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Company That Handles Prison Phone Calls is Surveilling People Who Aren't in Prison

posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 14 2018, @12:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-long-way-around dept.

canopic jug writes:

More and more phone service for the imprisioned population is run through a single company. The ACLU writes that the company which handles prison phone calls, Securus, is also surveilling people who aren't in prison. This last week Senator Wyden (D-Oregon) described Securus' ability to obtain and share the cell phone location information of virtually anyone who uses a phone.

Real-time cell phone location tracking of a suspect requires a search warrant under federal law and, as some courts have held, the Fourth Amendment. Normally, when police want to track a suspect's cell phone in real time, they provide a warrant directly to the phone service provider, which reviews the warrant to confirm that it is valid before complying with the request. The major cellular service providers have law enforcement compliance teams comprised of trained staff who review warrants and other law enforcement requests and regularly reject or narrow requests that are improper or overbroad.

However, major phone carriers appear to have allowed Securus to bypass these procedures. Government investigators contracting with the company upload documentation justifying a request for cell phone location data to Securus' system. Securus, functioning as a middleman, pays other middlemen, who then pay major telecommunications carriers for the location information.

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  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by frojack on Monday May 14 2018, @02:31AM (3 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Monday May 14 2018, @02:31AM (#679399) Journal

    As described in one Securus document, the company provides the ability to track “the location of a suspect’s cell phone, in real time, regardless of whether a call is in process.”

    Sorry but TFA seems a little vague. I don't trust the source either.
    What is a suspect? Someone actively talking to one of the prisoners incarcerated? Or any person they so choose, such as Hillary Clinton?

    The phone company can't even track you any closer than which lobe of which cell tower you may be connected to, and that takes a while to be coughed up.

    911 can track you closer, if you call 911 it forces your GPS on, and sends that data to the tower, which the police get some few minutes after the call starts. (They call in phase two location).

    The fact that the story talks about middlemen without naming them suggests there is a lot of inventive reporting going on.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Whoever on Monday May 14 2018, @04:03AM (2 children)

    by Whoever (4524) on Monday May 14 2018, @04:03AM (#679409) Journal

    I just love it:

    Frojack:
    Government: Taxes are theft. Violently imposed monopoly.
    ACLU reports private company doing something similar: Don't believe it.

    Take off your blinders and stop worshiping large companies.