Here comes the latest in ho-hum dystopia. And by that, I mean surveillance creep has become such a regular occurrence that it takes something truly Overton Window-breaking to gain traction with the general public.
But that’s no reason to let this slide by without pointing it out. The government (at all levels) has a lot of vehicles. People in the government (at all levels) are now asking with increasing frequency, “why not put a camera on it?”
That’s why we’ve got city sanitation vehicles wielding cameras for the purpose of generating “blight” citations. And that’s why we now have the Postal Service do a trial run with always-on cameras attached to delivery vehicles. Joseph Cox has the details at 404 Media:
The United States Postal Service is running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks, and improve “community safety,” according to a letter posted by a labor union and a statement from the agency to 404 Media. The idea is that, since the trucks are constantly traveling anyway, they can be used as a way to collect data, eventually potentially across the nation.
“The purpose of this pilot is to leverage the Postal Service’s unique ability to collect this valuable data due to the scale and frequency with which our fleet of postal vehicles travel the streets of every community across the country,” the letter, posted by NALC Branch 238 to Facebook, reads.
I always love it when the people laying the groundwork for a persistent, abusable surveillance network say things like “leveraging unique [collection] abilities.” For the most part, I think we we’re all fine with the USPS mainly being in the delivery business, with collection limited to getting the stuff that needs to go to somewhere else.
It all seems pretty innocuous, at least at first. And, to be sure, there’s a use case for what the USPS says it intends to do with the cameras:
A spokesperson for the USPS told 404 Media in an email “The Postal Service is conducting a limited pilot to assess whether vehicle-mounted cameras can help identify roadway conditions and support community safety. The pilot includes privacy safeguards and requires no additional action from employees. Findings will inform any future decisions.”
But that’s what everyone says when they want to add cameras to places and things that didn’t have them before: mumble mumble “community safety” and maybe something vague about privacy. Pervasive surveillance rarely rolls out fully developed. It develops incrementally. But the most important thing is to get the ball rolling and wait for mission creep to set in. If this hangs around long enough, it just becomes another set of cameras and recordings other agencies with less respect for “privacy safeguards” and even less interest in “supporting community safety” can access and, eventually, abuse.