US Postal service conducts public surveillance program with Facial Recognition

Interestingly, the United States Postal Services(USPS) department is conducting a surveillance program for the past few weeks with the help of Facial Recognition integrated with Artificial Intelligence.

According to a report published in Yahoo News, USPS is holding the program to track citizens who are indulging in criminal activities on the dark web and various social media platforms using fake accounts. A source from Yahoo News reports that the staff indulging in iCOP is seen daily searching the social media pages with keywords to track down potential threats rising from scheduled protests.

The department that provides mail services says that it is monitoring the public not only to share their activity with 3,210 law enforcement agencies operating across the world; but at the same time help its 640,000 employees avoid such people and save themselves from any untoward incident.

A statement released by USPS says that it is conducting an Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) by using Clearview AI technology. And as a part of this project, dedicated staff are seen viewing more than 3 billion images scraped from public websites and social media platforms- all to track people with criminal backgrounds.

Zignal Labs is supplying the related Nfusion software to iCOP.

NOTE- Privacy advocates from various civil rights groups argue that the surveillance program is being held in the lines of an akin program that has been going on in China for the past 2 years and is simply meant to spy on Americans and identify potential targets with a criminal history.

Wonder why the postal department is showing interest in such a criminal tracing program and with what authority?