USPS Protest Surveillance Program Ran With Little Oversight, EFF Says

The U.S. Postal Service ran a social media surveillance operation that tracked and circulated reports on protests spanning the political spectrum, from a planned Million MAGA March to Black Lives Matter demonstrations, with almost no documented legal rules governing its use, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The records were obtained after a multi-year Freedom of Information Act fight that began when EFF sued in 2021, and show the agency's internet Covert Operations Program, known as iCOP, operated for years before any outside party could examine how it was used or who it targeted.

What Happened

According to EFF, the group filed suit against the Postal Service in 2021 after Yahoo News first disclosed iCOP's existence and its monitoring of First Amendment protected activity. The litigation sought records showing what internal rules, if any, governed the program, and this year the agency finally disclosed a series of bulletins along with three heavily redacted email chains documenting how officials queried iCOP and distributed what they found.

The bulletins cover a wide range of planned demonstrations in 2020 and 2021, EFF reported, including the Million MAGA March, a guns rights advocacy event and counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest, and demonstrations planned outside then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's home in Washington, D.C. The bulletins themselves provided dry descriptions of events being planned and referenced public discussions on major social media services. However, some bulletins appeared to anticipate or imply potential violence without solid evidentiary grounding. One bulletin discussing protests scheduled for March 20, 2021 referenced potential violence tied to "online inflammatory material" while simultaneously acknowledging the agency had "no intelligence to suggest specific threats," EFF noted. Another bulletin tracking Black Lives Matter protests in response to police killings styled itself a "National Civil Unrest Update."

EFF said the government agreed to release the email chains as part of a settlement this fall, and they are, to EFF's knowledge, the only surviving materials showing how the agency actually queried the surveillance system. The email exchanges, while heavily redacted in release, document how agency officials used iCOP and disseminated findings to others within the organization. That survival was close to accidental. EFF reported that during years of negotiations over internal communications stored on an external hard drive, someone dropped the drive and rendered it inoperable. By that point the Postal Service had already deleted the underlying email messages under its standard retention schedule, leaving only what had been separately preserved. This technical failure nearly erased the only documentary evidence of how the surveillance tool was operationalized, raising questions about whether similar data losses have occurred across other government monitoring programs.

On the question of internal limits, EFF said the agency disclosed very few documents. The closest thing to formal guidance was a set of talking points from the Chief Postal Inspector, who wrote that in reviewing social media postings "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 same talking points acknowledged that "the recent attention on iCOP has highlighted opportunities for improvement, including enhanced executive oversight," and stated that bulletin distribution had stopped. However, EFF noted that the disclosures contained no evidence that the underlying social media surveillance itself ended. The inspector's characterization of the program as providing "situational awareness" to officials stands in tension with the bulletins themselves, which show the Postal Service systematically monitored and circulated information about Americans organizing lawful protests.

Why It Matters

The iCOP disclosures exemplify a recurring pattern in government surveillance: infrastructure development outpaces legal oversight and policy guardrails. A federal agency with no clear law enforcement mandate over protest activity built and ran a monitoring program for years, circulating reports to officials, before any outside party could test its legality or operational bounds. Even now, the only safeguard on record is a set of talking points written in response to press inquiries rather than binding policy enacted before deployment.

The destroyed hard drive underscores a practical accountability problem that extends beyond this single program. Retention schedules and equipment failures can erase the only evidence of how a surveillance tool was actually used, regardless of what rules existed on paper. This means that even successful FOIA litigation may recover only partial records, making it difficult for courts, Congress, or civil liberties organizations to fully reconstruct the scope and impact of monitoring activities. The Postal Service's acknowledgment that the program was renamed after 2021 public disclosure, combined with the absence of evidence that surveillance ceased, suggests the practice continued under a different label with minimal external oversight.

What to Watch

EFF said its case seeking iCOP records has concluded but that it intends to keep pursuing transparency around government social media surveillance more broadly. Whether Congress imposes any statutory limit on federal agencies building similar monitoring programs, or whether the Postal Service's renamed successor to iCOP faces its own disclosure fight, remains unresolved. The bulletins themselves offer no indication that the underlying practice of scanning social media for protest activity has stopped, only that formal bulletin distribution ceased. Future FOIA requests may reveal whether other federal agencies operate undisclosed social media monitoring programs with similar gaps in documented oversight, or whether the Postal Service continues iCOP under a new name with identical data collection practices.

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