Pop quiz: Which federal company runs a social media surveillance unit referred to as the Web Covert Operations Program (iCOP)?
When you guessed the FBI, the CIA, or the Division of Homeland Safety—sorry. This one belongs to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). And thru it, postal inspectors have been monitoring social media platforms about U.S. protests, utilizing instruments that embrace a facial recognition database.
That the company greatest recognized for delivering mail has a aspect hustle in on-line snooping took lots of people without warning when it was reported in April by Yahoo! Information, which obtained a March 16 “Situational Consciousness Bulletin” about iCOP operations. The bulletin talked about that U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) brokers monitoring Fb, Parler, Twitter, and Telegram had seen “vital exercise relating to deliberate protests occurring internationally and domestically” as a part of a rally for freedom and democracy.
“The iCOP program protects the Postal Service and the general public by facilitating the identification, disruption, and dismantling of people and organizations that use the mail or USPS on-line instruments to facilitate black market Web commerce or different unlawful actions,” the USPIS 2019 annual report explains. “Analysts in iCOP make the most of USPS programs and instruments to offer open supply intelligence and cryptocurrency blockchain evaluation in assist of all Inspection Service investigations.” Instances cowl “narcotics, mail theft, income fraud, murder, harmful mail, and extra.”
As a part of iCOP, USPIS brokers “assume faux identities on-line, use refined intelligence instruments and make use of facial recognition software program,” Yahoo!‘s Jana Winter reported this yr. These instruments embrace Clearview AI’s facial recognition database, which incorporates greater than 3 billion pictures scraped from social media and different public web sites, and Zignal Labs’ real-time key phrase search software program.
Data from iCOP analysts was distributed by Homeland Safety fusion facilities to a wide selection of legislation enforcement items and authorities authorities, in addition to saved for future entry. “The retention and dissemination of those stories might permit federal businesses to obtain info they aren’t allowed by statute to gather themselves,” Winter instructed.
Though the USPS has disclosed this system’s existence in its annual reporting, this spring’s revelations precipitated an uproar from some congressional Republicans, who expressed concern about iCOP’s professed monitoring of “right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.” This system “raises critical questions concerning the federal authorities’s ongoing surveillance of, and encroachment upon, Individuals’ non-public lives and discourse,” wrote 30 GOP members of Congress in an April 22 letter to Postmaster Normal Louis DeJoy.
“The kind of amorphous, broad mandate below which iCOP is allegedly working is especially troubling as a result of it’s unclear why the USPS, of all authorities businesses and the one one dedicated to the supply of Individuals’ mail, is taking over the function of intelligence assortment,” the letter continued. “The US shouldn’t be missing in its availability of intelligence businesses, and it must be left to these professionals to interact on this form of conduct, whether it is even essential in any respect.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) has launched a invoice—co-sponsored by 9 Republicans—to ban USPIS funds from getting used for the iCOP program.
On April 28, Chief Postal Inspector Gary R. Barksdale testified about this system earlier than members of the Home Committee on Oversight and Reform. He mentioned it launched in 2017 to assist detect mailed opioids and firearms however had morphed in Might or June 2020 to monitoring the web for details about potential threats to USPS leaders, workers, or amenities. “No audits of iCOP have occurred so far, however USPS is taking a look at governance points,” mentioned a committee press launch concerning the briefing.
Not everybody was glad by the solutions Barksdale supplied. He “was unprepared to reply our inquiries to the purpose of incompetence,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) wrote within the Washington Examiner after the briefing. “Barksdale could not inform us…how a lot taxpayers have been paying to run it, and even what authorized authority the publish workplace needed to spy on the general public’s social media actions.”