U.S. Postal Service Vehicles to Carry Sensor Packages
December 22nd, 2010Via: New York Times:
The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail. 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.
After all, the delivery fleet already goes to almost every home and business in America nearly every day, and it travels fixed routes along a majority of the country’s roads to get there. 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. (This idea is mine alone, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Postal Regulatory Commission.)
The key elements for the project already exist, including tiny, inexpensive G.P.S. receivers and radio uplinks, features found in today’s smart phones. The sensors would operate without distracting the drivers from their primary responsibilities. The service could also minimize startup costs by teaming up with a company to develop, install and operate the equipment. One company under contract with the National Weather Service is already installing environmental sensors on long-haul commercial buses to enhance weather forecasting.
The data gathered by these truck-mounted sensors would establish a baseline map of ordinary conditions, making it significantly easier to spot a problem or anomaly. Such a system could aid in homeland security by rapidly detecting chemical agents, radiological materials and, eventually, biological attacks; it could also collect detailed data to improve weather forecasts. And it could assess road quality, catalog potholes and provide early warning of unsafe road conditions like black ice.
A system like this could also detect gaps in cell-tower coverage, weak radio and television signals and sources of radio frequency interference. This data could help provide uninterrupted communication services and promote more efficient use of the broadcast spectrum.
One logical way to start would be for the service to work with other federal agencies, or to lease space on certain trucks to permit testing of smart sensors by businesses, nonprofits or university researchers.
Anytime you read “gee-whiz we could sure make the world a better place if we just did this” copy like that featured in this article, please pay attention to that eerie ringing in your ears, the hair standing up on the back of your neck and that strange sensation you can’t quite describe in the back of your mind.
First, let’s observe the tell, a single seemingly-innocuous contextual sentence that lays down the brass tacks that is always lurking in the middle somewhere, hiding out all factual like:
“The data gathered by these truck-mounted sensors would establish a baseline map of ordinary conditions, making it significantly easier to spot a problem or anomaly.”
Bingo.
Direct on-the-move local sensing, locating and triangulation equipment WHEREVER there are people receiving packages, which is to say everywhere “civilized”. To anyone not familiar with the equation spelled out by these terms, Sensing + Locating + Triangulation = Monitoring.
Now, in addition to the personal locators already riding around in most pockets and purses, they’ll be able to better sniff out and log the locality of a fair percentage of neo-luddites as well.
Always under the guise of “improving our safety/lives/efficiency/welfare”.
Off the reservation on the dark side, it could also quite easily be engineered as a highly localized DELIVERY mechanism, supporting any number of additional psy-op missions.
How ironic it all becomes, once you realizre that the guy so famous for the “No one gets out of here alive” line also just happened to be the son of the admiral calling the shots on the water during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Or that free-thinker Frank Zappa’s pop did “secret things” at Edgewood.
Social engineering is as real as rain. It’s pervasive, coming at you from every direction all day every day via the open veins of the media. That intellectual goon Roddenberry puked it up exactly backwards for the rapidly modernizing industrialized masses, thereby confusing generations into an overeasy tech-worship (truth be told, myself included): your MIND is the final frontier.
Even more ironically, a HUGE portion of the modern mobile device’s appeal is the STAR TREK nature of the thing: “Beam me up Scotty…”
However, technology ALWAYS carries a double-edged sword. That which enables some glorious new efficiency also runs out of batteries at critical moments. Pervasive monitoring is surveillance, no matter what costume you choose to tart it up with.