Attorneys at law Brooklyn Defender Services say the prison telecom provider Securus Technologies has recorded conversations between its clients and lawyers. In the United States, the secrecy of these conversations is protected by the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution and the Federal Wiretapping Act.
According to Brooklyn Defender Services, inmates and employees of the company have long suspected wiretapping. In 2015, the wiretapping was confirmed after more than 70 million phone calls from prisoners, recorded by Securus, were leaked. This led to several lawsuits against the operator, many of which were settled without pleading guilty to the company. Securus argued that the calls were recorded as a result of human or technical error.
In 2019, Brooklyn Defender Services attorneys learned that tapes of telephone conversations between attorneys and clients had been shared with prosecutors in the course of disclosures in several cases. The organization requested an audit.
The audit revealed that more than 1,500 phone calls concerning the cases of at least 353 defendants were recorded. Securus said calls are usually preceded by an automatic message that the conversation will be recorded, but several lawyers said they were unaware of the recording.
Violations in New York are just the tip of the iceberg, according to an analysis of court documents and local news articles by human rights organization Worth Rises in conjunction with Motherboard. Securus has recorded tens of thousands of telephone conversations between lawyers and their clients, according to lawsuits filed in California, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin. Global Tel Link (GTL), another major prison telecommunications provider, allegedly recorded telephone conversations with lawyers in Florida, California and Maine. In some cases, the prosecutor's office was found to be listening.
Bianca Tylek, a lawyer and executive director of the human rights organization Worth Rises, believes that recording telephone conversations in prisons is a “systematic practice” that has been going on for many years. "While persistent violations of fundamental constitutional rights usually lead to federal investigations, insufficient coverage of these violations has allowed Securus and GTL to calmly settle individual claims without substantial liability," Worth Rises writes on its blog.
Securus has challenged this characterization.
"Random entries are not evidence of 'systemic practice,'" a Securus spokesman told Motherboard. - In fact, the opposite is true. Inadvertently recorded calls to attorney numbers account for less than one tenth of one percent of all calls on the Securus platform, which means these issues are rare and sporadic, not systematic. ”
The company also said that all calls from correctional facilities are recorded by default, and that attorney numbers should be added to the exemption list so that the system does not record conversations. Securus said it is making efforts to remove inappropriate recordings and is doing "everything in its power to avoid recording these calls."
However, an audit conducted against Securus in New York found that more than 100 Brooklyn attorney phone numbers were not on the write-protected list despite requests for confidentiality. Lawyers in Maine, California and Texas have raised similar objections, and some private lawyers have waited over a year to be listed.
Tylek says these issues are irrelevant for prison telecom operators: companies make colossal amounts of money from phone calls that make it easy to cover the costs of conflict resolution. Securus and GTL are owned by large private equity firms and form a duopoly over prison telecommunications services in the United States. According to The Prison Policy Initiative, in 2018 the average cost of a 15-minute phone call in prison was $ 5.74. In June 2021, Connecticut passed legislation for the first time making phone calls in prisons free, but that hardly changes the big picture. In 2020, Securus' revenue grew by 10% to $ 767.5 million.
Privacy breaches continue, Tylek said, because prison telecoms have a financial stake in serving law enforcement as their primary customer base. Recordings of private conversations are often used by prosecutors to build cases. In addition, according to Brooklyn Defender Services, some prisons have used wiretapped data to create voice recognition databases.
“This is deeply troubling,” said Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, Director of Science & Surveillance at Brooklyn Defender Services. "This is a huge amount of data, and it is not completely clear how they use it and why."
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