Biden Using Postal Service Surveillance Unit To Snoop On Americans Social Media
The United States Postal service has an enforcement division called the “United States Postal Inspection Service” (USPIS) that has roughly 1,200 members.
The division is on of the oldest operating federal law enforcement agencies in the nations history however their jurisdiction only covers crimes that affect the use of mail, the postal system, or postal employees; until now.
It has been discovered that the UPIS is also conducted surveillance that many civil liberties experts believe goes beyond their mission of protecting the postal system.
The Postal Service is monitoring the social media activity of Americans to share “inflammatory” content across government agencies.
From 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,” read a government bulletin. “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.”
Mar 20 was the date set for the World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, an umbrella protest involving many anti-government groups and movements. The bulletin includes screenshots of users planning such protests over various social media sites including Facebook and Parler.
While the bulletin justified this surveillance by suggesting that “Parler users have commented about their intent to use the rallies to engage in violence,” it admits that “[no] intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats.”
Below is a copy of the bulletin:
Post Office Redacted by Yahoo News
Even former Obama officials are shocked that the US Postal Service would be engaged in this kind of operation.
“I just don’t think the Postal Service has the degree of sophistication that you would want if you were dealing with national security issues of this sort,” said Geoffrey Stone, who was selected by Obama to investigate the NSA’s mass surveillance program. “There are so many other federal agencies that could do this, I don’t understand why the post office would be doing it. There is no need for the post office to do it — you’ve got FBI, Homeland Security and so on, so I don’t know why the post office is doing this.”
In defense of their program the Postal Service told Yahoo News that “The Internet Covert Operations Program is a function within the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which assesses threats to Postal Service employees and its infrastructure by monitoring publicly available open source information.”