Relevant: This NYT article from last month that profiled the mail scanning system and visual triage that is used to process the many unreadable pieces of mail that come through:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegib...</a><p>I guess it makes sense that every piece of mail is "photographed" at some point...in the sense that a scan is a photograph. So the act of photographing each mail isn't a surprise.<p>But, as opposed to the Verizon and PRISM cases, when you send a piece of snail-mail, you are literally sending it to the government to be handled, have its "metadata" read and recorded as necessary as a means for it to be sent to its destination.<p>On the other hand, the aggregation of data and retention of such may not be something we're all happy with, so what's the policy on that?