Postal Inspectors Have Been Illegally Spying on Americans

[Kamaji]

Postal Inspectors Have Been Illegally Spying on Americans

The Post Office's inspector general uncovers unrestricted online snooping by postal cops without any legal authority.

BRIAN DOHERTY
4.1.2022

The U.S. Postal Service has a "U.S. Postal Inspection Service's Analytics and Cybercrime Program"—of course it does! Its tasks, according to a report issued last week from the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General (IG), include via its "Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP)" subprogram, to "proactively gather intelligence using cryptocurrency analysis, open-source intelligence, and social media analysis."

In doing so, the IG concluded in that report (which was the result of a House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform request to look into Post Office online snooping), the iCOP program "exceeded the Postal Inspection Service's law enforcement authority."

One rub is that iCOP's efforts by law "must have an identified connection to the mail, postal crimes, or the security of Postal Service facilities or personnel prior to commencing"—a "postal nexus" in their lingo.

A big "oops" the IG uncovered is that "the keywords used for iCOP in the proactive searches did not include any terms with a postal nexus." The iCOPpers also "did not retain information needed to ensure compliance with the Postal Inspection Service's legal authority."

The program was intended to "[e]ngage in proactive threat hunting…to Postal Service executives, employees, infrastructure, and facilities." From "October 2018 through March 2021, more than half of the 1,745 work assignments" of the program "fell into one of two program areas – Prohibited Mail-Narcotics and Mail Theft."

But that wasn't all the iCOP program did. Often it performed searches (on generally publicly available information) that "did not include any terms related to the mail, postal crimes, or security of postal facilities or personnel. Examples of the keywords include 'protest,' 'attack,' and 'destroy.'" The IG report found in some cases that "iCOP intentionally omitted terms that would indicate a postal nexus in an effort to broadly identify threats that could then be assessed for any postal nexus." In other words, they thought they'd snoop about, say, our protests first, try to find out why the post office should care later.

*  *  *

Source:  https://reason.com/2022/04/01/postal-inspectors-have-been-ilegally-spying-on-americans/