The agency best known for delivering mail has a side hustle in online snooping.
(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson, Source images: CSA-Archive; Ponomariova_Maria/iStock)
Pop quiz: Which federal agency runs a social media surveillance unit known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP)?
If you guessed the FBI, the CIA, or the Department of Homeland Security—sorry. This one belongs to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). And through it, postal inspectors have been monitoring social media platforms about U.S. protests, using tools that include a facial recognition database.
That the agency best known for delivering mail has a side hustle in online snooping took a lot of people by surprise when it was reported in April by Yahoo! News, which obtained a March 16 “Situational Awareness Bulletin” about iCOP operations. The bulletin mentioned that U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) agents monitoring Facebook, Parler, Twitter, and Telegram had noticed “significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically” as part of a rally for freedom and democracy.
…Although the USPS has disclosed the program’s existence in its annual reporting, this spring’s revelations caused an uproar from some congressional Republicans, who expressed concern about iCOP’s professed monitoring of “right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.” The program “raises serious questions about the federal government’s ongoing surveillance of, and encroachment upon, Americans’ private lives and discourse,” wrote 30 GOP members of Congress in an April 22 letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
Yep.
All this started after 911.
I tried to ship a couple rifles to the Lone Star that I sold on Gunbroker.com . My local post office refused to ship them . Said the Postmaster did not want to . I showed them a copy of USPS regulations permitting the interstate shipping of firearms and they still refused . I went to the next county over west and they gladly shipped them for me . Now all my bills that arrive in the mail are late and I have had to go with direct bank account transfers and email notification . The screws are tightening !