Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Forget the StreetView data vacuum scandal. If an idea proposed for the money hole known as the U.S. Post Office is adopted, your friendly neighborhood postal person may be soon driving a high-tech data collection vehicle that would rival anything Google put to use for the government.

	Post Office trucks may be used to determine if you have problems with the government. Photo: Kevin Spencer.

“The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail,” Michael Ravnitzky, chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, wrote for the New York Times last week. “But what if they were fitted with sensors to collect and transmit information about weather or air pollutants? The trucks would go from being bulky tools of industrial-age communication to being on the cutting edge of 21st-century information-gathering and forecasting.”

“Data collection wouldn’t require much additional staff or resources; all it would take would be a small, cheap and unobtrusive sensor package mounted on each truck,” writes Ravnitzky.