U.S. Postal Service Surveilled Protest Activities Online with Little Oversight
Original title: Postal Service Surveilled Protest Activities Online with Little Rules, Oversight
Postal Service monitored protests via iCOP with minimal safeguards after FOIA disclosures.
The U.S. Postal Service used iCOP to surveil social media posts organizing protests from 2020-2021, including the Million MAGA March, a Virginia guns rights event, and Black Lives Matter protests. Disclosed records show bulletins anticipating violence without specific threats identified and little internal oversight or legal justification. A FOIA suit led to email disclosures, but the agency renamed the program and deleted records after a hard drive incident.
Unconfirmed: Whether iCOP surveillance stopped after renaming remains unclear
- Monitored events like Million MAGA March and Save the Post Office Saturday
- Referenced potential violence in some bulletins despite admitting no specific threats
- Deleted email records after dropped hard drive during negotiations
- Claimed no group targeting but acknowledged chilling effect on First Amendment rights
Impact: government monitoring of protest activities
- Vendors
- U.S. Postal Service
- Products
- iCOP
- Threat actors
- U.S. Postal Service
- Victims
- protesters
- Countries
- United States
From the original article
4 min read at eff.org
The U. S. Postal Service used social media surveillance to monitor and report on protests across the political spectrum, government records show.
By hn_acker · eff.org
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.