AN ENORMOUS CACHE of phone records obtained by The Intercept reveals a major breach of security at Securus Technologies, a leading provider of phone services inside the nation’s prisons and jails. The materials — leaked via SecureDrop by an anonymous hacker who believes that Securus is violating the constitutional rights of inmates — comprise over 70 million records of phone calls, placed by prisoners to at least 37 states, in addition to links to downloadable recordings of the calls. The calls span a nearly two-and-a-half year period, beginning in December 2011 and ending in the spring of 2014.
Particularly notable within the vast trove of phone records are what appear to be at least 14,000 recorded conversations between inmates and attorneys, a strong indication that at least some of the recordings are likely confidential and privileged legal communications — calls that never should have been recorded in the first place. The recording of legally protected attorney-client communications — and the storage of those recordings — potentially offends constitutional protections, including the right to effective assistance of counsel and of access to the courts.
“This may be the most massive breach of the attorney-client privilege in modern U.S. history, and that’s certainly something to be concerned about,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “A lot of prisoner rights are limited because of their conviction and incarceration, but their protection by the attorney-client privilege is not.”
The blanket recording of detainee phone calls is a fairly recent phenomenon, the official purpose of which is to protect individuals both inside and outside the nation’s prisons and jails. The Securus hack offers a rare look at this little-considered form of mass surveillance of people behind bars — and of their loved ones on the outside — raising questions about its scope and practicality, as well as its dangers.
Securus markets itself to government clients as able to provide a superior phone system — its Secure Call Platform — that allows for broad monitoring and recording of calls. The company also promotes its ability to securely store those recordings, making them accessible only to authorized users within the criminal justice system. Thus, part of the Securus promise is not only that its database is vast, but also that it meets rigorous standards for security. “We will provide the most technologically advanced audio and video communications platform to allow calls with a high level of security,” reads the company’s Integrity Pledge. “We understand that confidentiality of calls is critical, and we will follow all Federal, State, and Local laws in the conduct of our business.”
But the fact that a hacker was able to obtain access to over 70 million prisoner phone call records shows that Securus’ data storage system is far more vulnerable than it purports to be.
More broadly, the Securus leak reveals just how much personal information the company retains about prisoners and the countless people to whom they are connected. It is information that, in the narrow context of incarceration, may not be considered private, but in the larger world raises serious questions about the extent to which people lose their civil liberties when their lives intersect, however briefly, with the criminal justice system.
Illustration: Alexander Glandien
SECURUS IS A TELECOMMUNICATIONS company based in Dallas, Texas, owned by a private equity firm. Its primary business is providing phone and video visitation services to incarcerated people — ostensibly offering a meaningful way for them to keep in touch with loved ones on the outside, as well as to communicate with attorneys. Until now, Securus was probably best-known for the incredibly high rates it has traditionally charged for phone calls, a burden borne almost exclusively by the very people who are the least able to afford it. (The Federal Communications Commission in October voted to cap calling rates and fees, a move that Securus and other industry leaders had fought, claiming the change would have a “devastating effect” on their businesses.)
It isn’t just Securus whose business model has relied on gouging people caught up in the criminal justice system. The industry’s other players, including the leading prison telecom company, Global Tel*Link, largely do the same. Prison and jail communications is a $1.2 billion a year business, whose handsome profits come from serving a captive and inelastic market. According to public relations materials, Securus provides communications platforms used by more than 1.2 million inmates across the country, who are confined in more than 2,200 facilities; by 2012 the company was processing more than 1 million calls each day. In 2014, Securus took in more than $404 million in revenue.
Securus does business with local and county governments (which operate the nation’s jails) and with state departments of correction (which, with some exceptions, run the nation’s prison systems). A key selling point to its clients is that the company not only installs and maintains phone systems at little to no cost to the government, but also that it agrees to pay back to its clients generous “site commissions,” a kickback that comes from revenue generated by inmate calls — on average 42 percent of the revenue from its state contracts, according to research done by Prison Legal News. (The FCC rate caps threaten the industry’s ability to keep revenues large enough to fund the exorbitant kickback scheme it created. Lowering and capping the rates and fees charged for calls means at least some industry players could be forced to dip into company coffers in order to comply with contracted payoff schedules, unless they renegotiate existing contracts. How the new rate caps will impact these payoffs remains to be seen.)
“OMG … this is not good!” reads an internal Securus email discussing phone calls hacked in 2014.
In addition to the sweetheart deal it offers clients, Securus also touts the technology of its Secure Call Platform, which allows recording and monitoring, with few exceptions, of all calls made by prisoners. The superior technology, it claims, ensures that its database is well-protected, and only accessible to authorized users — among them corrections workers, police investigators, and prosecutors. Law enforcement personnel are particularly important to the company: Securus promises it can provide recordings on demand to investigators across jurisdictions, promoting its system as a powerful crime-solving tool.
But the scale of the Securus hack shows the company has failed to fulfill its own promises on security. The more than 70 million phone call records given to The Intercept include phone calls placed to nearly 1.3 million unique phone numbers by more than 63,000 inmates. The original data was contained in a 37-gigabyte file and scattered across hundreds of tables, similar to spreadsheets, which The Intercept merged into a single table containing 144 million records. A search for duplicates reduced this figure to more than 70 million records of individual phone calls.
The database contained prisoners’ first and last names; the phone numbers they called; the date, time, and duration of the calls; the inmates’ Securus account numbers; as well as other information. In addition to metadata, each phone call record includes a “recording URL” where the audio recordings of the calls can be downloaded.
The vast majority of the calls appear to be personal in nature; downloaded audio files leaked alongside the larger database of recordings include one in which a couple has an intimate conversation; in another, relatives discuss someone whose diabetes is worsening. In a third, a couple discusses Dancing With the Stars, TV dinners, and how much money is available to pay for their regular phone conversations — versus how much should instead be spent on food. But a subset of the recordings — a minimum of roughly 14,000 — were made by detainees to attorneys, in calls that range from under a minute to over an hour in length.
To arrive at this figure, The Intercept looked up each of the nearly 1.3 million phone numbers that inmates called in a public directory of businesses to find out whether a law firm or attorney’s office is associated with that number. We found that Securus recorded more than 14,000 phone calls to at least 800 numbers that clearly belonged to attorneys. That 14,000 figure, however, is likely an underestimate because it does not include calls to attorney cellphone numbers. In other words, the 14,000 attorney calls are potentially just a small subset of the attorney-client calls that were hacked.
In short, it turns out that Securus isn’t so secure.
In fact, this doesn’t seem to be the first time that Securus’ supposedly impenetrable system has been hacked. According to documents provided to The Intercept by a Texas attorney, the company’s system was apparently breached just last year, on July 18, 2014, when someone hacked three calls made by an inmate named Aaron Hernandez, presumably the former player for the New England Patriots, who was awaiting trial for killing a friend. In an email thread from July 21, 2014, two Securus employees discuss the breach — the system was accessed by someone in South Dakota, they discover, though they don’t have that person’s name. “OMG……..this is not good!” reads one email contained in the document. “The company will be called to task for this if someone got in there that shouldn’t have been.”
There is no indication the 2014 hack has previously been made public. Securus did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this story. [Editor’s note: See update below for a statement from Securus in response to publication of this story.]
PRISONERS DO NOT GENERALLY ENJOY a right to privacy while incarcerated — a fact that is emphasized in the course of virtually any communication with the outside world. Like other jail and prison telecoms, Securus inserts a recorded message at the beginning of each prisoner-initiated phone call, reminding recipients that “this call is from a correctional facility and may be monitored and recorded.” In this context, anyone who hears the warning and still chooses to use the phone has effectively waived a right to privacy during that call, a condition all too familiar to people with incarcerated loved ones. Still, it is hard to imagine that people on either end of the line would ever anticipate that their conversations would be stored for years, in a manner that could potentially expose their intimacies to the larger public. By failing to prevent hackers from accessing the calls, Securus appears to have done just that.
This is troubling to the ACLU’s Fathi, because “waivers of rights are not meant to be all or nothing. Waivers are meant to be only as extensive as necessary to accomplish the goal underlying the waiver,” he said. If the goal for recording and monitoring detainee phone conversations is to enhance safety both inside and outside a facility that’s one thing — but those conversations should not be stored indefinitely, once they’re determined to be free of intelligence that would aide the institutional goal.
The mass recording of detainee calls was originally rationalized as improving safety within a facility — a way to hedge against contraband being brought in, to ferret out escape attempts or potentially violent uprisings, and to curb the possibility of witness tampering or intimidation. But if the goal is to see if a “person is smuggling drugs [or] plotting an escape,” said Fathi, “it doesn’t mean that the prisoner and the … outside person they’re talking to has forever waived all privacy rights and that any conceivable use of that recording is OK.”
The implications are especially alarming for calls that are understood to be the exception to the record-everything rule. Securus’ phone systems are supposed to be set up to allow certain phone numbers to be logged and flagged so that calls to those numbers are exempt from being recorded — let alone stored.
Indeed, that a criminal defendant or inmate should be able to speak frankly and honestly with a lawyer is a cornerstone of the criminal justice system — inherent in a defense attorney’s ethical obligations, and firmly rooted in the Sixth Amendment right to competent and effective legal counsel. A review of contracts and proposals completed by Securus in a handful of states reflects the company’s understanding of this right. In a 2011 bid to provide phone service to inmates in Missouri’s state prisons, Securus promised that each “call will be recorded and monitored, with the exception of privileged calls.” But the database provided to The Intercept shows that over 12,000 recordings of inmate-attorney communications, placed to attorneys in Missouri, were collected, stored, and ultimately hacked.
Illustration: Alexander Glandien
The lawsuit was brought by the Austin Lawyers Guild, four named attorneys, and a prisoner advocacy group, and alleges that, despite official assurances to the contrary, privileged communications between lawyers and clients housed in the county jails have been taped, stored, “procured,” and listened to by prosecutors. The plaintiffs say that while some prosecutors have disclosed copies of recordings to defense attorneys as part of the regular evidential discovery process, other prosecutors have not, choosing instead to use their knowledge of what is in individual recordings to their “tactical advantage” in the courtroom “without admitting they obtained or listened to the recordings.” (None of the recordings provided to The Intercept appear to be connected to any of the Austin attorneys named in the suit.)
The Austin attorneys argue that the intrusion into their communications with clients undermines their ability to effectively represent them. And those most disproportionately impacted are often clients who are the most disadvantaged: those who can’t afford bail and have to stay in jail awaiting prosecution. Austin defense attorney Scott Smith, who discovered this summer that an intern in the prosecutor’s office had inadvertently listened to a portion of a phone call he had with a jailed client, points out that it rigs the adversarial legal process in favor of the state. “How do you plan your strategy? It’s like being at the Superbowl and one team gets to put a microphone in the huddle of another team.”
Challenging the lawsuit, Securus notes that government intrusion into the attorney-client relationship could be a violation of the Sixth Amendment. But the company insists it has abided by its policy of not recording privileged phone calls — while at the same time maintaining that any existing tapes were voluntarily turned over by the state to defense attorneys during discovery. What’s more, Securus argues that the plaintiffs have not proved that “such recordings” had any adverse effects on their cases. “Securus acknowledges that Plaintiffs have alleged that recorded attorney-client calls have been shared with prosecutors, but they have failed to articulate a single instance where they have been harmed or prejudiced,” Securus said.
Exactly who is to blame for the recording of attorney calls is unclear. In many jurisdictions — including in Austin — the onus is on lawyers or their clients to give phone numbers to prison officials so that they can be placed on a do-not-record list. Failing to provide up-to-date contact information would make any inadvertent recordings the attorney’s or inmate’s fault. But properly logging these numbers is the government’s responsibility. And the secure storage of these is squarely up to Securus — particularly given that it markets itself as providing a service to do exactly that.
Illustration: Alexander Glandien
IT WASN’T ALWAYS THE CASE that detainee phone calls were recorded in bulk. The practice really took hold in the 1990s, says Martin Horn, a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who previously served as commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction and, before that, as secretary of corrections in Pennsylvania. When Horn went to Pennsylvania in 1995, the state did not allow for the recording of inmate calls. But that decade saw “numerous horror stories,” he said, of inmates “perpetrating crimes” from within prison, “continuing to run their criminal enterprises” from behind bars, or “threatening witnesses, and so on.” At the same time, telephone technology had evolved significantly, making monitoring, recording, and storage of call data possible.
Until the mid-1980s, inmate phone services were provided by AT&T via operator-assisted collect calls from pay phones. But after the breakup of AT&T the market became more competitive — and less regulated — and companies such as Securus, originally known as the Tele-Matic Corporation, entered the market to offer equipment and, ultimately, sophisticated monitoring systems.
Today, Horn regards call monitoring as an important correctional tool. And while Horn said he was never made aware of any recording of attorney-client communications during his time in corrections, he said to the extent that a privileged communication is either monitored or recorded, there isn’t necessarily a harm — “if in the course of listening to it you become aware that it’s a conversation with a privileged party, such as an attorney, you stop listening,” he said. “So the fact that it was recorded, while unfortunate, you know, isn’t necessarily damaging.”
The hacked database also includes records of calls between prisoners and prosecutors — including 75 calls to a U.S. attorney’s office in Missouri.
But the massive amount of data provided to The Intercept suggests that the scope of surveillance within the system goes far beyond what the original goals might have been. A 2012 Securus contract with the Illinois Department of Corrections describes an optional product called Threads, branding it “one of the most powerful tools in the intelligence community.”
“Securus has the most widely used platform in the industry, with approximately 1,700 facilities installed, over 850,000 inmates served, literally petabytes of intelligence data, and over 1 million calls processed per day,” the company bragged to Illinois officials. “This valuable data is integrated directly into Threads and could be available at [Department of Correction]’s and [Department of Juvenile Justice]’s fingertips.”
Today those numbers are even higher. Securus’ website says that the Threads database contains the billing names and addresses of over half a million people who are not incarcerated, as well as information about more than 950,000 inmates from over 1,900 correctional facilities, and includes over 100 million call records. The amount of data sold to corrections and law enforcement investigators “continues to grow every day.”
As Adina Schwartz, a professor at John Jay College, points out, when you consider that these recordings can be stored “forever, with no supervision,” the potential for abuse increases. “I think any criminal defense attorney who wasn’t worried by that prospect is basically somebody who doesn’t do his or her job.”
And the recordings with known attorneys are not limited to calls with defense lawyers. The hacked database also includes records of calls between prisoners and prosecutors — including 75 calls to a United States attorney’s office in Missouri. These, too, are potentially problematic, particularly if they include conversations with cooperating witnesses who could be vulnerable if the details of their dealings with the government were exposed.
The attorney-client privilege is “the oldest privilege of confidentiality known in our legal system,” said Fathi. In a criminal case it prohibits defense attorneys from divulging, or prosecutors from using, any case-related information that was obtained in confidence. But the reality is that keeping conversations with incarcerated defendants confidential is a challenge. Experts point out that the recorded notice embedded within phone calls initiated inside jails and prisons means that there should be no real expectation of privacy. “If a client is making an out-of-prison call to an attorney, the attorney-client privilege, arguably, doesn’t apply,” said Michael Cassidy, a professor of law at Boston College Law School, because by consenting to speak over a phone line that is subject to recording, the client and attorney should expect that is happening. But that isn’t the end of it: Even if the privilege doesn’t apply, “the Sixth Amendment right to counsel applies and the government can’t interfere with it,” he said. “So even if you could argue that notifying a prisoner that their calls are being recorded negates the privilege, it doesn’t negate the Sixth Amendment right to not have the government interfere with counsel.” And monitoring, recording, and potentially using information gleaned from attorney-client calls would do just that.
That’s why prison calling systems, such as Securus’ Secure Call Platform, are set up to log numbers that should not be recorded. “But that’s a technological issue and sometimes it doesn’t work,” said Cassidy.
But Schwartz argues that the logging of attorney phone numbers provides a “recognition that there is attorney-client privilege” and that it is “incumbent on the government to follow through” in protecting that privilege. When attorneys learn that their calls have been recorded, it shakes the foundation of trust, inevitably impinging on their Sixth Amendment obligations. “Once people know there is trickery, there is a chilling of attorney-client communications — because how do you know it won’t happen again?” Schwartz asked.
Indeed, that is precisely the risk that Fathi sees arising from the breach of Securus’ database. “Going forward, prisoners will have very good cause to question whether their phone calls with their attorneys are confidential. And that undermines that very core and fundamental purpose of the attorney-client privilege, which is to allow persons consulting an attorney to give a full and frank account of their legal problem,” he said.
Still, challenging the recording could be tricky, says Cassidy, even if there is clear evidence of taped communications. If a call was recorded because the attorney or client failed to put a phone number on the do-not-record list, he says, then the state is off the hook — a prisoner can’t sue for damages, or seek to have his or her criminal charges dismissed (although the government would still be prohibited from listening to or using the content of the call). However, if one can “show a regular and systemic practice” of recording such calls, a case could be made that “the company is violating multiple prisoners’ Sixth Amendment rights,” which could have more of an impact, perhaps prompting systemwide reforms.
And Fathi believes a case could also be made that the recording and storing of non-attorney calls is unconstitutional. “Prisoners do retain some privacy rights and certainly people on the outside who just happen to be talking to prisoners retain privacy rights. And, again, the fact that you’re passively consenting that the call can be monitored for security purposes doesn’t mean you’re consenting to all conceivable uses of that recording for all time,” he said. “I think even with the non-attorney calls there may be a case to be made that this is just so spectacularly overbroad that it is unconstitutional.”
Indeed, Austin attorney Scott Smith believes that, at least in the nation’s jails — where the majority of inmates are awaiting prosecution and have not yet been found guilty of anything — the blanket recording of phone calls should be stopped. If there are specific detainees worth monitoring, that can be accomplished in a far less intrusive manner, he said. “You can say safety mandates a reduction of civil liberties all the time. And that’s essentially the old debate — how much do you have civil liberties and how much do you need to get rid of them in order to be safe?”
Fathi agrees that the practice of recording detainee phone conversations should be reined in and limited. “It is another manifestation of the exponential growth of the surveillance state. Obviously that’s been noticed and commented upon in other contexts, but if we’re talking about [more than 70] million [calls], even if some of those are repeat calls between the same people, that’s a lot of people — including non-prisoners whose privacy has been compromised by a private company that is acting as an agent of the government,” he said.
Update: November 12, 2015
After this story was published, Securus emailed the following statement:
Securus is contacting law enforcement agencies in the investigation into media reports that inmate call records were leaked online. Although this investigation is ongoing, we have seen no evidence that records were shared as a result of a technology breach or hack into our systems. Instead, at this preliminary stage, evidence suggests that an individual or individuals with authorized access to a limited set of records may have used that access to inappropriately share those records.
We will fully support law enforcement in prosecution of any individuals found to have illegally shared information in this case. Data security is critically important to the law enforcement and criminal justice organizations that we serve, and we implement extensive measures to help ensure that all data is protected from both digital and physical breaches.
It is very important to note that we have found absolutely no evidence of attorney-client calls that were recorded without the knowledge and consent of those parties. Our calling systems include multiple safeguards to prevent this from occurring. Attorneys are able to register their numbers to exempt them from the recording that is standard for other inmate calls. Those attorneys who did not register their numbers would also hear a warning about recording prior to the beginning of each call, requiring active acceptance.
We are coordinating with law enforcement and we will provide updates as this investigation progresses.
Research: Margot Williams, Joshua Thayer
The creation of a database on inmates called ‘Threads’ is incredibly troubling – and its done for pecuniary advancement – with little to no worry on any Constitutional fundamentals is again troubling. (I am inclined to believe that the greed concept of making a better data mousetrap may have made them vulnerable to hackers) What I would like to read about is who profits by this state of affairs. At the beginning of the creation of this incarceration state, there was a fairly ‘healthy’ group of Congresspeople/State Legislators cashing in on their perfidy – do we still find them involved? I know it’s been a few years now, and people come and go – but drilling down to the beneficiaries is a great way for the rest of us to give credit where credit is due to the top 10% of the population that ‘matter’.
First, they came for the 4th Amendment, and I didn’t have anything to hide, and I did not object. Then they came for the 5th Amendment, and I had no idea what due process was, so I didn’t object. And then they came for the 6th Amendment, and there was no one left to take my case, and object in court.
This database should be shared with the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, The American Bar Association, the National Bar Association and other bar organizations, which should contact the affected attorneys to determine whether the confidentiality of client communications was breached. While improper prosecution and law enforcement use of privileged information may be difficult to prove, it is the obligation of the attorney to his/her client to investigate whether confidential communications were breached and take appropriate action when evidence of that breach is discovered.
We are surprised by this, why?
Is the file somewhere on the internet to download?
No, and we don’t plan on publishing it.
How are we attorneys supposed to find out if any of our calls were recorded then?
It was a violation of their constitutional rights to have their phone calls recorded by Securus, so you accepted a dump of all of Securus’s recorded phone calls of prisoners’ most personal calls… and listened to them.
You don’t see the hypocrisy?
People have rights to privacy. People have rights to have wrongs righted. But people — even you — do not have the right to listen in to other peoples’ personal data, ESPECIALLY when it was ALREADY A VIOLATION OF THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.
NB: Most prison calls have signs that blatantly state that all calls can and likely are monitored. That doesn’t make it right. IMHO it doesn’t make it legal either (especially between attorney/client) — but in NO CASE does it seem right to me for ANY of you to listen to ANY of these calls.
As much as I appreciate that you think you were doing the right thing in exposing abuse, I feel as though you basically quadrupled the abuse and committed a crime in so doing. I’d also advise you to look into the legalities of phone tapping. They don’t ONLY involve first and second party. Did you consult a lawyer or did you just get giddy that rights were violated?
Because it sounds like you worked really hard really fast to make a database.
How is that database being secured by the way? And how is it any of YOUR business?
And in case I wasn’t explicit, I care VERY DEEPLY ABOUT THE ABUSE/invasion of attorney-client privilege. I feel it’s an outrage by all involved. I’m not explicitly pointing you out. I’m calling your handling of this unethical, like I’d call the handling of ANY personal explicit phone calls being handed over to a third party illegal.
That doesn’t belong to you, it doesn’t belong to the american public, it doesn’t really belong to securus, it doesn’t even belong to the prisons or the prisoners, and in my opinion none of that data belongs anywhere near anything other than the attorneys and clients whose rights were being abused. Which does NOT mean you.
Manually?!
We wrote software to do it for us.
What’s missing from this article is more location-based information. For the 14,000 calls, do you have a breakout of federal (Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals, ICE) versus State and County facilities and whether they’re at privately or government-operated?
Also, is it important to distinguish between whether this is happening at detention centers that hold pre-sentenced detainees versus correctional centers holding convicted offenders?
What about immigration-related offenses? Do Immigrant detainees’ rights differ?
Technical note: The Intercept is really outstripping readers’ resources here. If you are using a less-than-perfect Wi-Fi connection, those multiple animated gifs really take a toll even before you try to expand comments, especially when you’ve already mandated that every article has to have your entire infinite-scrolling front page tagged on the end.
The people in those Islamic countries some of the authors here like to stick up for, or anyone else using dialup connections, wouldn’t have a chance of reading something like this. The text has become the prisoner of its fancy wrapping, like a guard post to make sure nobody outside the First World can get in to see it.
Hear, Hear!! I agree , even if you stole my thunder a bit: I was going to mention the way these images (jpegs to flash vids) pop up and reset the spacing of the entire article, causing me to chase the paragraph I’m on down a screen.
As opposed to those truly wretched souls in dial-up hell, I suffer (I believe) from a throttling issue with my ISP and scrolling long pages can take a minute.
What a great way to get The Intercept to pay attention to your complaints. And how presumptuous of you to speak for other readers.
If you are limited in data load it becomes expensive for pensioners like me on apre paid mobile broardband structure when each page uses up so much data.
Then you have to refresh the page after a comment. You have to continually refresh to see new comments.
Function not the form.
Produce good articles and it matters not if the container looks like a fish and chip wrapper.
All you need is a Tor browser and the animations will not be an issue.
Guys, use an adblocker. It helps a lot. Meanwhile, back at the joint . . .
Perhaps consider using a browser with image loading/javascript disabled instead of asking the rest of the world to bend to your particular browsing needs. You can easily do this in Chrome and or use something open source like Lynx or Firefox.
Most people in “those Islamic countries” are probably using 3G & 4G mobile internet (and/or sometimes decent DSL/cable in bigger cities), but certainly not dialup…
While I read most of my articles through an RSS feed, and thereby escape most of the formatting issues (everything is just displayed as plain text), I think this site’s interface leaves a lot to be desired. It’s important to take into account that not everyone is going to be technically capable of disabling images or adblocking or JavaScript editing every time they want to read this site.
It’s honestly not much of a problem for me to view the full site, but I can only imagine what it would have been like on my old computer. I think there should be a plaintext version of the site available for those with ramshackle connections.
Agree. Plus, new design is really really ugly. READER VIEW AVAILABLE is not available. TI is difficult to read. Too bad. TI is my #1 source of information: I checked it almost hourly after 13/11, desperate for some media non-idiocy.
“The recording of legally protected attorney-client communications — and the storage of those recordings — potentially offends constitutional protections, including the right to effective assistance of counsel and of access to the courts.”
Post-constitutional is post-constitutional — get over it. If the POTUS doesn’t have to enforce or follow the law, who else does? If the POTUS and the bureaucracy can make law (prohibited by the Constitution) so what if constitutional protections are offended? What’s the big deal?
If the POTUS can target the 2nd amendment, then they’re all fair game.
First they came for the Christians, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Christian.
Then they came for the gun owners and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a gun owner.
Then they came for the wealthy and I did not speak out —
Because I was not wealthy.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Really? Obama has targeted the 2nd amendment. Prove it.
All along, the right wing talking points used to destroy or bad mouth or whatever it is that they are trying to do to the horrible Obama have been fake ones such as that second amendment (He’s coming for your guns!) one. The only reason that I can think of why they do that, since there is an almost endless list of legitimate horrible things that Obama has done or not done that he could and should be constantly criticized for, is that the audience that the right wing is trying to get the attention of are extremely low information people, and, frankly, have a track record of showing themselves to be gullible to a point which is beyond my imagination.
You have no clue what you’re talking about. Sorry!
I do understand that the far-right hates the US Constitution, and suffer from delusional persecution complexes, but in real life, not fantasyland, it is the law of the land.
I mean, let’s face reality here – the far right are the people who are opposed to abortion, contraception, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to privacy, ect.
Not to say that everyone on the left is all roses, but in real life, not fantasyland:
The Supreme Court ruled that the 1st amendment protected unlimited spending on political ads.
The Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd amendment protected the personal right to bear arms.
The Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting gay marriage was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Those are all Constitutional rulings.
The Supreme Court’s job is to smack down the other two branches of government when they do unconstitutional things. The other two branches of government should avoid doing them as well, and do things when someone else violates the Constitution.
Surely, an economic incentive to lock people up is unconstitutional? I think even Scalia would agree. Why has no one/group challenged this aberration of justice?
*of course, $10-12 per min. talk time with inmates would, no doubt, make the litigation expensive.
The whole prison system is so privatized the inmates are nothing more than a profit center. All their conversations into a per DB, their families profiled as well. They are “allowed” to work for pennies, have little protection from predators within the system, and are forever marked both socially and mentally. All of this system needs to be gutted, it needs to be nationalized again. The current system takes many people who have made “poor life decisions” into hardened criminals and even more of a threat.
The current corps running these prisons, the phone systems, etc need to be dissolved, their assets returned to the public, and the prisons returned to the ownership of the states or federal government. All employees and workers need to be governmental employees, with transparency via public commissions like the jury system. Imprisonment for anyone in the chain found to be at fault.
People claim that the “states can’t afford to run the prisons”, but these corps sure seem capable of that plus have a decent profit margin for their shareholders.
Well said.
People claim … because corrupt state officials tell them to believe that it’s more economical to give huge profits to private companies (who then remit “campaign contributions” {bribes} to those officials). I, unfortunately, have seen prisons for profit hp close. They profit by inhumanely abusing prisoners through substandard feeding, slave labor, paying their guards peanut wages and numerous other shavings. The result is that more than a well managed prison a prison for profit alienates and corrupts the very people they’re supposed to be “correcting”.
Privatization of prisons is not even the half of the problem. For one, it’s not true at all that a large or even high percentage of prisons are privatized. The prison system is corrupted from top to bottom.
ACLU on Private Prisons
From US Prison Culture blog
Picuring a world without prisons
Look, the alternative to prison is to simply kill everyone who would be put in prison.
Is that a good alternative?
No.
The reality is that prison is necessary. Some individuals are a threat to society. They have few to no moral scruples. That’s why they became criminals in the first place!
Murderers, rapists, robbers, and other such folks need to be isolated from society. By putting them in prison until they get older and forcibly reforming them, we reduce the crime rate (by preventing them from committing more crimes) and make people safer.
The reality is that people get upset by the idea of prison, and it isn’t a nice place. But it is in part not a nice place because the people who get sent there aren’t nice people.
Well, if you’re an imbecile, then you’d posit that as the only alternative, whether you’re for it of agin’ it. If you’re not an imbecile you would at least try to educate yourself to what prisons are about and have always been about, and learn what might possibly be considered or done to change all of that.
More and more typically I am responding to someone who either did not read what I’ve posted or what was in the links I’ve posted. Read what I’ve posted and what was at the links I’ve posted or continue to make an ass of yourself screaming at clouds.
If you would like to post comments that are directly in rebuttal to something I’ve posted or within the links I’ve posted, try that. But please, don’t post straw man trash to kick around like killing everyone who would be put in prison. That is, unless you’re not concerned about continuing to make an ass of yourself.
So I’m curious I’m reading this, so did this effect people’s credit cards needed to set up a account, if they can hack the calls they can hack accounts. This is very scary in all levels. I’ve been recorded with both my children. Some calls less pleasant than others. But that’s my business. I’m aware of being recorded but to think they cannot trust talking to their attorneys privately. Wtf. Now who do we trust. I’m worried about credit card fraud and privilege info for their safety. This is crap
The data that we received did not contain any credit card information. Only phone call metadata.
It should be noted that Securus uses the Genesys Voice Platform ( http://www.genesys.com/about-genesys/customer-stories/securus-increases-year-over-year-funding-collection-by-improving-customer-e ) as their IVR, which also sells add-ons for Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech within the platform which undoubtedly their Threads application is based on mining for HUMINT/SIGINT based on. The entire platform is written in Java and somewhat buggy and insecure as it is.
Thanks for that helpful information Lord Ishtar.
BTW a LOT of voip providers do automatically record and even do automatic speech to text transcoding, especially for calls or numbers they dub ‘suspicious’ or ‘interesting’ (no matter if they’re not — no matter if it’s cleared). It’s built into a lot of software specifically for law enforcement purposes. That it would be turned on and never turned off for this doesn’t surprise me. It bothers me but doesn’t surprise me. And it’s pretty standard for IVR in general (even non-customer-line oriented stuff like customer service for ‘quality assurance purposes’ tho that tends to stay on and get flushed, by my understanding (but I’m sure that varies from place to place).
I wonder if it’d surprise people how many VOIP providers though keep that recording (in audio form, easily transcribable) turned on, especially at law enforcement request.
The tech’s built in. Glad l0rdishtar pointed it out.
Hey munchkin Ricky Smith – karma sure is a female dog ain’t it.
It was only yesterday when your midget – platform shoe wearing – booster seat using – lack of business ethics butt was sending hundreds of Minnesotans to the unemployment line.
Pump and dump, that’s your oompa-lumpa history. Just when you thought you had put enough lipstick on this pig you got blindsided by your lack of technical understanding about how secure file servers work.
Remember when you made the whole company watch 300? I finally understand now – you wanted us to think of you as Ephialtes – that hunched over midget who would betray anyone to make a shiny nickel.
Enjoy the poop storm Rick Smith!
Ebitda Rick is most certainly at it again with this sham company. He said recently he will “fight to the death” to keep charging $14 a phone call. Little man is going to need that $.
Here’s some math for you Securus and Little Rickey. 70 million records breached times $154 per record = 10.78 billion buckaroos. There goes the Christmas bonuses!
Boss boss, da plane! Da plane!
Rick Smith and I shop at the same platform boot store.
Im a Bail agency owner in Daytona beach. Dealing with these crooks on a daily basis this come as no surprise. This company steals non stop, not from inmate , but really their families. This company and its practices need to be run thru with a fine tooth comb.
People from Securus should be going to prison.
ALL platforms have backdoors. Almost ALL products. So this is common case. Most commercial like goldl ock and those have big backdoors and are capable of recording all conversations. So , stay away from untrusted ones
… Yes, and this is why the ACLU is modestly pointing out breach of attny client privilege here. I think they could make a much broader case, or a class action case of some sort, against the NSA for probing content, metadata in modern computing when a client has to use a Skype connection or any private connection under intense warrantless scrutiny by the DNI. The NSA is breaching attny client priviledge in a State-sanctioned APT attack against its own citizens. I feel like this is a problem. We have a lot of problems when non-criminals are treated the same as prisoners and the prisoners have no rights.
En LA cancel candor to llamas so entering Dr to direction Dr lo K alas Asia Dr lbs medicines K Tomas skunk no lo digas
What IS this?
Maybe it’s an example of speaking in tongues, mechanical translation at its finest or how to beat the system by using an indecipherable code that looks like gibberish.
Playing devil’s advocate, the government could argue that 1) they give a warning that all calls may be recorded and 2) if they are recording all calls, they are not going to have the resources to go through the database of each call and determine which calls are protected by attorney client privilege and need to be deleted. If there are hundreds of millions of calls, that probably just isn’t going to happen. Now I doubt that government prosecutors would be unable to introduce these into court? I am assuming if they did that the judge would say they were protected by attorney client privilege despite the warning? Otherwise all attorneys would be required to travel to the prisons each time they wanted to have a protected conversation? I’m not an attorney, but I am assuming these calls would still be protected despite the warning. The fact they weren’t deleted out of the database is a result of not wanting to spend the money sorting out 100 million phone calls into protected and unprotected (by attorney-client privilege) status. But if a prosecutor ever tried to introduce one of these calls individually, I am betting the judge would not allow it.
Indeed, the NSA’s position recently has apparently been that they are not intercepting communications at all unless they actually have a human LOOK at them. (I wonder if your call can land you on the no-fly list or on the D.A.’s personal docket even though the NSA or the local cops have done no surveillance, because it was all done by behavioral algorithms, like a drone attack…)
Note: do not try this fine philosophy with that collection of discs you downloaded off Usenet porn feeds without hand-screening each photo to see if it might be underage … there’s one logic for the rich or powerful, another for people being prosecuted.
They can’t introduce these communications in court; evidentiary laws will prevent it in just about every jurisdiction, attorney-client privilege and all that. What prosecutors can do is use the conversations to plan their own countermeasures on motions, witnesses, conflicts between co-defendants, that sort of thing.
Also, since it’s the local jail, the local DA’s office can winnow out a lot less material if they can review only the local calls.
…the banking of the seemingly innocent conversations may be a tool to be linked to future criminal activity if it occurs…even the slightest minute of disclosure,i.e., a name of an innocent associate, the name of an unnamed co-defendant, a nickname, the name of a neighbor, the name of a pet, the name of a street, the name of a bar, the name of a restaurant…need more?….can supply the prosecution with legally prohibited information that is not always disclosed to the defense with the excuse “the minute we knew it was privileged, we stopped listening”…..sure….
if the software company wanted to make the system more compliant with the constitution, they could have a list of Defense Attorneys and encrypt all calls to a number in their list of registered defense attorneys and require some type of warrant signed by a judge to decrypt it.
Just to be clear here, legally speaking, BY LAW attorney-client privilege is supposed to CIRCUMVENT those recording capabilities, just like it’s supposed to when you go to a separate room to have a conversation with a lawyer and get separate types of mail handling if you’re in prison when it comes to legal documents. There is supposed to be NO overlap.
Of course people might be being idiots and calling their lawyers on these phones because they have no choice. I’m not sure how they WOULD have a choice. So frankly if I were the ACLU that’s what I’d make a big deal about. If conferences and paper documentation is treated differently phone calls should be treated differently too — and that should go to the Supreme. How it hasn’t is beyond me. Tech surpassing the law yet again. I am guessing it won’t go in favor of the rights of the ‘condemned’ though. After all, we’re all recorded — if it’s not by the prison phone systems, then it’ll be done so by the phone system’s backend.
It also begs the question — the federal system used for email — how is THAT handled, monitored, and treated, especially when it comes to attorney-client privilege — it seems very intertwined/a similar issue that shoudl be resolved at the same time. And fast.
To clarify, by that I don’t mean the federal prison system’s email system although I’m sure that needs an overhaul too — I’m talking about the direct equivalent of the prisoner phone systems; in the federal prison system, that’d be Corrlinks (https://www.corrlinks.com/Login.aspx).
Most of what you wrote was covered in the article. Try reading the article.
….critic…wow!
Was what I wrote factually incorrect?
If they don’t have the resources to review the calls to determine which ones are protected by attorney-client privilege, do they have the resources to review the calls to determine which ones deal with a prisoner’s plan to smuggle in contraband or manage a criminal enterprise outside the prison? Isn’t the latter supposedly the stated purpose of this recording program?
The problem is not whether or not the judge would allow introduction of the recorded attorney-client calls in court. If the prosecution were made aware of the contents of the calls that would be like a football coach being required to tell their opponent the play they were going to run. If I as your opponent KNOW (not merely suspect from your formation, but heard it as a true statement from your own mouth) your quarterback is going to throw to a wide receiver on the left side of the field, my job (forcing an incompletion, an interception, a sack, etc.) just got a whole lot easier and your job (completing the pass for positive yards) just got a whole lot tougher.
That Guardian article about people being charged for “public defenders” is appalling. As is the surveillance (sensu proletario) of phone calls to attorneys.
Both have the same solution!
We need to have a straightforward public resource that explains to people, in detail, what to do in event of being put on trial and not being able to afford a public defender. This should be very much the counterpart of the ACLU’s little cards about “what to do if stopped by police”.
If every person charged uses his full rights as a pro se defendant – the most dreaded thing in the legal system – not only may more of them manage to get a fair hearing before a jury – it might just swamp the system and grind it to a permanent halt.
Of course, I’m not suggesting the U.S. can’t do perfectly fine without a judiciary – but it will be the same “justice” CHEAPER.
Pro se is a possible way, and courts do try to accommodate self-representing parties, although a defendant who’s in a county jail may have trouble accessing a law library or Westlaw or Superior Court rules, esp. in the pretrial phase, which often has tight deadlines.
Also, given the surveillance of phone calls and, presumably, DSL activity, the fact that a defendant is interested in Pitchess or Murgia motions, say, means that the DA’s office might be several steps ahead.
…..exactly right….
Or is the problem more that participating in the judicial system means you’re part of an adversarial process and strategies; so, the better lawyer will more likely win… is it possible to remove the adversarial and strategic nature so that pro se is realistic? But then the legal profession may be unnecessary.
Also, there seems be quite a bit o catch-22 setup in the bureaucracy. Haha we gotcha!
Most attorney calls are not recorded but some attorneys are constantly changing cell phones and phone numbers and they don’t inform the local jails even though the phone is telling them that they are being recorded every few minutes. When an officer stumbles on one of these calls they typically stop listening IMMEDIATELY, have to fill out painful paperwork and mark the phone number as an attorney call so no other officers listen to those calls.
All they attorney has to do is call the jail and get their number added to the “do not record” list but it’s too much trouble. Fortunately most attorney phone numbers are published and companies like Securus are constantly adding phone numbers to the “do not record” list.
We did reverse phone number lookups on 1.3 million phone numbers that inmates called, and discovered over 1,400 law firms and attorney offices. Inmates had attempted to call all of these business numbers, but in the data we have, they succeeded in calling over 800 of them. Since we did our reverse lookups in a business directory, that number doesn’t include any cell phones. I’m sure the data we have includes many privileged calls between inmates and their lawyers’ cell phones that we weren’t able to detect.
Man I bet organizations like the KGB, the now defunct Stasi, China’s 3PLA and every other “intelligence” agency” around the world must be incredibly jealous and salivating. America is legitimizing the very worst tendencies of government and corporatism, and doing it employing the logic of the Stasi–employing the “shield and sword of the Party” to ‘keep you safe and protect the Homeland’.
When it comes to the for-profit near zero accountability “contract outsourcing” of your civil liberties and human rights, America’s system has every other nation’s police state-total information awareness systems beat hands down. Zero accountability, massive profits for the few, and total surveillance of the many.
Even if you were to opt out of all modern technological means of communication from cell phones to computers, and move to some remote place with others to try and live outside the American “panopticon”, they’d still have satellites, drones, bugs and informants.
It really is the most pernicious and dangerous of tendencies (toward the goal of total “situational” awareness and domination) when you permit the melding of government and for-profit corporatism.
I don’t fear technology. But I do have a very health skepticism toward my fellow human beings, their agendas (including the unrepentant and morally unrestrained greed and the lust for power of many elites), and the ability of some to employ technological advances without democratic input regarding its proper oversight and limits.
And I personally dream of the day hackers and activists turn it all against those who claim to be “doing it to keep us safe”. Do not kid yourself. They do not do it to keep you safe except to the extent their failure (or appearance of failure) to keep “us” safe has repercussions for them politically or economically.
Put simply, they do it for power. Nothing more and nothing less. They may justify and rationalize their employment of these tools of “mass surveillance” as “being for your own good and to protect you”, as second rate sophists and totalitarians/authoritarians inevitably will, but do not mistake what it is really all about. It is about power and the ability to control or exploit others that comes with it.
If you’ve never read Bentham or Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish you really should.
Trigger warning: the preceding comment contains information which could unsettle those who worry about the future.
To which I will add this. The TPP prohibits nations from asking mass market software companies for access to their source code. See TPP article 14.17 http://www.mfat.govt.nz/downloads/trade-agreement/transpacific/TPP-text/14.%20Electronic%20Commerce%20Chapter.pdf
That means any company that the government outsources communications or access to sensitive personally identifiable information may use proprietary software that can be a cybersecurity threat and use machine learning. And the government (and we) will never know.
See this opinion piece. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/11/06/cybersecurity-and-the-tpp/
The problem is particularly acute in county jails, which, as the article notes, is a place for pretrial confinement. It skews the process against defendants, particularly those too indigent to post bail or afford private attorneys.
Footnote: the fact that 41 states charge defendants for public defenders skews the process even further.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/09/when-states-charge-for-public-defenders-poor-defendants-are-doomed
If they can violate any ones rights, they can violate every ones rights ! Wise up America ! !
did this really happen this is crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“… while Horn said he was never made aware of any recording of attorney-client communications during his time in corrections, he said to the extent that a privileged communication is either monitored or recorded, there isn’t necessarily a harm — “if in the course of listening to it you become aware that it’s a conversation with a privileged party, such as an attorney, you stop listening,” he said. “So the fact that it was recorded, while unfortunate, you know, isn’t necessarily damaging.” ”
His faith in the integrity of humanity is very touching, and so we get TPP, TPIP…these ISDS provisions will never be used for anything, dontcha know. Deregulate the financial systems, it will lead to so many jobs, Trickle-down economics works….ay caramba.
Perhaps they should delay rolling out this system to the general public until the privileged communications screening system is improved. Although, if this is too technically difficult, perhaps the DOJ could simply agree to not allow any recordings of privileged communications to be admissible as evidence.
As Menken said, ‘for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple’.
Ah, but it’s not just the DOJ involved. County jails are holding facilties for prisoners awaiting trial, which means every county District Attorney gets to listen in to privileged Defense information. In California alone that means 58 DA offices. There are attorney-client privileges in state and federal evidence law, but all that means is that attorney-client communications are not admissible as evidence at trial; what use the DAs and US Attorneys make of the pregame info is another matter.
….ditto….
“. . . what use the DAs and US Attorneys make of the pregame info is another matter.”
Yup, as is what use “corrections” personnel, law enforcement officers who may be interested in the folks on the other ends of the prisoners’ calls, et al. may make of information gleaned from recorded calls.
usa_naziland; “they hate us for our freedom!”….erm no, they hate you for murdering millions of people & lying & labelling innocent men, women & especially children as enemy combatants when clearly they were civilians. Fuck off amerikunt shills & government paid scumbags with your self-aggrandizement logic. They can invent new words into there dream-land for common place scenario’s & then pretend the world doesn’t see the vile us-satanic actions abroad. Here we see again even with regard to its own prison population, they see nothing wrong in lying, cheating & fraudulently breaking rules. They jail the highest proporation of people for crimes & the ‘system’ willfully cares nothing for honesty & intergrity.