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A hacker has given The Intercept a trove of 70 million phone records leaked from Securus Technologies, exposing the insecurity and questionable legality of the services offered to people imprisoned in the U.S.:
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."
[More after the break.]
The Federal Communications Commission recently capped the per-minute cost of prisoner phone calls, amid a debate on how such services are offered in prisons:
There's one big task left: to apply similar rules to newer technologies — like email, voice mail and person-to-person video — which are subject to the same kinds of abuses found in the telephone industry.
There's little doubt that inmates who keep in touch with their families have a better chance of finding places in their communities and staying out of jail once they are released. But before the F.C.C. intervened, a call from behind prison walls could sometimes cost as much as $14 per minute. Thursday's order sets a cap of 11 cents per minute for all local and long-distance calls from state and federal prisons. [22 cents per minute for local jails.] This means an average (and much more affordable) rate of no more than $1.65 per 15 minutes for a vast majority of intrastate and interstate calls.
Prisoners' families, who pay for these calls, are among the poorest in the country. The new system will allow them to keep in touch without going broke. But the F.C.C. ruling does not get to a fundamental problem: Inmate telephone costs are partly driven by a "commission" — essentially a legal kickback — that phone companies pay corrections departments. The commissions are calculated as a percentage of revenue, or a fixed upfront fee, or a combination of both.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Thursday November 12 2015, @03:35PM
It's not illegal to record the calls, only listen to them. Unless there's some way to determine which calls are to lawyers and which aren't, I would guess they'd record them all. I also seem to remember attorney/client privilege not actually applying in a few cases.
Of course, I certainly wouldn't put it past prison officials listening to all calls. Some sort of oversight would need to exist to keep it from happening, and I really doubt that any exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @04:11PM
Interestingly, regardless of if they were listened to this can be illegal, or just a good catch-22.
-This actually depends on the state in which the calls were made and recorded. If it is a two party consent state, and the prisoners making the calls were not notified that all calls were recorded, this is illegal.
-If prisoners thus notified still make the calls the recordings may be considered legal.
-If these phone calls are the prisoner's only form of communication with their lawyer they may be giving up Attorney-Client privilege simply by "knowingly disclosing" the information they communicate with their lawyer to a third party (the recording company). Because the privilege does not cover information that is shared with other parties (again in this case the company recording) due to it then no longer being between just the attorney and client.
Thus the prisoner gives up all Attorney-Client privileges through a nice clean catch-22.
Brilliant right?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:32PM
I would argue there is no technical reason why lawyers' calls could not be protected from being recorded.
Many years ago, I worked at a small company that provided phone service to prisons. At the time, we were replacing 6502-based technology with 486DX 100MHz, so a few things may well have changed since then.
Still, even using that ancient tech, there were a large number of features (yes, that is what they were called: features) that could be set on a per-prisoner basis. This included whitelists and blacklists of phone numbers. Also time-of-day when each permitted phone number could be called. Whether or not any given number could be called collect. Whether or not calls were to be recorded. Voice recognition to flag key words and the date/time of their appearance in the recording. The possible feature selections were enormous!
Now, more than 20 years later, there are no technical reasons why they could not have lawyers' phone numbers on file and block recordings of calls to those numbers. Whether or not that is now legally permissible in certain cases today? As far as I know, attorney-client privilege is still sacrosanct. If this is NOT the case, I'd very much appreciate a link confirming this!
Wit is intellect, dancing.