Have you heard? The United States Postal Service thinks it's the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Apparently, even bureaucrats get confused with the alphabet soup of federal agencies operating in our nation's capital.
The USPS has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects the social media posts of Americans and flags them for "inflammatory" language, according to a new report from Yahoo! News.
The surveillance program, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, employs analysts who track social media activity and share those posts across government agencies.
“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”
Protests were scheduled to take place around the world on March 20 as part of the World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy. Protest topics included everything from lockdown measures to 5G, Yahoo! reports.
It remains totally unclear why the USPS is engaged in this kind of activity.
“This seems a little bizarre,” Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told the outlet. “Based on the very minimal information that’s available online, it appears that [iCOP] is meant to root out misuse of the postal system by online actors, which doesn’t seem to encompass what’s going on here. It’s not at all clear why their mandate would include monitoring of social media that’s unrelated to use of the postal system.”
This is how The Swamp grows to control every aspect of our lives. Congress empowers the Post Office to enforce federal postal service laws, but the USPS doesn't stop there. Their law enforcement wing moves beyond post office violations to monitoring Americans' online activity, and all of a sudden every federal agency is engaged in controlling how Americans think and what they do.
This needs to end, but we can't trust Congress to rein in The Swamp. While some politicians genuinely care about federal overreach, the vast majority are content to let bureaucrats operate with impunity. It's time to rein them in, and we can do it with a Convention of States.
An Article V Convention of States is called and controlled by the states and has the power to propose constitutional amendments. These amendments can limit the power, scope, and jurisdiction of the federal government, including federal agencies. In other words, amendments can be written that shrink the size and scope of some agencies (i.e., fire most of the bureaucrats) and eliminate others altogether.
It's time for a government of, by, and for the people. Not of, by and for the bureaucrats. If you want to join the fight, sign the petition below!
