Postal Service monitored online protest posts across political spectrum

The U.S. Postal Service used its internet Covert Operations Program to monitor social media posts about protests across the political spectrum in 2020 and 2021, according to records released under a Freedom of Information Act settlement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Postal Service under the Freedom of Information Act in 2021 after reporting disclosed the program and its monitoring of First Amendment-protected activities. The agency settled the case this fall and released the records, ending the records lawsuit.

Postal inspectors spied on protests from September 2020 to April 2021 through iCOP, according to records obtained by a Cato Institute fellow. The disclosed bulletins covered the Million MAGA March, a gun rights advocacy event with a counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest, and demonstrations outside then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit said the agency collected posts made on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and Telegraph while watching social media users. The Capitol protests and riots of January 6, 2021, highlighted the importance of tracking online communications for real-world consequences.

One bulletin about planned national and international protests on March 20, 2021, mentioned possible violence linked to online inflammatory material while saying the agency had no intelligence suggesting specific threats. Another bulletin called itself a National Civil Unrest Update while tracking Black Lives Matter protests answering police shootings and killings. A social media analyst wrote a 2020 situational awareness bulletin stating that Louisville was under a state of emergency before the state investigation into Taylor’s death. The program found a Million MAGA March would create traffic jams in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.

The bulletins also recorded threats sent to then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Most inspector bulletins included disclaimers that reports should not violate human rights and aimed to alert law enforcement to possible criminal activity and violence.

The Postal Service gave the Electronic Frontier Foundation three heavily redacted e-mail chains showing how the agency queried iCOP and shared what it found. The foundation says they are the only existing materials showing how the agency queried iCOP. Agency officials said someone dropped an external hard drive holding iCOP e-mails during talks, breaking it, and the agency had already deleted the e-mails under its retention schedule.

After Yahoo News revealed the program in 2021, the Postal Service said it renamed iCOP and stopped issuing bulletins, but the records do not state that social media surveillance ended. The closest internal guidelines released were talking points by the Chief Postal Inspector saying reviewers did not single out any group and did not base reviews on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or First Amendment exercise. The talking points also said recent iCOP attention showed chances for improvement, including stronger executive oversight, and that bulletin distribution like the media-reported one had stopped.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked for internal rules, guidance and training on First Amendment safeguards, but the agency disclosed very few documents on that subject. The Postal Service inspector general called the surveillance an overreach and said it might break the law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the surveillance chills First Amendment rights. “We’re filing this FOIA lawsuit to shine a light on why and how the Postal Service is monitoring online speech,” said Houston Davidson, an Electronic Frontier Foundation public interest legal fellow. Aaron Mackey, an Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney, said social media monitoring chills free expression and people self-censor when they think monitored speech could target them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will keep seeking transparency on government social media surveillance and will challenge the practice when authorities catch people for exercising First Amendment rights. Representative Thomas Massie asked where the Postal Service gets money for surveillance after losing money for many years. A 2017 survey found seven in 10 U.S. police forces used social media to gather intelligence on terrorist operations.

Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, received heavily redacted documents from a Freedom of Information Act request. He said the records cover conservative groups that marched to Washington after President Biden’s election, Louisville, Kentucky protests after the Breonna Taylor death investigation, and gun rights activists in Richmond, Virginia. Eddington said the Postal Service cannot reliably deliver mail but can fund digital spying at scale on Americans doing First Amendment-protected activities.

The Postal Inspection Service said its inspectors sometimes check public information to judge possible safety or security threats to employees, facilities, operations, and infrastructure. More than 60,000 requests sought personal information from the outside of envelopes and parcels over a decade, and postal officials fulfilled 97 percent of those requests made without a court order. Postal inspectors logged more than 312,000 letters and packages from 2015 to 2023.

A Postal Service inspector general report counted 10,000 law enforcement surveillance equipment pieces worth more than 65 million dollars, and found 134 of 404 electronic surveillance equipment items and 464 of 1,238 technical surveillance equipment items had recording errors or were absent from inventory records. The inspector general said equipment-use policies and procedures had not been updated, raising the danger that staff would misuse surveillance tools.

The Postal Service faced legal scrutiny over seizures of Black Lives Matter masks meant to shield demonstrators from Covid-19 at protests following George Floyd’s May 2020 murder. In May 2023, Representative Jamie B. Raskin asked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy if the service kept stopping postal police from going wherever problems occur. “continued to prevent postal police officers from doing their jobs … by traveling to wherever the problem is taking place?” The Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation requested more information through a Freedom of Information Act request and received many redactions from the agency.