Silk Road forums
Discussion => Shipping => Topic started by: pine on February 19, 2012, 09:33 am
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Hello chaps
It occurs to me that having a "packaging barcode" on a package or envelope isn't such a hot idea. I don't think they are usually intended to be scanned by the Mail Office, but that could change since scanning millions of them is an easily automated thing, it's what barcodes are designed for.
Can't know for certain, but it's probably the case that these barcodes for bundles of packages you buy in bulk come in a sequence or some other pattern.
Hence, for high volume vendors, it serves as a potential 'return address' for LEO to red flag, irrespective of anything else on the package or inside it.
Then they can work out what company you bought it from, what box you acquired and what payment method used, IP address used to access the website et al. Or worst, the post office or shop at which you bought them. Seems like a problem to me.
Before you think, ah, that's obvious, it might well be, but the fact remains that the majority of professional looking business mail packages use barcodes, small or large ones.
You cannot cut out the barcode and put a sticky label over it for the return address, since LEO is sure to happily adopt that as a new red flag.
So, you ideally need pro packaging, which is used very frequently in the business world because it's an 'in-bulk' kind of deal, but which doesn't use barcodes on it's packaging.
So far, I'm quite alright since my shipping quantities are extremely tiny, but it's still a problem. Especially for our weed vendors, who really need decent sized packages.
Ideas? Comments?
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Haha, so I am the only one concerned that barcodes and QR codes could potentially be used in a geographical profiling attack? ::)
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It's not clear to me: are you referring to the UPC (Universal Product Code) barcode, or the one used and printed by the postage system?
UPC code only contains the manufacturer's ID and the product's code, I don't see how could the authorities work out those things from it what you mentioned above.
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take a picture of some bar codes and scan them (try http://www.onlinebarcodereader.com/ ). you will likely find that the bar codes are common to each particular product and are only useful for scanning at checkout to look up pricing and do inventory updates. I would be surprised if they were sequential or variant since it would add manufacturing cost for questionable value.
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Re: morningdeer: Yeah UPC
Yes, to ID products that's how they are conventionally used.
That doesn't mean it will always be the case. I'm talking about LE deliberately making the people who make the packages use barcodes or QR codes which ID either a box of packages or even an individual package. For national security, blah blah blah....
Does anybody know the search space for UPC and QR codes? How big is it?
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I'm not sure about QR codes on those kinds of products, but the UPC barcode of a specific item doesn't usually change. It's tied to many, many lots of the item that were manufactured at a certain factory at a certain time, so it is technically traceable, although I doubt they could narrow it down past several hundred thousand (or even million) units--not very useful unless you're investigating a serial killer. Then again, who knows? Maybe a certain set of envelopes was manufactured with a unique UPC code for whatever reason, or perhaps you're using a rare brand of bubble mailers easily traceable through their limited and unique barcode?
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I'd be happier if I could simply find a popular range of packaging without barcodes and other identifiers. Then I wouldn't need to think about the possibilities. Bliss! -.-