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What is iCOP? Not What You Think
I almost choked on my beverage in the car when I heard an ad from cyber-security guru Kim Commando, warning that the government has enlisted the United States Post Office to spy on our social media content and report it back to certain agencies. Then the same story was being discussed on two different radio stations. From Business Insider:
According to a Yahoo News report, the law-enforcement arm of the US Postal Service is running a “covert” program that monitors Americans’ social media posts for “inflammatory” content and then passes those posts along to other government agencies.
The surveillance effort, which falls under the agency’s Postal Inspection Service, is known as the Internet Covert Operations Program, or iCop, the outlet reported. Prior to the Yahoo News Wednesday report, details of the program had not been made public.
When did this happen?
The outlet obtained a March 16 memo, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” that said analysts with the US Postal Inspection Service had monitored “significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021.
Well, March 20th came and went.
The government bulletin appears to be referencing demonstrations across the world planned as part of a World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy, in which groups were expected to demonstrate for a variety of causes, including lockdown measures and 5G, Yahoo News reported.
So how long have they been doing this kind of spying on Americans? Was the “World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy” possibly a pushback against the very thing the authorities are supposedly doing? Why, if they are monitoring social media for disturbing behavior, do they never catch the crazies that shoot up FedEx facilities or grocery stores? They always site their social media red flags after the fact. It doesn’t add up.
It seems these days that everything that is supposedly being done ‘in the name of freedom’ is producing the opposite. There doesn’t seem to be a slowing of rioting and violence in some of our cities, where law and order are MIA, and attacking law enforcement or at the very least, not obeying police when they are called out seems to be ok. Are these non-peaceful protestors being monitored?
This federal scrutiny of law enforcement procedures and even the military – with social justice questionnaires, (like our men and women on the front lines domestically and internationally are the cause of all these social problems), is completely and utterly absurd. Now we learn just how deep and wide the cage is and we are all in it. This sounds like something out of Stalin’s Rules for Dummies!
What is happening happened to our country? Why is it being tolerated?
Published in General
They also image every piece of mail. Every piece. I’d imagine there is a database somewhere of who sends stuff to whom and when.
Perhaps they could just deliver the mail?
I bet Mark Zuckerberg will gladly sell this info to the US govt. for a nice fee. Some days it is hard to tell when the government ends and Big Tech starts.
Sounds like the joke is on them. Don’t they realize people don’t use the mail any more?
P.S. It’s Komando. She is – or at least was – married to a long-time Phoenix-area radio host, Barry Young, who also produced her radio show.
Thats because there is no boundary between the two.
Yeah, show me the letter written by an Antifa thug to his contacts planning a demonstration.
Interesting – so does this explain why it now takes two and half weeks to receive a birthday card from the South to the North? I’ve gone to the post office and it is so busy that people packages were just strewn all over the parking lot on the ground, being sorted – huge bins outside. So they thought this mail out ballot thing on election day was going to work out? This surveillance thing has to be illegal – doesn’t the Constitution prevent this? AI is everywhere – very concerning.
I imagine he’s already on board…
According to what I heard today on several different outlets, phones, computers and all social media is monitored.
No, they’re not very good at that these days. They are diversifying.
They ‘only’ image the outside of the envelopes/packages. That exterior data is public information. Ostensibly, the program is supposed to help sort the mail. Yeah. Right.
I’m waiting on a ‘Priority’ envelope sent from NY to NJ almost 2 weeks ago. Was supposed to be 2 day delivery. Ha! According to the tracking ref it’s somewhere in Nebraska. That imaging is sure making things efficient.
For one of their own packaging items – Priority Mail boxes, etc – it’s not an issue, but I’ve had packages delayed because people don’t obliterate previous bar codes as USPS says they should. The spurious bar codes can interfere with the automated processing and cause delays.
Their FOIA library seems shambolically useless:
https://about.usps.com/who/legal/foia/library.htm
I just did a post on this – not looking to see that you’d beaten me to the news… I heard about this program from:
The one thing that sticks in my mind is that name, arent covert operations separate from covert surveillance? I have to wonder if this is not a surveillance program at all – but really is a covert operations program. What operation would the post office be uniquely equipped to handle? Well, they’re one of the few federal agencies that has operations in every town in the country. Could that geographic diversity be useful some how?
There cannot be enough posts, videos and voices on this issue – thank you for posting about it and this video!! Good grief!!!
There seems to be a law enforcement and intelligence function built into every federal agency. Do you remember back in Obama’s first term (I think) that it came out, that the department of education had a SWAT team?
And they were buying a lot of ammo, as I recall.
Also, iCOP is obviously the new robot policeman from Apple.
In the 80s, it was RoboCop. Now, it’s iCOP.
We need to keep funding those SWAT teams. This is not the hill to die on, you know.
But it could be the hill that other people die on.
Sounds like a great reason to use private delivery services!
Is social media under the jurisdiction of the USPS? That is news to me.
Because authorities can’t act until someone actually does something illegal unless they can convince a judge that the rhetoric indicates imminent danger to a specific target.
These dangerous folks are usually known to authorities ahead of time. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that the authorities are somehow systematically monitoring social media. Most of that stuff is public.
Antifa and BLM have long learned to keep their plans and intentions off of the internet. It’s right wing populists who don’t seem to mind posting inflammatory stuff for all to see.
Perhaps the other agencies that normally handle law enforcement begged off of it. Or, perhaps some official thought that no one would think that the Post Office would do this sort of thing.
Or that they would be any good at it, and hence not a serious risk?