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Company That Handles Prison Phone Calls Is Surveilling People Who Aren’t in Prison

Accepted submission by canopic jug at 2018-05-13 06:36:12
Digital Liberty

More and more phone service for the imprisioned population is run through a single company. The ACLU writes that the ompany which handles prison phone calls, Securus, is also surveilling people who aren’t in prison [aclu.org]. 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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