Documents Reveal the Postal Service's Broad Surveillance of Political Activists
Postal investigators monitored social media for protest plans and used facial recognition software.
We know that mission creep is a thing, but is it entirely necessary for every federal agency to try to reimagine itself as Big Brother?
OK, silly question. Of course, it's not necessary for the Post Office—that's the agency under scrutiny this time—to engage in mass surveillance. It just seems to be an activity in which all government bureaucracies inevitably engage. That's the most logical explanation for why the U.S. Postal Service decided that it should monitor the internet for information about political demonstrations.
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The Mailman as Political Cop
"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.
"The disclosures include a series of bulletins created from iCOP, which show that the postal service used the program in 2020 and 2021 to monitor and circulate information about a wide range of planned protests" from "across the political spectrum," Mackey added. "They included a planned 'Million MAGA March,' a guns rights advocacy event and counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest, and planned protests in front of then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's home in Washington, D.C."
Reports revealed that postal investigators ran keyword searches on social media posts and created "anonymous, untraceable email and social media accounts," the better to monitor Americans' conversations. They applied Clearview AI facial recognition software to photos scraped from online platforms for comparison to a database of billions of images.
From Chasing Smugglers to Spying on Activists
In testimony, Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale said iCOP "was developed around 2017 as part of our strategy to combat opioids and other illegal drugs in the mail" and that "the iCOP program protects the Postal Service and the public by facilitating the identification, disruption, and dismantling of individuals and organizations that use the mail or USPS online tools to facilitate black market Internet trade or other illegal activities." He claimed iCOP's mission expanded in response to threats of violence against DeJoy. Its activities were then extended to cover "situations with the potential to impact the security of our facilities and most importantly the safety of our employees." This morphed into broad surveillance and intelligence sharing with "around 70 federal, state and local agencies" through the Executive Protection Threat Intelligence Working Group.
Barksdale added that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service no longer issued law enforcement bulletins about political activities like the one published by Yahoo! News. But as EFF's Mackey emphasizes, "the documents do not say that the agency's social media surveillance stopped."
Surveillance 'Exceeded the Postal Inspection Service's Law Enforcement Authority'
Barksdale's testimony came courtesy of congressional alarm over the Postal Service's self-appointed surveillance role. Members of Congress from both parties, including House Oversight Committee members James Comer (R–Ky.) and Carolyn Maloney (D–N.Y.), urged the Postal Service inspector general to investigate.
"These activities raise serious questions about the scope of the program, the extent of sharing of information among law enforcement agencies, and whether USPIS has the authority to conduct such an operation," they wrote.
The inspector general agreed there were grounds for concern.
"We determined that certain proactive searches iCOP conducted using an open-source intelligence tool from February to April 2021 exceeded the Postal Inspection Service's law enforcement authority," the March 2022 report confirmed. "Furthermore, we could not corroborate whether other work analysts completed from October 2018 through June 2021 was legally authorized."
The inspector general report added that postal law enforcement is supposed to have a "postal nexus" with some connection to sending and receiving mail. "However, the keywords used for iCOP in the proactive searches did not include any terms with a postal nexus. Further, the postal nexus was not documented in 122 requests and 18 reports due to a lack of requirements in the program's procedures."
The report also found that Postal Inspection Service managers didn't consult their lawyers before launching their continuously expanding surveillance program. In addition, they "did not retain information needed to ensure compliance with the Postal Inspection Service's legal authority."
In practice, EFF's Mackey notes, this resulted in the Postal Service claiming it couldn't turn over key documents because somebody dropped the hard drive they were stored on.
"Setting aside that it's unclear whether internal oversight occurred or resulted in any changes, the claim that iCOP did not infringe on First Amendment rights rings hollow," comments Mackey. "As the records disclosed show, surveilling and reporting on social media users' efforts to organize rallies and protests was a feature of iCOP."
Given the Postal Service's activities, it's probably safest to assume that all government agencies eventually get around to treating Americans as potential threats to be spied upon.
