(AP Photo/Josh Replogle)
This cannot be a good idea in the hands of the people known for ‘going postal’.
In an exclusive story from Yahoo News it has been discovered that the agency known for stealing Netflix DVDs in bulk, and had numerous stories of election ballots being dumped in ditches has formed its own stealth monitoring division. The surprising thing is this is not seemingly mail-related in any fashion, as it has given itself the task in monitoring the social media activities of citizens.
If this sounds ominous and disturbing, just wait. The investigative arm of the USPS, the United States Postal Inspection Service, has established a division with a disturbing mission, and an unsettling name to go with it they have called it the Internet Covert Operations Program. The USPIS-iCOP (an appropriately nefarious acronym) is seeking out organized groups possibly scheduling gatherings, or worse activities, and then sharing these details with various federal agencies.
Again it is important to repeat, this type of activity is one long continuum. The IRS was previously used; federal contractors for the FBI have previously been used, and now the United States Postal Service is running a covert surveillance program against Americans that sounds suspiciously like the prior DHS announcement.
The Yahoo news article is filled with people saying they don’t know why. But that’s only because they have not been paying attention. The USPS has the systems in place to record every single package (sender and recipient), of every single piece of mail, sent anywhere at all times. They have a massive database of information on every single American.
Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, Getty Images
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Add another pushpin to the string wall of America’s shadowy force of postal service cops. Yahoo News reports that the USPS’s security arm, the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), monitored social media for potential threats of domestic violence. According to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo obtained by Yahoo News, the USPIS collected “inflammatory” Parler and Telegram posts ahead of planned March 20 protests and shared them with other agencies.
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, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.
The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.