I have a little sister…we’re both adults now (or at least old enough to be considered adults)…so I have always been the “big brother”.

It’s something I’ve always been.

It’s something I’ll always be.

You can’t change birth order.

But check this article out….all of a sudden, “big brother” takes on whole new meanings.

Here’s another link to a report that CBS News did….

(Just in case you don’t click on the links…the USPS photographs every piece of first class mail that comes through its facilities.  How about that?)

I work for the Post Office.  I deliver the mail.

I am Big Brother.

Thankfully, they don’t have me sitting in my car with a digital camera taking pictures of all the mail.  I think that would take a crazy amount of time. If it would save them money they would probably just tack that on to my current duties, though.

I hope they never think of that option.

I guess that now they have machines that do it.  If I was cheaper than a machine, I’d be the one they’d choose to take the pictures.

Now that I have made that news about mail surveillance even more public, I hope I don’t have to go the way of Edward Snowden and seek asylum in Norway or something.

( You know….that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, now that I think about it.  Maybe Norway has a special place in its heart for displaced Postal whistleblowers? It would be worth checking out…)

The thing about any of this news….cameras on the street, Google Earth, phone taps, finding out that Paula Dean used a racial slur while growing up in the SOUTH…pictures of our mail….is that it’s nothing that we didn’t already suspect.

I don’t know why it freaks us out to have it confirmed.

Before I worked for the Post Office, I used to be really curious about survivalism and the militia movement.  I never wanted to hurt anyone or take up arms to defend my little island of paranoia…I was just really curious about what survivalism was all about and why people were living full of fear.

It was a heady time.

Anyway, during this time, it seemed like a lot of our mail was coming to us opened.

Even my Guitar Player magazines were coming to us with the plastic wrapper opened…like for security purposes someone had read why “Eric Clapton is the best guitarist ever”.

It inspires curiosity and mild paranoia when you think that someone is reading your mail.

(I don’t think that many people read this blog….so it’s the one safe forum I have to broach a topic like this.  If it was a different situation, I’d be a lot more covert about where I shared my questions about “mail tapping”. This blog gives me the option of being kind of a “Windtalker”…even though I don’t know Navajo and any code I include is unintentional. )

We’re going to be monitored.  That’s not paranoia…it’s reality.  It’s kind of like when they offer you a card at Lowes that tracks your purchases for you.  On the commercials, it makes it seem like the next time you need a furnace filter, that card is going to make it so much easier for you that you’ll wonder how you made it before everything you did was recorded.

It’s a pleasure to have it all in a place that someone can pull up and see what we were up to.

Now where did you say I needed to go to get that MARK OF THE BEAST?!  The Lowes card is the Mark of the Beast?

Well…I’m glad I didn’t need a furnace filter.