Greetings. They've been pretty busy down at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) over the last week or so. First, they issued a notice in the Federal Register about plans to require sender identification on some classes of mail, as part of the previously announced "Intelligent Mail" (tm) project. Since this project has previously discussed the goal of tracking the senders of all mail, alarm bells went off in privacy quarters around the country.

Then, a few days later, they announced that they were withdrawing the notice (to be reissued later) from the Federal Register due to "misunderstandings" about what it really meant.

Today, they sent out a new press release assuring us all that the USPS is committed to privacy and that they have no intention of requiring sender identification on all mail, regardless of what the Intelligent Mail proposals had to say.

The USPS also announced today that, in league with Universal Pictures, a "Cat in the Hat" postmark will start appearing on some mail. This seems quite appropriate, since many people have suspected for quite some time that "Thing 1" and "Thing 2" are running things in Washington.

--Lauren--