[leesalminen]

The USPS takes an image of the front of the envelope for every first class letter sent in the USA. It's a safe bet that they're doing OCR of the recipient/sender addresses and store it in a database. USPS Informed Delivery is just a customer-facing result of that long standing program.

[mindslight]

The USPS includes legal protections against your mail being opened, and a mandate to serve everyone. Whereas private companies can be fully employed for government surveillance (third party doctrine), sell bulk records to commercial surveillance companies (equifax, google, etc), as well as refusing service to whomever they like (ala MC/Visa).

I agree this isn't the overriding concern of those trying to destroy the USPS, but it's surely a nice bonus.

[AndrewBissell]

Yes, the goal of surveillance is already being advanced in many ways under the existing structure of the USPS.