Free Republic

Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has introduced a bill to shut down the Internet Covert Operations Program, a domestic surveillance operation run by the law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service... ...“The Postal Service should be focused on delivering the mail on time and on budget, not running a covert surveillance program to monitor political behavior on social media,” Gaetz said in a statement... ... “As the dangers of government surveillance and targeting become ever the more clear, especially to conservatives, Congress must immediately abolish this program,” the congressman said at the time ..

The United States Postal Service has been monitoring protesters around the country for anti-gun and ant-Biden activity, according to newly unearthed intelligence assessments. Postal inspectors tracked the activities of gun rights activists in Virginia and far-right groups making their way to Washington, D.C. to protest President Biden's election, according to documents obtained by the Cato Institute. Cato obtained heavily redacted records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that laid out postal inspectors' spying from September 2020 to April 2021, including their covert social media surveillance through a program called Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP).

The post office’s law enforcement arm has faced intense congressional scrutiny in recent weeks over its Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), which tracks social media posts of Americans and shares that information with other law enforcement agencies. Yet the program is much broader in scope than previously known and includes analysts who assume fake identities online, use sophisticated intelligence tools and employ facial recognition software, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Yahoo News.Among the tools used by the analysts is Clearview AI, a facial recognition software that scrapes images off public websites, a practice that has raised the ire...

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.