Newly disclosed records show USPS monitored social media posts about planned 2020–21 protests

Newly disclosed records show the U.S. Postal Service’s online surveillance program monitored social media posts about planned protests across the political spectrum in 2020 and 2021, adding concrete detail to a program that had previously been described only in broad terms.

The records were released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group, on July 27, 2021. In a summary published Monday, EFF said the documents include a series of bulletins generated by the Postal Inspection Service’s Internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP, that tracked events including the “Million MAGA March,” a gun-rights rally and counterprotest in Virginia, the nationwide “Save the Post Office Saturday” demonstration and planned protests outside then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in Washington.

Those bulletins suggest the program was not focused on one ideology or movement. They also appear to offer little publicly disclosed evidence of internal limits or guidance governing how protest-related social media monitoring was conducted. One bulletin about protests planned for March 20, 2021, cited possible violence because of “online inflammatory material,” while also acknowledging there was “no intelligence to suggest specific threats.”

The strongest independent government finding on the program came in a U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General audit published March 25, 2022. The inspector general found that “certain proactive searches iCOP conducted using an open-source intelligence tool from February to April 2021 exceeded the Postal Inspection Service’s law enforcement authority.” The audit also said some searches were weakly documented as having the required postal nexus — meaning a connection to Postal Service duties or investigations — and identified problems with records retention and storage. It made six recommendations. The inspector general said the effort evolved from an earlier Dark Web Program, was renamed iCOP in October 2018, and by April 28, 2021, was being referred to internally as the “Analytics Team.”

iCOP first drew public attention after Yahoo News reported on it in April 2021. After that disclosure, the Postal Service said it had renamed the program and stopped distributing the bulletins. But EFF said the newly released documents do not show that the underlying social media surveillance itself ended. EFF also said the disclosures include three heavily redacted email chains showing how the agency queried iCOP and circulated the results.

The records fight has also exposed broader transparency problems. In a separate FOIA case, James Madison Project v. USPS, a federal court opinion issued Sept. 23 summarized agency declarations saying a search had initially identified about 12,000 responsive documents totaling roughly 72,000 pages of emails and attachments. But the opinion said the agency later lost access to many of the processed emails because “the hard drive on which they were stored was inadvertently dropped.” The court said the Postal Service also represented that, because of a two-year email retention schedule, much of the underlying material was no longer available.

That lost-records account adds to concerns already raised by the inspector general’s audit, which found recordkeeping shortcomings even as it examined whether the program had stayed within the Postal Inspection Service’s authority. Together, the audit and the newly released bulletins offer a more complete picture of a surveillance effort that monitored protest planning on mainstream social media while leaving behind limited public documentation of its rules and oversight.

EFF’s summary also points to internal talking points from Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale defending the program’s approach. “In reviewing social media postings to gather information we did not single out any particular group and did not base what was reviewed on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or a person’s exercise of First Amendment freedoms,” the talking points said.

What the new disclosures establish most clearly is not that every aspect of iCOP was improper, but how it operated in practice: by collecting and circulating information about planned public demonstrations, across partisan and ideological lines, through a program whose authority and records management were later called into question by the government’s own watchdog.