Child Monitoring and Security Information Archive 2019 - 12.14.13
Home
Do Jails Monitor Phone Calls
The location service has proved to be a selling point. Matthew Thomas, chief deputy of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona, said that the department had been using Securus’s location tool for about a month, and that it had already come in handy. “We use it for search-and-rescue operations, and at the jail they use it to maintain security and to put cases together,” he said.
Phone companies have a legal responsibility under the Telecommunications Act to protect consumer data, including call location, and can provide it in response to a legal order or sell it for use with customer consent. But lawyers interviewed by The New York Times disagreed on whether location information that was not gathered during the course of a call had the same protections under the law.
Yes, they do. The latest example? An accused kidnapper, awaiting trial in California, used a jail phone to speak with a reporter. According to an article in WIRED, the conversation was recorded, and while the accused told the reporter to treat some of what he said as off the record, the authorities are under no obligation to honor that agreement. Now, thanks to that taped conversation, the FBI says it has a confession. When using a jail phone, “speak at your own peril,” an attorney in the case says.
Inmates have challenged this in court, but have not been successful. Courts have upheld the monitoring of jail and prison phone calls as being reasonably related to preventing escapes, fraud, and other illegal activities.
Monitor Phone Company
The Justice Department has said its policy is to get warrants for real-time tracking. The Supreme Court has ruled that putting a GPS tracker on a car counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment, but this was because installing the device involved touching a person’s property — something that doesn’t happen when a cellphone is pinged.
In Indiana, a man pleaded with his girlfriend not to testify, saying: “Please get me outta here. Please. Man, don’t go to court… Don’t come. Man, just don’t come. … I love you. I love you.” When she said she was coming to court, he told her: “They can’t keep me in here forever.”
The only exception to the privacy thing is in regards to communications with the prisoner’s attorney(s). I have read that while prisons and jails can video tape meetings with attorneys, they cannot audio record meetings or phone calls with attorneys, nor can they use any info derived from surreptitiously or accidentally recording attorney meetings against the prisoner because to do so would be a direct violation of the prisoner’s privacy (attorney/client privilege) rights under law.
Monitor Phone Activity Android
Privacy concerns about Securus and location services were raised to the F.C.C. last year before the company’s sale to Platinum Equity, a private equity firm, for about $1.5 billion. Lee Petro, a lawyer representing a group of inmate family members, wrote letters urging the commission to reject the deal, based in part on concerns about locating people who spoke with inmates over the phone.