Why haven't we seen any benefits from this hundred years of dragnet surveillance? I get all kinds of creepy junk mail, obviously sketchy load offers, someone who very carefully offers to remind me to renew my domain name for a sumptuous fee, stuff like that. Why doesn't the TLA in charge of this data shut stuff down? The FBI might have been able to avert the 2008 financial crisis by intercepting subprime mortgage offers, and prosecuting the hell out of the shady mortgage vendors. Terrorism can't hold a candle to the damage that the 2008 financial crisis did to the USA.
You raise an interesting question. I would love to be able to refuse delivery of postal spam (as you can in the Netherlands, where almost everyone has a sticker on their mail box saying whether or not they accept unsolicited commercial communications addressed to a generic 'resident', and commercial communications addressed to them personally).
It turns out that you do have a right to prevent delivery of junk mail, thanks to a 1970 court case called Rowan c. Post Office Department (http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3558098989148411...). In fact, you can download a form 1500 from the US postal service toput this into effect....but you have to do it for each sender of mail, and the form requires you to affirm that you find the amterial 'erotically arousing or sexually provocative,' even though the holding in Rowan is not limited to such cases. Right now the Postal Service redirects consumers to the FTC for help with getting off mailing lists - presumably because a) it does not want the additional hassle and expense of presorting and not delivering junk mail and b) because the Postal Service is famously under financial pressure and the delivery of bulk mail provides a huge chunk of its revenue - bulk mail makes up roughly half of all mail delivered and about 1/3 of USPS revenues (as of 2011 - http://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-junk...).
I can think of a strategy for forcing the USPS to let consumers opt out of receiving junk mail, but it would involve some expensive and protracted litigation and would likely drive the price of first-class mail up to $1 if implemented, so it would generate a great deal of political opposition. I have not done in-depth research on the legality of the USPS dumping this problem into the lap of the FTC, so my impression that the USPS could be compelled not to deliver junk mail in the first place may be incorrect.
A while back on HN, there was an article about private mail filtering services. You would have your ground mail sent to them, they would get rid of the junk mail and send you only the "good stuff" that you specified.
(Anecdotal) Well, these guys had a meeting with Postal Inspector who didn't think much of what they were doing. When informed that it was a voluntary service, he pretty bluntly informed them that it would upset the 400 or so of his (the Postal Inspector's) largest customers.
Upshot, the Postal Service has a vested interested in you receiving junk mail because they are paid to deliver it, and woe betide anyone who interrupts that.
I'm not really that concerned about junk mail per se: a lot of it is just stupid ads. I'm concerned that the US government has had the capability of dealing with predatory companies for a while (100 years?!?) and hasn't done anything about predatory lending or other obviously fraudulent postal mail schemes. It's like funding the NSA's all-phone-traffic dragnet and still having to suffer through obviously illegal "Rachel From Cardholder Services" calls. A monumental waste of taxpayer money.
