[UpstandingUser]

I've heard rumors that this was going on for a long time before it's been publicly acknowledged to have -- before OCR should have been able to handle that sort of variety of handwriting (reliably), let alone at scale. Like a snail-mail version of the NSA metadata collection program.

[nuclearnice1]

Wikipedia gives the impression the modern incarnation of photographing the US mail at scale began in 2001: “created in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, including two postal workers” [0]

However research on photographs of mail was already taking place as far back as 1986 [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Isolation_Control_and_T...

[1] https://cedar.buffalo.edu/papers/articles/Framework_Object_1...