Postal investigators monitored social media for protest plans and used facial recognition software.
“The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests,” Jana Winter first reported in 2021 for Yahoo! News.
“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” according to a March 2021 bulletin from the iCOP that was included in the article. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”
Among the organizations alarmed by the disclosure was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed suit to learn more about the surveillance program. “After years of delays and technical failures that led the agency to lose access to a trove of emails discussing the program,” wrote EFF Deputy Legal Director Aaron Mackey, the organization was finally able to extract some key documents about iCOP from the postal cops this month. Others were apparently destroyed.
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