Adam and Connor discuss the Postal Inspection Service and their iCop spying program, which monitors social media for “extremist” activity, sometimes outside the boundaries of the law.
Reference Link
USPS Social Media Spying Program Revealed In 2021 (View in transcript)
Lawsuit Finds iCop Program Acted Outside Boundaries of the Law (View in transcript)
https://reason.com/2022/04/01/postal-inspectors-have-been-ilegally-spying-on-americans/
They Are Also Spying On Your Mail and Have Been For a Long Long Time (View in transcript)
https://liberationnews.org/the-u-s-national-security-state-is-spying-on-your-through-your-mail/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/24/post-office-mail-surveillance-law-enforcement/
USPS Spies Aiding Trump’s Deportation Efforts (View in transcript)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/no-postal-service-data-sharing-deport-immigrants
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/29/usps-immigration-trump-deportations/
Episode Transcript
Adam Tod Brown: Oh, hey everybody. Welcome to Conspiracy the Show. I’m your host, Adam Tod Brown, joining me as co-host Back in the trap once again, Connor McSpadden’s here. How’s it going man?
Connor McSpadden: Put a forever stamp on that.
Adam Tod Brown: We are talking about the goddamn post office this week.
Connor McSpadden: You know, Adam, sometimes you come in here and you break my heart about something that’s really near and dear to me. And practically the only thing I like about the government is the goddamn post office. Now, here I go, finding out that it’s, involved in all these nefarious things. I mean, the post office provides meaningful competition to all the shipping brokers in the world, and I bet you anything if these, fuckers ever finally closed the thing, Amazon, FedEx, UPS prices are gonna rise quickly and highly in unison.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. This is one of those no good options situations, because we obviously need. The mail. We need to be able to send things to each other cheaply. I sell a bunch of shit on eBay and USPS is significantly cheaper than FedEx or UPS, so it obviously has its benefits, but also those motherfuckers are spying on us all the time.
Connor McSpadden: And and not even just scraping data.
Adam Tod Brown: No,
Connor McSpadden: This ain’t a couple cookies you.
Adam Tod Brown: it’s a lot worse than that. And it’s a thing we’ve known about for a few years. I’ve brought it up a bunch of times on this podcast. a report came out in 2021 that we’ll talk about in a minute. That made it very clear the post office, and by that I mean the United States Postal Inspection Service, who we will be calling PIS for.
rest of this episode, they’re the ones doing it. And
Connor McSpadden: this.
Adam Tod Brown: we did an episode a couple weeks ago where I talked to two former CIA officers and at one point they mentioned that the CIA doesn’t spy on Americans and. I’m not trying to single any listeners out, but a couple of listeners got in the comments and on the Discord and were really put off by these two dudes saying that the CIA A doesn’t spy on Americans because their pushback was, well, what about MK Ultra, which I learned about on this very podcast, and again, I’m not trying to single anyone out.
If two people are in the comments saying it, that means there’s like 200 other people who are thinking it, but just have better shit to do than
Connor McSpadden: most definitely.
Adam Tod Brown: commenting on a podcast. So I feel like I should address that. We’re addressing it with this episode. For one thing, MK Ultra happened in the fifties and sixties, and these two dudes I was talking to are in their fifties and sixties, so they weren’t even alive when this shit was happening.
One of ’em was four when JFK was assassinated. So not only does MK Ultra predate the people I was talking to, but it also predates that directive that says the ccia a can’t. Spy or operate on American soil prior to like 75. They could, so
Connor McSpadden: about the early years when they’re getting a little more experimental with it, you know, it.
Adam Tod Brown: back when they were, you know, an offshoot of both the Office of Special Services in the US and the SS in Germany, that’s what the CIA was. We had our own version of it. And then after Operation Paperclip, we were like, God damn, the Nazis are good at spying.
Connor McSpadden: They got all these cool guys that are up for grabs.
Adam Tod Brown: And look at how they dress. Oh man.
Connor McSpadden: One of the greatest images ever is Warner von Braun standing there. I forget which president, I think it’s Eisenhower or something, watching a Apollo launch. With the Nazi Boarding School scar in his face.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Yeah. We hired a bunch of them after World War ii, and you can look it up. I’m not saying this as speculation. The CIA at its inception was half OSS, half Ss, so. Yeah, they had some rough and rowdy years in the beginning there when they were doing human experiments on people and things of the like as part of MK Ultra.
Connor McSpadden: I mean God forbid you wanted to get some pussy in San Francisco back when that was going on. There’s all kinds of guys waiting for you to trying to test LSD on you and all kinds of shit.
Adam Tod Brown: You’re just trying to pay for some strange and next thing you know, God damn Sidney Gottlieb is looking at you through a two-way mirror in the other room.
Connor McSpadden: You just wanna support your local small business woman,
Adam Tod Brown: Exactly,
Connor McSpadden: and then these spooks come in. That sounded bad.
Adam Tod Brown: yeah. That comes up a lot on this pod. Different uses of spooks. Uncomfortable term to throw around. So if you follow the CIA from the church committee, which is where it was, decided they can’t operate on US soil up through now, most of what they do does happen on foreign soil, including, you know, Jonestown.
Which I still maintain was the CIA. Even the CIA sold crack in LA thing. The CIA’s part happened in Latin America Freeway. Rick Ross was not a CIA agent. He was a crack dealer. That’s a big difference. He was used by the CIA to sell drugs in la but it wasn’t the CIA directly selling drugs.
Connor McSpadden: wasn’t their cutout. He built his own empire and they allowed him to operate it.
Adam Tod Brown: Even then it’s not like the CIA was alone in that. Have you seen , there’s a movie and a documentary, I wanna say the movie is just called White Boy
Connor McSpadden: Oh, fuck. I almost watched this. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I almost watched it.
Adam Tod Brown: about the white crack dealer in Detroit in the eighties. That was, I believe Matthew McConaughey stars in that, and I could be completely wrong about that part, but that was the FBI. Feeding a dude drugs and telling him to go out and sell them and then come back to us and give us all the information you got.
So the FBI was implicit in that shit too.
Connor McSpadden: Moral of the story. If you’re selling drugs in this country and you feel like things are going way better than they should be, they probably are.
Adam Tod Brown: absolutely. And that shit came for him. He eventually got arrested for selling crack and when he did he was like, but the FBI told me to, no one gave a shit. He still went to prison for it.
Connor McSpadden: It’s a pretty good excuse here in conspiracy to show if the FBI told you to do it.
Adam Tod Brown: We find you innocent
Connor McSpadden: You were just following orders in our books.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah there’s a lot to go around when it comes to blame for shit like that. And something I brought up on that episode that I’ve also brought up a bunch, I think CIA has just become kind of a catchall term like Kleenex when it comes to intelligence agencies.
Connor McSpadden: it’s come to mean deep state writ large.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, but the CIA doesn’t need to spy on Americans. We’ve got 16 intelligence agencies in this country.
Connor McSpadden: fucking, the Coast Guard is doing that and freaking, you know, like they’re, they’re watching your port number.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, I think the scariest intelligence agency in this country is probably the fucking NSA. They existed for something like four decades before it was even confirmed that it was real, that secrecy, and they operate very much in the United States.
Connor McSpadden: This is one, one trick that people will throw around sometimes if you wanna be on the lookout for it, is America has like 16 of these intelligence agencies. So sometimes when they’re trying to they’ll be like, well, so there’s, there are 15 agencies that don’t have an opinion on Jeffrey Epstein.
So, you know, and it’s like, well, that’s not because 15 agencies wouldn’t conducted a thing and decided something. It was like, no, they just. Didn’t fucking look at it in the first place. ’cause it wasn’t in their purview. They just throw around things like 15 agencies have declined or had no opinion.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Yeah. The Office of Naval Intelligence probably doesn’t have a dog in that fight,
Connor McSpadden: Yeah,
Adam Tod Brown: so they’re not gonna have a fucking opinion. But that, yeah, that means nothing. Yeah. The NSA, we gotta do an episode on the NSA,
Connor McSpadden: , I didn’t know that they were underwater for 40 years before we found out about ’em.
Adam Tod Brown: They existed for a long time, just mostly as a rumor.
Connor McSpadden: It’s kinda like MK Ultra and how it got found. Just that random misfiling.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. I didn’t have to push back on this during the CIA interview episode because. One of them pushed back on the other for saying it, but one of them was like, you know, I think if the government was involved with the JFK assassination, they certainly wouldn’t write it all down. And it’s like, well, for one, that’s how we found MK Ultra, because they wrote a bunch of shit down and just filed it in the wrong place.
But the other guy, I don’t remember who’s, which of them said what. But the other guy was like, also, if you’re gonna do something that complicated, you have to write it down. You can’t just trust everyone involved to commit it to memory. You’re gonna have to put some shit to paper and then hopefully remember to shred or burn that shit.
Connor McSpadden: you’re gonna have to know that the motorcade is heading what direction at how many miles per hour, at what time, you know?
Adam Tod Brown: So many details and yeah, the NSA, one of the weirdest things that has happened to me in recent years I feel like most people have forgotten about this, but there was a thing that happened in like 20 17, 20 18, something like that, where I believe it was on Valentine’s Day, a bunch of. People got these like phantom text messages that just came outta nowhere.
I knew it was happening because I got a reply from my friend Vanessa Gritten, that was just all question marks. And I was like, what? And she sent me a screenshot. She had gotten this text from me that I had actually sent months ago, like months and months ago, and it was, I don’t even remember what it was.
Connor McSpadden: I remember this. It was clogged up in the chute somehow.
Adam Tod Brown: Yes. What was weird about that to me was as soon as it happened, the company involved was like, no, no, no. Don’t worry about it. We fixed the server. It’s nothing. It was only like 30,000 texts, something like that. If it was only that limited number of texts, why did I know so many people who it happened to?
Connor McSpadden: Yeah, it was all fucking 3, 2, 3 LA numbers or something. You it was like all la fucking comedians it seemed like, and comedians I knew, and it’s like, what are the odds
well, that’s a group that you do something to comedians, you’ll hear about it. It’s a chatty group.
Adam Tod Brown: That’s true. And I did look into it a little bit, and the company that ran, that server that apparently got clogged or whatever, they contracted with the NSA. So once they were like, no, it was just a server issue, it’s fine. Everyone moved on. But it’s like, okay, but what was that server? What was it for Yeah. Right. What was the cause of the clog in the first place? Why were you holding these text messages instead of just delivering them? Wow, how are they piling up here?
Especially if you’re a company that contracts with the fucking NSA. , those are questions.
Connor McSpadden: I mean, you contract with the NSA, you open yourself up to all kinds of unemployed guys making queries and inquiries about what you’re doing. You know, that’s just, you just have that coming when you take that deal with the devil,
(00:10:52) The iCop Program
Adam Tod Brown: Absolutely. So let’s talk about the USPS and their SPY program. We’ve known that since at least 2021, that the postal inspection service PIS has been spying on our social media. And this was a story that, people covered it, but it didn’t make the headlines you would expect.
Connor McSpadden: It’s kind of like finding out, Santa Claus is tracking my data. It’s like, oh, the post office, you know, it’s not, it’s if it’s the NSA or the CIA or one of the big scary three letter guys, then you’re going, oh, I don’t want them having my data. But you’re like, the’re fucking post office. What are they gonna do?
Organize it, pussies.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, exactly. And I bet that is a lot of people’s thinking, but I mean, the question is, sure, they’re not gonna do anything with it, but who are they giving it to? Who are they giving that information to, is the question. And what we found out in 2021 was that. The postal inspection service was running a covert operations program to monitor American social media posts for extremist activity.
One of the things that came up when this story broke was that when they pitched this idea, the post office, because remember this was happening at a point when Trump was floating the idea of, Hey, maybe we should just abolish. The post office in 2020 that was a lot of talk from Trump was, eh, we should probably get rid of it.
This was their plan to save themselves was, okay, what if we start doing some other shit like spying on people? For the government. And when they pitched this plan, they went to Democrats and were like, dig, we can use this to spy on right wingers. And then they went to Republicans and were like, we can use this to spy on leftists.
And both sides were like, cool, let’s do it.
Connor McSpadden: It’s the
America I know and love.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
Adam Tod Brown: we mention all the time, once the government agrees on something, buckle up. It’s bad when both sides are like, sounds like a good idea. It’s probably a bad idea.
Connor McSpadden: Very rarely is like the idea. Let’s send you an $800 check.
Adam Tod Brown: Sometimes, and that’s always great,
Connor McSpadden: let’s fix a road.
Adam Tod Brown: Very rarely. So it’s basically just a tool that is in the hands of whatever administration wants it. It was in Biden’s hands when we first found out about it. ’cause it was 2021, so a lot of people on the left didn’t give a shit. We were like, yeah, monitor those fucking right wingers.
Keep ’em from storming the capitol again.
Connor McSpadden: Pretty sure there’s a founding father that has one of those handy dandy little quotes for this where, you know, imagining the power of, you have the other person using it. I’ve heard it, I just don’t know what fucking Thomas Payne witticism it is specifically I.
Adam Tod Brown: it’s absolutely correct though. That is what you need to think about. If you’re on the other side and you know your side passes something that the other side is like, Hey, that could be used to hurt Americans. Your response should not be, yeah, but not me, not this American, other Americans it’ll come around full circle and hurt you someday too.
Connor McSpadden: Yeah, this applies to like, you know the imperial boomerang overseas too. You know, it’s like, well, they tried it out in Gaza and now we’re doing it in Chicago.
Adam Tod Brown: exactly. And the program in question is known as iCop,
Connor McSpadden: Which, this just hearkens back to that era from like 2004 to 2008, where the only way to make people know that your brand was a cool technology brand was to just put a lowercase eye in front of it. And even if you didn’t have a lowercase eye technology, but you could do that shit for, you could be the fucking eye candy and it just a box of candy.
It was I everything.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. And there’s no reason for the I to be lowercase in this acronym, but it is. It absolutely is.
Connor McSpadden: they do that on their official media and shit. That’s so lame.
Adam Tod Brown: And it’s not like the, I stands for if or something like that.
Connor McSpadden: Yeah. That’s not, it doesn’t stand for a small word,
Adam Tod Brown: It stands for Internet Covert Operations Program. That should all be caps. That should all be caps.
Connor McSpadden: so it’s got the lame little two thousands eye thing and the word cop in it.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, I
hope they pitched it with one of those old school iPod ads with just the white silhouette dancing against the solid color background.
Connor McSpadden: yeah, no, just the white silhouette running from a bunch of other white silhouettes with Billy clubs,
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Just getting dragged into a van by DHS. So as part of this program, analysts t trawl through social media sites
Connor McSpadden: which I’ve heard of the post office, but this is ridiculous. I’m just going through posts all day.
Adam Tod Brown: They are looking for inflammatory posts, which are then shared with the various government agencies of the world.
Connor McSpadden: your little bunch of kids sliding down the hole in Charlie Kirk’s neck, the post office saw that shit, dude, and they didn’t think it was so funny.
Adam Tod Brown: That’s the thing that is exactly what the post office is doing right now. If you got canceled for making jokes about Charlie Kirk, you might have your local postman to blame. Who knows? But back in 2021, they were using it to monitor right wingers. So again. No one on the left cared in the slightest, and we went really hard in the paint defending the USPS.
And I wanna make it clear I’m fine with the USPS as a mail delivery service. I just don’t want them spying on us. Could we abolish that part? Maybe
Connor McSpadden: can we kind of like a piece of sushi, cut it out from the rest of the.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, or just have PIS go back to doing what they’re supposed to do, which is monitor for threats to the post office or threats to postal employees or postal infrastructure. Sure.
Connor McSpadden: The location of.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Yeah. That is perfect for this kind of shit. But no, they’re using it to find protests and things,
Connor McSpadden: Well, they did this to kind of save their ass. Right. You know, to add some utility to the post office brand. It’s like, well, that’s what’s selling in this administration. , It’s an information economy and that’s just what’s moving right now. I.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, and we’ll get to a story later that explains how much of a miscalculation it was for people on the left to ignore this story. Here’s a quote from the article we’ll link to about this. While posts on platforms such as Facebook and Parlor have allowed law enforcement to track down and arrest rioters, who assaulted the Capitol on January Sixth. Such data collection has also sparked concerns about the government surveilling, peaceful protestors, or those engaged in protected first amendment activities. End quote. I’m sure it will never come to that in this country. What are they gonna do? Deport people for criticizing Israel? Come on. That would never happen.
Connor McSpadden: Well, and you know the January 6th ERs, they’re heroes in our culture.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. They are the ones out there keeping us safe from. Five-year-old school kids in Minnesota
Connor McSpadden: Yep.
Adam Tod Brown: running all over the streets.
Connor McSpadden: , The January 6th people reminds me so much of when Hitler lionized. Everyone that died in the beer hall putsch.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Or even their push to give Ashley Babbitt, was that the name of the woman shot on January 6th?
They wanted to give her like military funeral honors. two government agents executed people in the streets in Minnesota, and no one has a word to say about that on the right, but trying to storm the capitol
Connor McSpadden: State.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, exactly. So to show how little difference there is between one side using stuff like this as opposed to the other side. Listen to this quote from the Department of Homeland Security defending the program back when Biden was the one using it. And just tell me how different it sounds from something the Trump administration would say today.
Here goes, we know that this threat is fueled mainly by false narratives. Conspiracy theories and extremist rhetoric read through social media and other online platforms. End quote. That’s exactly what Trump is saying about the left now. Exact same thing. It’s just when this story came out,
Connor McSpadden: They said it a lot more articulately.
Adam Tod Brown: yeah, it definitely flows a lot better.
Sounds a lot less like AI wrote it.
Connor McSpadden: there’s no like sidebar about Arnold Palmer having a huge cock
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, and it doesn’t reference your mom.
Connor McSpadden: or a, ballroom.
Adam Tod Brown: . So yeah, . A lot of what Trump is saying about the left, now, you could fit it into that more eloquently worded statement about the right back in 2021. And either way, it’s just the government acknowledging that the same government department that literally sends someone to your home six days a week is also monitoring your social media posts to make sure you love the government enough.
And that’s not to say you shouldn’t trust your mail carrier. I don’t think they’re the foot soldiers in this.
Connor McSpadden: I don’t think they’re peering through the blinds going, eh, that’s a pretty nice tv. Huh?
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, that was the other thing about that CIA interview, which I assume would hold here with, you know, mail carriers versus PIS. The CIA is so compartmentalized. One person working on one thing isn’t gonna know what someone in another department is working on. It’s just not. That way, like everything I’ve ever read about the CIA is like, we’re not, you know, having pep rallies in the office and going over what everyone else is working on.
It’s a very secretive organization and. One of the questions I didn’t get to for those two CIA officers was, okay, you say none of this stuff is happening, but would you know, like, how would you know? And I don’t think your friendly neighborhood mail carrier is privy to any of this shit.
Connor McSpadden: Yeah. , Don’t, go
harassing them.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Leave them alone. They’re fine. Give them a tip at Christmas.
Connor McSpadden: I forgot. You’re completely ruining my biggest fantasy, which is to move to a mid-size town in the Midwest and become an alcoholic mailman.
Adam Tod Brown: Oh shit. Yeah,
Connor McSpadden: You know, I just drink my days away and fucking huck letters could do worse
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. This episode will ruin that for you for sure.
Connor McSpadden: I know is my Charles Bukowski dream is slipping between my fingers.
Adam Tod Brown: Although you never know, I shit talk ancient aliens all the time and still ended up on an episode of a history channel show. So they didn’t do their due diligence.
Connor McSpadden: Oh yeah, but you how do you watch every hour of what a guy said, you
know,
Adam Tod Brown: I haven’t been back on the History channel since then, so I might have just fallen through the cracks, but.
Connor McSpadden: they did a thing on Mariah Carey or.
Adam Tod Brown: No, I was on the season three finale of History’s Greatest Mysteries, talking about the Chicago Tylenol murders because I had done one podcast episode about the Chicago Tylenol murders,
I guess a guest dropped out and I was a last second replacement. Don’t get me wrong, I did great. I am interviewed the most by far in the episode, but I was a last second replacement.
Connor McSpadden: That’s our boy.
Adam Tod Brown: It was a really eye-opening thing I feel like a show like that would actually be pretty easy to.
Connor McSpadden: Oh yeah. This is a bunch of fucking people talking straight to camera.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. And they tell you what to say. They’re not interviewing you and asking your opinions. They give you a bunch of lines to say, and just whoever says ’em the best gets featured the
Connor McSpadden: Whoever has the most interesting hair.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Well, that wasn’t me. They made me go hatless for it. So
Connor McSpadden: if you go shoeless next time, you can
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. There it’s, yeah. Yeah. If I put my last two toes down, it looks like my feet are throwing the devil horns.
Connor McSpadden: Oh, that’s cool.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, I do like that. So , also in this article we’ll link to about this story from 2021, they ask a bunch of national security experts what they think of this PIS spying program. And they were all skeptical. But one quote in particular was especially striking to me here goes, I just don’t think the postal service has the degree of sophistication that you would want if you were dealing with national security issues of this sort.
Connor McSpadden: That’s a sentence you love to read about your own government.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, and I actually don’t believe it. The postal inspection service, I’ve mentioned this a bunch of times, for lack of a better way to put it, they kind of solved mass shootings in the nineties. I don’t know how many people listening are old enough to remember, but there used to be a phrase for when a person snapped at work and it was called going postal.
And it’s because in the nineties. Post office employees were showing up to work and fucking slaughtering their colleagues with guns.
Connor McSpadden: In the nineties when all that violent rap music came out,
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah.
Connor McSpadden: coincidence.
Adam Tod Brown: I, absolutely blame Dr. Dre 100%, but.
Connor McSpadden: Keep their heads ringing was about the post office.
Adam Tod Brown: The postal inspection service finally looked into alright, why are our employees fucking shooting each other on such a regular basis? And they actually figured it out. What it was was. The post office was hiring ex-military people who were coming to their jobs at the post office and treating it both the job and all the people underneath them, like it was still the military and just being like drill sergeants to their fucking employees.
And it was making people fucking go nuts. Yep.
Connor McSpadden: I can very much see this happening. This is a genre of guy that takes his job too seriously. This was my manager at Old Navy. he looked like Lord Voldemort, but like he did CrossFit and he had like a wiry build and he was just had these bald head with these sunken eyes and this motherfucker loved Old Navy, like it was the United States of America.
It was unbelievable. And I think he was ex-military and you know, every, everything he said was like, when you put out a box, make sure you pick up another box so you’re never walking without a box. that shit will wear on you.
Adam Tod Brown: I as a teen, worked at Burger King for a few years, and at one point they hired an ex-military guy who only lasted a couple days. He was one of the most intense motherfuckers I’ve ever met. And I think his breaking point you were allowed to drink soda for free, but you had to put it in a plastic cup and he fucked up and put his in a regular paper cup, and the manager comes to him and goes, you have to put that in a plastic cup.
Otherwise it’s considered stealing and hearing. Considered stealing. Set that motherfucker off. He was so goddamn offended. I thought he was gonna fight that woman. And he like quit the next day. .
Connor McSpadden: His honor man.
Adam Tod Brown: Exactly, and that’s what was happening at the post office. And a lot of the shootings, I think like 85 to 90% were committed by veterans.
So a bunch of fucking idiots at the time were like, oh, the post office should stop hiring veterans. And it’s but not all the shootings are being carried out by veterans. So what about those? Is that just well, that’s an acceptable amount of shootings now if we just stop hiring veterans. And the postal inspection service looked into it more and was like, yeah, it’s kind of veterans, but not the way you think.
It’s us hiring veterans who treat this job like the military, and they just trained mass shootings out of the post office basically,
Connor McSpadden: They told them to chill out.
Adam Tod Brown: So don’t tell me shit about how the postal inspection service doesn’t have the chops to handle monitoring our social media for threats. They solved mass shootings.
Connor McSpadden: I think that’s a slightly different, still skilled in managing data, like knowing how servers work , I got the impression that’s what he was talking about. But no, that’s, pretty amazing. I didn’t know that story. I knew that phrase.
Adam Tod Brown: But it is them proving they can identify a threat because you would think, okay, well, we got a bunch of mass shootings, where’s the threat coming from? What’s causing this? And it turned out it wasn’t the people shooting, it was the people they were working for. So that takes some chops.
Connor McSpadden: The post office is, okay, we’re gonna solve mass shootings wr at large. This time, it’s a weird answer, but hear us out. It’s both too much and not enough Prozac. It’s just the incorrect amount
Adam Tod Brown: I mean, I have heard some suggestions that a big part of mass shootings like just fucking everyday stress, work stress, shit like that. Fucking tapering off your SSRIs. That’s
Connor McSpadden: stressful. You know,
you hear that one a.
Adam Tod Brown: I wouldn’t be surprised. if the postal inspection service could put a dent in mass shootings in this country. Who knows? I know. I don’t want ’em fucking monitoring my social media, although that ship has sailed after I. Found one of these stories that we’ll talk about in a minute.
I did that leftist thing and immediately hopped on blue Sky and posted, abolished the post office and just linked to it, and someone saved that post. uh oh. Was that the post office?
Probably
Connor McSpadden: you’re gonna be jumping at stamps. the post office gets all the junk mail that gets sent to my house, that’s the original version of the algorithm, kind of, that was your feed. You know, so they know your analog algorithm,
(00:27:57) EPIC Lawsuit Over iCop Program
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, exactly. So after the news broke in 2021 about the spying program, an outfit called Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC. Much better acronym than PIS.
Connor McSpadden: Bacon Time, Adam.
Adam Tod Brown: Oh yeah. I suppose
Connor McSpadden: It’s
Adam Tod Brown: with bacon, though.
Connor McSpadden: Well, Bacon’s great and the word Epic is actually pretty useful in writing, but they’ve been ruined for us forever.
Adam Tod Brown: was getting thrown around way too much
Connor McSpadden: Yeah, it’s similar to putting an eye in front of things. Epic was also got played the fuck out.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, it was like extreme in the nineties,
so EPIC. Filed a lawsuit against the USPS over the spying program, and it was decided that sure enough, PIS acted outside the boundaries of the law in administering the program, except it wasn’t decided as part of the lawsuit. The lawsuit was thrown out, but mysteriously the same day, the lawsuit was dismissed.
USPS Inspector General issued a report saying that sure enough, they probably broke the law. As part of this program, because you see this program was supposed to be about identifying threats to postal employees and postal infrastructure
Connor McSpadden: It’s the most , pretentious way to say mailboxes postal infrastructure.
Adam Tod Brown: Oh, we’re coming up on another fucking 75 cent word here in a second. The Inspector General’s report found that the iCop program unlawfully used an open source intelligence tool to search for keywords like protest, attack, and destroy, while intentionally omitting terms that would indicate a postal nexus.
Connor McSpadden: Oh, good. I know exactly what that means.
Adam Tod Brown: A postal nexus, just say connection. Come on. It’s one of the main rules of sales. Don’t use technical jargon if you’re trying to pitch something to people. Put it in layman’s terms.
Connor McSpadden: Yeah, I think , , that’s true of technical copywriting too. isn’t your job to take this esoteric content and distill it into some sort of meaningful short form for me? I don’t know, English, majors is what I say. I.
Adam Tod Brown: This report determined that as much as 28% of the intelligence gathering requests. May not have been authorized under the postal Inspection Services legal authority, including 14 requests for facial recognition services that contained very little or no explanation for the request report.
Also found that PIS didn’t properly maintain records, including keeping targets personally identifiable information including addresses, birth dates and social security numbers on their work computers. I didn’t put this part in the notes because I forgot. But I found it very entertaining. One of the articles we linked to mentions that when they were questioned about this part, about keeping people’s personal information on work computers, they were asked what they were doing with that information and their response was telling you would be a violation of people’s privacy.
Connor McSpadden: Wow. That’s some pretty good
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah,
Connor McSpadden: on you Jiujitsu.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. That is gymnastics
Connor McSpadden: it’s almost like the Jeffrey Epstein thing of well, we can’t show you any of the evidence ’cause it’s all child porn. If you want us to release it, you’re just saying you wanna release child porn. So you know
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Yeah. You’re a pervert if you wanna see the Epstein files now. Apparently the report also expanded on the things the USPS was using to spy on people adding cryptocurrency analysis into the mix. So, so much for that shit being anonymous.
Connor McSpadden: That’s not really a feature of cryptocurrency.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, that’s the thing. I heard that recently too, and I feel like it’s always been pitched as a feature.
Connor McSpadden: It was back in the day, it was relatively anonymous because just no one was using it and you could just use it for drugs. but blockchain is a public ledger of transactions with every transaction that has ever happened on the blockchain contained in the code. So it’s like the most public thing it’s like if you could post something on the internet and you couldn’t delete it, you know?
Adam Tod Brown: So the post office is on that shit too.
Connor McSpadden: But they might come after your Zcash or Monero. Those are the ones that you use to for human trafficking now, I guess
Adam Tod Brown: yeah.
Connor McSpadden: privacy coins. It’s a whole thing.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. It’s not the one I use for human trafficking, but I don’t wanna give away the trade secrets,
Connor McSpadden: Tornado cache.
Adam Tod Brown: Connor, come on.
Connor McSpadden: Okay. Sorry.
Adam Tod Brown: Fucking letting it all out. Who are you? The post office.
(00:32:21) Mail Cover Spying
Adam Tod Brown: So it should go without saying that if USPS is spying on your social media, they’re obviously spying on your mail too. I have mentioned a few times I did an episode about a book from the sixties called the CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which a disgruntled former CIA agent wrote, and it was actually the first book, the US government.
Ever went to court to try and censor and they did get a bunch of it censored, but not enough. It’s a fascinating book. Apparently the guy who wrote it is a fucking fuck face now Who knows?
Connor McSpadden: That’s probably why it’s only got a 3.9 on Good Reads.
Adam Tod Brown: yeah. But it’s a fascinating book.
Connor McSpadden: No, we’ve talked about this book a lot. I’ve, been meaning to read this for a minute.
Adam Tod Brown: One of the things he brings up as the nightmare scenario of surveillance is, well, what if it gets to a point where the post office is just making a copy of every envelope you receive and storing that somewhere?
And that was the doomsday scenario in this book. And now it’s just a thing you can opt into. the post office will send you an email that shows you everything you have. Coming in the mail, so they’re obviously scanning your mail. It’s just a matter of do you want them to show you or
Connor McSpadden: It’s just kind of like when they roll out any new surveillance technology is like we talk about it for years and it sounds a little scary, but they design it so that you fucking like it, it’s a convenience for you. You know, you’re like, oh my God, now my phone shows me all these things.
I like. ’cause of all the things I watch that I like, this is great and you don’t realize it’s being used to sell you all this shit. And I figured where I was going with this and I’m just ranting about the algorithm in general.
Adam Tod Brown: it reminds me of all the controversy around Ring doorbells right now, where on the one hand, yeah, those can be used to make a massive surveillance system in this country, but also some people need to know if ICE is at the door. and shout out to podcast listener Travis Wolf. I reposted a thing he posted on Blue Sky, making that exact point.
I don’t wanna take credit for it, but that is a valid point. And just saying, oh, well don’t use a ring doorbell, then I feel like lesser brands are gonna be even less secure. that’s not a solution either. It’s really a no win situation.
Connor McSpadden: That’s another thing. Have a camera hooked up out there in front of your house so we can see what’s going on in your front yard at all times. No, no, no. Trust me, you’re gonna want, you’re gonna pay big money for this. You’ll like this be,
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah.
Yeah. It is a no win situation, and as far as the post office spying on your letters, it’s actually worse than. It’s just a thing you can opt into Now. Washington Post was first to report on this back in 2024. Between 2015 and 2023, PIS inspected over 312,000 letters and packages, making notes on the sender and recipient of the parcel.
Did this at the request of. Federal agencies, including the F-B-I-D-H-S-I-R-S, and uh oh ice, over 60,000 mail cover requests were received during that time period. That’s what they call it when they wanna see the front of your mail. 97% were approved. There’s no external oversight over the approval process.
A judge doesn’t have to approve the application or request, and this has actually been part of postal service regulations since. 1879.
Connor McSpadden: Nice to have that grandfathered
in when you need to do some unconstitutional shit. It’s like, oh, I’m actually allowed to search and seize that.
Adam Tod Brown: And this is speaking of search and seizure. This is still legal under US law, but a 1978 lawsuit did determine that mail cover requests constitute a search and seizure by the government. So the feds are supposed to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to do shit like that. But with the post office in your mail, they don’t.
Connor McSpadden: So don’t mail me anything. Cool.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah,
Connor McSpadden: Keep it on signal or, WhatsApp, I guess.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. There’s almost nowhere you can go anymore to be like completely anonymous. So during the church committee hearings in the mid seventies. Another PIS spying initiative was revealed that paired them up with the CIA, it was called HT lingual, and ran from 1952 until 1973 as part of the program, 28 million letters were examined at CIA locations and over 200,000 pieces of mail.
We illegally opened program, targeted anti-war and civil rights activists, academics, scientists, artists, writers, et cetera. So the CIA used to spy on Americans, but when it comes to the post office, to paraphrase, one of my favorite comics, Mitch Hedberg, they used to spy on Americans. They still do, but they used to too.
That was his quote about doing drugs.
Connor McSpadden: I love. No, I love that joke.
Adam Tod Brown: Such a good joke. Goddamn
Connor McSpadden: An elevator cannot be broken, and it can only temporarily become stairs.
Adam Tod Brown: Sorry for the convenience. Fucking love Mitch Hedberg so much.
(00:37:25) Postal Inspection Service Aiding Trump’s Deportation Efforts
Adam Tod Brown: So that’s all bad, all of that. And then in 2025, we once again, very much under the radar learned that PIS teamed up with the ultimate villain signing on to aid in Trump’s deportation efforts. What are they providing to accomplish those goals you might ask.
Immigration officials were granted access to PISes, quote, broad surveillance system including postal service, online account, data package, and mail tracking information, credit card data, and financial material, and IP addresses along with. Mail covers for the record. USPS delivers 318 million letters, posts 7 million visitors to their website issues, 209,000 money orders and processes, 93,000 address changes every day.
We give a shit ton of personal information to the post office and they are sharing that shit with Trump to help him snatch, abuelas and school kids off the street and send them to concentration camps.
Connor McSpadden: They’re like, oh, this guy’s on a lot of blue Chew. Must be low T, he’ll be easy. Pickens.
Adam Tod Brown: Exactly. But yeah. Tell me more about how I should get up in arms at two retired CIA officers. ’cause they said the CIA doesn’t spy on Americans anymore. I don’t think they do. Your post office is doing it. NSA is doing it.
Connor McSpadden: This is classic Adam, Todd Brown. What actually what you’re mad about me. It’s the post office.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah. Blame the post office. It’s their fault. But I do think it’s concerning knowing.
Connor McSpadden: Oh, very. I didn’t know any
of this shit. I can’t believe that there’s, people send 318 million letters a day. We have 318 million useless pieces of correspondence every day that have to be moved.
Adam Tod Brown: yeah, that is nuts. And it’s like, who’s even still, I mean, I still use the post office all the time. I guess I was gonna say who’s still sending letters, but I just sent a friend of mine, a little gift and wrote a little note in it. I guess
Connor McSpadden: that’s just ’cause you’re a good guy. There’s not people like you. You’re unique.
Adam Tod Brown: yeah. And now I’m gonna be in Guantanamo for it.
Probably. Who knows.
Connor McSpadden: fuckers sent a letter.
Adam Tod Brown: yeah, yeah,
yeah,
yeah,
Connor McSpadden: that? Shit?
Adam Tod Brown: yeah. I’m sure that package I sent is gonna get checked. I have had, here’s the thing, I buy and sell a lot of sports cards, so I do sometimes get mail that’s been like ripped open and I’m always like, is that a fee for the government? I don’t
know.
Connor McSpadden: or is it a guy who’s like, okay, Griffey Jr.
Adam Tod Brown: exactly.
Connor McSpadden: I see I pulled up a baseball player real quick like that. Can’t usually do that.
Adam Tod Brown: That was a solid poll. That was a very solid poll. So I think that’s our episode. Keep an eye on the post office, everybody. They’re keeping an eye on you.
And again, I mean the postal inspection service, the people at your local post office, they’re fine. Probably,
Connor McSpadden: They’re probably just as depressed and checked out as any other glorious post office
Adam Tod Brown: yeah, they would go postal if they could afford the guns,
Connor McSpadden: They don’t have enough self-esteem for that. I.
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, it’s not the nineties anymore. Wages are going down.
Connor McSpadden: Boy, are they,
Adam Tod Brown: Yeah, no shit.
Connor McSpadden: I’ve even, my conspiracy, the show checks are three weeks behind.
Adam Tod Brown: know I. So that’s our episode. We did it. Connor, thank you so much for doing the pod. What do we have to plug before we get outta here? I promise there were new Patreon levels coming and I’m getting there. Patreon doesn’t make that shit easy. We do have a ad free level up now where if you don’t care about bonus episodes, but you want your pods without the annoying ads in the middle, you can subscribe for.
Three mere dollars a month and get all of our public episodes with no ads. And also the last 10 bonus episodes of conspiracy, the show are mixed in there. So you get some extra stuff and some bonus episodes of our other shows. Go check that out. patreon.com/on pops and subscribe to the ad free tier.
there’s more tiers coming. Connor, what do you wanna plug?
Connor McSpadden: I, I wanna plug the Patreon for you don’t even like podcasts because there’s nothing worse than receiving targeted ads because then you know what a computer thinks of you. Then it’s like, oh, okay. I guess this computer thinks I’m, I’m not satisfying my girlfriend. All right, that’s nice. Let’s put that together based on my online behavior.
Check out my comedy special live in Tucson on youtube.com. Connor McSpadden Live In Tucson.
Adam Tod Brown: And I think that’s it. Let’s get the fuck outta here, Connor. Say goodbye. Goodbye everybody. We love you.