re: "and would accelerate the agency's decline"
If the USPS failed, would we *really* care?
Do you have any doubt as to whether a hundred shipping businesses wouldn't promptly step up to the plate, delighted to have the new business? Ultimately, FedEx or UPS would probably take the lion's share of the mail pickups and deliveries. More of us would need to go further than our front yards when we want to send something. But we do that with packages already. It's no big deal.
And more of us would rely on e-mail. That probably concerns me more since, even with digital certificates, you can't have too much confidence that a certificate hasn't been compromised and that your e-mail isn't being read.
Consider: To implement the Stuxnet virus (against the Iranian nuclear facility), whoever was behind it compromised TWO digital certificates, most likely by physically burglarizing Verisign and hacking Verisign's computer network to alter the certificates' hashes. Just think about the kind of resources it took to pull THAT off and you'll know why I don't consider e-mail to be worthy of trust.
And, now that I think about it, I have to wonder if it is a mere coincidence that physical mail is struggling at a time when electronic mail is waiting in the wings, ready to swoop in like either an angel or a vulture (you decide.)
Think about it. If you were in charge and wanted to spy on your people, wouldn't the forced replacement of PAPER messages with ELECTRONIC ones be an obvious move? Electronic messages can be databased after all. Stored... scanned... correlated. Non-repudiation can be implemented against the sender, perhaps even without his being aware of it. E-mail and other binary media are an absolute BONANZA for the Intelligence agencies.
So, I'm not concluding anything about the USPS failure being part of a sinister plot. No such explanation is required. The USPS is a crappy organization that deserves to fail. But it's also a pretty convenient failure for things like the FBI, CIA, NSA, the White House, the IRS, and myriad other groups we've probably never even heard of.
-----
BTW, I heard the other day that professional tax preparers are now required to file electronically. I wonder how long until the rest of us are? I've always hated the thought of doing anything that makes things easier for the I.R.S., my mortal enemy. Paper was always my friend, but I have a hunch it's not going to be there for me for too much longer.
With any kind of luck, I'll have changed my life and be living off the grid in New Hampshire by the time the rest of the walls are put up around America. I'll be as trapped as everyone else, of course, but in a nicer place and in a way that's far more difficult for TPTB to monitor and control.
Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months
| 