US Postal Service monitored protests on social media with little oversight, records show

Records released to EFF◼ and other FOIA requesters show the USPS Internal Covert Operations Program (iCOP) produced bulletins in 2020 and 2021 covering planned protests, including a March 20, 2021 event where the bulletin cited 'online inflammatory material' while stating there was 'no intelligence to suggest specific threats'. The agency renamed the programme and said it stopped distributing bulletins, but the records do not show that social media monitoring ended. Few internal safeguards were disclosed, and an external hard drive holding the emails was rendered inoperable after the underlying messages had been deleted under retention rules. No CVEs or technical indicators are involved. Defenders should treat this as a policy and civil liberties issue rather than a technical threat.

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