Child Monitoring and Security Information Archive 2019 - 21.41.20
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Do Jails Monitor Phone Calls
Mr. Wyden, in his letter to the F.C.C., also said that carriers had an obligation to verify whether law enforcement requests were legal. But Securus cuts the carriers out of the review process, because the carriers do not receive the legal documents.
Sound as that advice is, inmates around the country have ignored it, providing prosecutors with damning words to play in court. In jail or prison, rules governing privacy tend to be suspended. With rare exception—for example, inmate-attorney communications— conversations can be monitored. Nonetheless, here are some things some inmates have said after picking up the phone:
As long as they are following their own privacy policies, carriers “are largely free to do what they want with the information they obtain, including location information, as long as it’s unrelated to a phone call,” said Albert Gidari, the consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and a former technology and telecommunications lawyer. Even when the phone is not making a call, the system receives location data, accurate within a few hundred feet, by communicating with the device and asking it which cellphone towers it is near.
Mineola Monitor Phone Number
Securus, founded in Dallas in 1986, has marketed its location service as a way for officials to monitor where inmates placed calls. Securus has said this would block escape attempts and the smuggling of contraband into jails and prisons, and help track calls to areas “known for generating illegal activity.”
Some of the most chilling conversations were caught on tape in Washington, where Maurice Clemmons spent time in jail shortly before shooting four police officers to death in a coffee shop in 2009. In one conversation, Clemmons told his half brother: “Sometimes it burns me in my chest, man, I have so much hatred toward the police and stuff. Before I let them devils put me back behind some bar and railroad me, I will be carried by six. … As long as I got some company, I be all right.” Another time he said: “I’m gonna go the wild, wild west. Woe to the one that sees me first.”
Between 2014 and 2017, the sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used the service at least 11 times, prosecutors said. His alleged targets included a judge and members of the State Highway Patrol. Mr. Hutcheson, who was dismissed last year in an unrelated matter, has pleaded not guilty in the surveillance cases.
The letter called for an F.C.C. investigation into Securus, as well as the phone companies and their protections of user data. Mr. Wyden also sent letters to the major carriers, seeking audits of their relationships with companies that buy consumer data. Representatives for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon said the companies had received the letters and were investigating.
The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.