{"id":105947,"date":"2026-11-12T05:00:44","date_gmt":"2026-11-12T10:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105947"},"modified":"2026-11-11T16:57:02","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T21:57:02","slug":"the-us-post-office-resumes-an-old-old-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/the-us-post-office-resumes-an-old-old-role\/","title":{"rendered":"The US Post Office resumes an old, old role – surveillance of dissidents"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s nice when a long-standing institution goes back to one of its earliest roles … in theory. In practice, there should be a lot of questions about why the US Post Office took up responsibility for detecting and observing online dissidents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We know that mission creep is a thing, but is it entirely necessary for every<\/em> federal agency to try to reimagine itself as Big Brother?<\/p>\n

OK, silly question. Of course, it’s not necessary<\/em> for the Post Office \u2014 that’s the agency under scrutiny this time \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

The Mailman as Political Cop<\/strong><\/p>\n

“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<\/a> first reported in 2021 for Yahoo! News<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Among the organizations alarmed by the disclosure was the Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a> (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<\/a>, the organization was finally able to extract some key documents about iCOP from the postal cops this month. Others were apparently destroyed.<\/p>\n

“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>‘, a gun rights advocacy event<\/a> and counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest<\/a>, and planned protests in front of then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home<\/a> in Washington, D.C.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s nice when a long-standing institution goes back to one of its earliest roles … in theory. In practice, there should be a lot of questions about why the US Post Office took up responsibility for detecting and observing online dissidents: We know that mission creep is a thing, but is it entirely necessary for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,84,10,28,53,15,13],"tags":[1506,169,58,720,593,911],"class_list":["post-105947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-liberty","category-media","category-politics","category-technology","category-usa","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eff","tag-internet","tag-protest","tag-socialmedia","tag-surveillance"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ryP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105972,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105947\/revisions\/105972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}