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The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

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Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#131

Post by bscphil »

cryptoquick wrote: post #128
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on". Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was…

This. This right here. Every word. I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prej…

> if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with

Maybe I'm missing your point, but isn't that exactly what the cops in question are supposedly doing? "Immigration cops" investigate illegal immigration. The ATF investigates the unlawful use or sale of firearms and drug trafficking. All of these things are crimes (regardless of whether they should be).

So how is there a "pre-crime" aspect to specialization among police when it comes to things that actually are crimes?

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#132

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

gnicholas wrote: post #80
bigth wrote: post #70

I'm surprised by the comments here. People seem clueless to real threats the USPS faces and are puzzled why they have inspectors. Last year or maybe it was 2019 a delivery worker was murdered. Agg robberies of delivery workers has been going up. Breaking into mail boxes and mail theft has been going up. Using mail service to conduct fraud and other criminal transactions is going up. I'm on mobile so it's hard to get…

I'm not surprised they have inspectors. I'm surprised they think that social media surveillance is within their purview. I hope their inspectors continue to investigate mail theft, mail fraud, and other things related to the physical delivery of mail. But I don't want them shifting into digital snooping that is totally unrelated to mail.

> But I don't want them shifting into digital snooping that is totally unrelated to mail.

I mean, the primary method for delivery of goods purchased on the Silk Road was through the USPS. And I imagine the tor sites that replaced the Silk Road have similar delivery needs.

So if the USPS isn’t going to “digitally snoop” for the illegal delivery of handguns and heroin, who will?

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#133

Post by bigth »

gnicholas wrote: post #92
pixl97 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know mail fraud is commonly initiated by online groups, many times on social media, right?

> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information 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,…

Not true at all, any gathering of people is a prime target for shipping contraband in the mail. Not to mention how the protests could affect mail service in the area.

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#134

Post by bigth »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #120
bigth wrote: post #70

I'm surprised by the comments here. People seem clueless to real threats the USPS faces and are puzzled why they have inspectors. Last year or maybe it was 2019 a delivery worker was murdered. Agg robberies of delivery workers has been going up. Breaking into mail boxes and mail theft has been going up. Using mail service to conduct fraud and other criminal transactions is going up. I'm on mobile so it's hard to get…

If that's the case, surely it would be more appropriate for a law enforcement agency such as the FBI to investigate any crimes committed against postal workers. But we aren't even talking about crimes that were committed here – we're talking about crimes that might be committed.

The postal inspection service is a law enforcement agency...? And it existed before the FBI. Moreover, all federal law enforcement trains at the same place in Georgia.

Look: https://www.uspis.gov

Matter of fact their website news section shows you some of the crazy crime they investigate. Theft of postal vehicle happened few days ago apparently.

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#135

Post by salawat »

snowwrestler wrote: post #45

Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, for example. The Postal Inspec…

>I will say that personally I have fewer concerns about programs to monitor public content on the Internet, than programs that seek to access, monitor, and store content that people intended to be privately communicated to other people.

You should be worried about both, they're honestly equivalent.

See, this is the greatest bait and switch ever perpetrated on the citizens of the United States, and I'm not sure anyone was even actively trying to do it. Time was, communication between you and someone else was fundamentally expected to stay private. This was by definition prior to Third Party Doctrine, with which the Judiciary unilaterally decided the 4th Amendment was more of a suggestion than a hard line in the sand.

Communication intermediaried through a service provider should never have been severed from personal effects and papers. If third-party metadata were treated bbased on the end; intended communication either point to point (private), multicast (confidential with expectation of privacy), or broadcast (implicitly public), we'd be in a much better place. When the Government starts vendoring out surveillance, or bakes it into departments, you know you've steered your society off the rails somewhere.

The fact we're okay with businesses acting like a cabal of gossiping grannies only legitimizes the continued erosion of private space. How long until IoT connection strength logs make it possible to surveill anywhere with enough devices and computing power?

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#136

Post by cryptoquick »

bscphil wrote: post #131
cryptoquick wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. This right here. Every word. I would even go so far as to say, there shouldn't be specific immigration cops, or alcohol, tobacco and firearms cops, since if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with. To allow cops to go snooping around by widening jurisdictional responsibility, it has a very "pre-crime" aspect to it, which is often subject to prej…

> if there were actual crimes committed by immigrants or gun owners, the crimes themselves should be dealt with Maybe I'm missing your point, but isn't that exactly what the cops in question are supposedly doing? "Immigration cops" investigate illegal immigration. The ATF investigates the unlawful use or sale of firearms and drug trafficking. All of these things are crimes (regardless of whether they should be). So h…

I guess I'm asking a question of crime priority, and whether some crimes are more likely to be punished because a disproportionate amount of policing is put in place towards that sort of crime.

If the same resources that were dedicated to the numerous policing agencies in the US were given to a smaller number of more generalized agencies, those agencies would be allowed to prioritize where their time and resources are best spent protecting the public.

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#137

Post by logicslave »

_Nat_ wrote: post #49
logicslave wrote: post #22

Everyone has their tin foil hat with stuff on like this, but unless they are paying a 100 - 1000 engineers 250k-500k a year, I doubt theyve built anything useful with uptime. Maybe they could just scan a massive dataset of everyones posts, with some string searching, but still. I just dont see any entity like this being able to accomplish this task effectively.

What would " 100 - 1000 engineers " even be doing? The story starts off saying that the work's being done by analysts: > The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies. , so it sounds more like they've got some folks browsing social-media. Granted, a lot of the post-scann…

Exactly.

"> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies."

This is useless and nobody should fear it. You should fear a set of teams of highly trained technologists. Thats not what we have here

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#138

Post by logicslave »

barbazoo wrote: post #29
logicslave wrote: post #22

Everyone has their tin foil hat with stuff on like this, but unless they are paying a 100 - 1000 engineers 250k-500k a year, I doubt theyve built anything useful with uptime. Maybe they could just scan a massive dataset of everyones posts, with some string searching, but still. I just dont see any entity like this being able to accomplish this task effectively.

Why do you believe that unless they're paying their developers "250k-500k a year", they wouldn't have built something useful?

Because analyzing all of social media with efficiency and effectively is really hard.

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#139

Post by jeffchien »

belval wrote: post #90
dataflow wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. Maybe worth noting that USPIS is older than the FBI. It's the oldest federal law enforcement agency.

That's a fantastic trivia fact, I guess threats to the postal service are a very old problem so it makes sense.

I'm sure that the recent shooting of their FedEx colleagues in Indianapolis is on the USPS's mind as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if UPS and DHL tries to monitor social media as well.

Re: The USPS is running a 'covert' program to monitor Americans' social media posts

#140

Post by earleybird »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #115
snowwrestler wrote: post #45

Pretty much any federal agency you have heard of has an investigative dept that employs federal special agents. These are law enforcement roles with the same training, authority, and responsibilities as investigative agents in the FBI, etc. They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, for example. The Postal Inspec…

>They were created to meet the specific law enforcement needs of each agency. Dept of Education agents investigate misuse of Dept of Education funds, That's a really charitable way of saying "handle petty stuff that the FBI can't justify spending resources on". Every specialty police department exists for this reason and this reason only. Because the mission is often so petty they wouldn't get any resources if it was…

As it was, so it is. The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll; from the wikipedia article "a general reluctance to share information; the FBI in particular was uninterested as no large sum of money was involved and no classified information host was accessed" Cliff of course gives a very entertaining description of getting investigators interest. Should be required reading for anyone doing/interested in security.
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