AI Surveillance Of Prison Calls Scooping Up Millions Of Conversations, Producing Little Actionable Info

from the everything-scales-but-the-effectiveness dept

There's not much privacy in prison. And there's going to be even less. Inmates are warned that all calls are monitored. How often this goal is achieved is impossible to say, but tech advances are making it a reality. Attorney-client privilege is supposed to be respected in prisons, but we've already seen instances where it hasn't been, thanks to automated monitoring equipment.

What's already been a problem is going to get worse. AI is doing the eavesdropping, and it's far from perfect. A new report from Thomson Reuters shows prisons are investing heavily in automation to ensure as many conversations as possible originating from prisoners are recorded, captured, and mined for useful info.

When the sheriff in Suffolk County, New York, requested $700,000 from the U.S. government for an artificial intelligence system to eavesdrop on prison phone conversations, his office called it a key tool in fighting gang-related and violent crime.

But the county jail ended up listening to calls involving a much wider range of subjects - scanning as many as 600,000 minutes per month, according to public records from the county obtained by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

There's the stated intent: "gang-related and violent crime." Then there's the actual use. Utilizing a scanning system powered by Amazon's speech-to-text tech, Suffolk County jailers utilized keyword searches to flag conversations for further examination. Some keywords were questionable, like the Spanish word "mara," which can refer to a gang or just a group of friends. But it wasn't just serious criminal activity being flagged.

Sheriff's deputies in Suffolk County also circulated a regular intelligence brief of prisoners the system flagged for illegally collecting unemployment benefits while in the jail.

Then there are the seriously concerning keyword scans deployed elsewhere by prisons and jails using similar tech.

Emails and contracts from eight states show the tool is used to scan a wide range of calls, for example conversations involving mention of the Spanish word for lawyer or accusations that detention facilities were covering up COVID-19 outbreaks.

If the conversations including terms for lawyer were flagged as potentially off-limits, then the tech is being used responsibly. If those were flagged for further review, that's a huge problem. So is the flagging of COVID-related conversations, which could indicate prisoners were being flagged for complaints and possibly retaliated against for informing others about unsafe conditions. While some use was related to containing outbreaks (as is detailed in the documents obtained by Reuters), there are also indications that information about prison conditions was gathered for less-than-idealistic reasons.

In Calhoun County, Alabama, prison authorities used Verus to identify phone calls in which prisoners vouched for the cleanliness of the facility, looking for potential ammunition to fight lawsuits, email records show.

Is this really a good use for tech purchased with the stated intent that it would be used to combat criminal activity behind bars? And those flagging calls for complaints about conditions seem intent on thwarting whistleblowers or heading off lawsuits by subjecting complainants to retaliatory activity.

A lot of what's happening here appears to be mission creep. While the systems have shown some effectiveness in obtaining information about criminal activity and identifying prisoners who engaged in self-harm or are suicide risks, a lot of what's being flagged appears to be the result of opportunism. The legal justification is already there: all calls are monitored. If so, why not use the systems to flag anything of interest to prison officials, even if it's far outside of the stated scope of the surveillance?

Why not, indeed. That's how the system used in Suffolk County scooped up 2.5 million phone calls in the space of one year but returned only 96 "actionable intelligence reports." Not every call is worth listening to, but now prison facilities have the luxury of listening to all of them and no reason not to.

Filed Under: attorney-client privilege, phone calls, prisons, recording phone calls, surveillance

If Trump Is So Worried About Protecting Attorney-Client Privilege, He Should End The NSA's Bulk Surveillance (And CPB Device Seizures)

from the Privilege-for-me-not-for-thee dept

Over the weekend Trump tweeted:

If you can't read that it says:

Attorney Client privilege is now a thing of the past. I have many (too many!) lawyers and they are probably wondering when their offices, and even homes, are going to be raided with everything, including their phones and computers, taken. All lawyers are deflated and concerned!

Attorney-client privilege is indeed a serious thing. It is inherently woven into the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel. That right to counsel is a right to effective counsel. Effective counsel depends on candor by the client. That candor in turn depends on clients being confident that their communications seeking counsel will be confidential. If, however, a client has to fear the government obtaining those communications then their ability to speak openly with their lawyer will be chilled. But without that openness, their lawyers will not be able to effectively advocate for them. Thus the Sixth Amendment requires that attorney-client communications – those communications made in the furtherance of seeking legal counsel – be privileged from government (or other third party) view.

The problem is, it doesn't take a raid of a home or office to undermine the privilege. Bulk surveillance invades the sphere of privacy these lawyer-client communications depend on, and, worse, it does so indiscriminately. Whether it involves shunting a copy of all of AT&T's internet traffic to the NSA, or warrantlessly obtaining everyone's Verizon Wireless phone call records, while, sure, it catches records of plenty of communications made to non-lawyers (which itself is plenty troubling), it also inherently catches revealing information about communications made to and from lawyers and their clients. Meanwhile the seizures and searches of communications devices such as cell phones and laptops raises similar Constitutional problems. Doing so gives the government access to all records of all communications stored on these devices, including those privileged ones that should have been expressly kept from it.

So Trump is right: attorney-client privilege in America is under attack, and ever since we started learning about these programs lawyers have definitely been worried about how they impose an intolerable burden on the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. But unlike in Trump's situation where there is serious reason to doubt whether there's any privilege to be maintained at all (after all, privilege only applies to communications made in the course of seeking legal counsel, not communications made for other purposes, including the furtherance of crime or fraud), and care being taken to preserve what privilege there may be, bulk surveillance sweeps up all communications, including all those for which there is no doubt as to their privileged status, and without any sort of care taken to protect these sensitive communications from the prying eyes of the state. Indeed, the whole point of bulk surveillance is so that the prying eyes of the state can get to see who was saying what to whom without any prior reason to target any of these communications in particular, because with bulk surveillance there is no targeting: it swoops up everything, privileged or not.

If Trump truly finds it troubling for the government to be able obtain privileged communications he could put an end to these programs. It would certainly help make any argument he raises about how his own privilege claims should be sacrosanct rings ring less hollow if his administration weren't currently being so destructive to everyone else's.

Filed Under: attorney-client privilege, donald trump, mass surveillance, michael cohen, surveillance

Hacked Data Obtained By The Intercept Highlights Wholesale Spying On Inmate, Attorney Privileged Communications

from the institutional-apathy dept

A few months ago the FCC voted to crack down on the ripping off of inmates and their families by prison telecom companies, which for decades now have charged upwards of $14 per minute for services that cost little to nothing to provide. At the time, prison telecom companies like Securus complained hysterically about the FCC's decision, CEO Richard Smith declaring the new price caps would have a "devastating effect" on its business, potentially ending its participation in "services and continuing inmate related programs."

According to a massive new trove of data obtained by the Intercept, one of the "services" Securus was apparently providing was of the wholesale spying variety. Hacker-obtained data examined by The Intercept includes 70 million records of phone calls (and recordings of the phone calls themselves), placed by prisoners in at least 37 different states over a two-and-a-half year period. Of particular note are the estimated 14,000 recordings of privileged conversations between inmates and their lawyers:

"This may be the most massive breach of the attorney-client privilege in modern U.S. history, and that’s certainly something to be concerned about,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “A lot of prisoner rights are limited because of their conviction and incarceration, but their protection by the attorney-client privilege is not."

Securus alone provides telecom services and "secure" storage of communications for 2,200 prisons around the United States, processing a million or so calls each day. Securus and other such companies serve a relatively captive and unregulated market, where prisons are paid upwards of $460 million annually in "concession fees" (read: kickbacks) to win exclusive telecom-related prison contracts. Part of Securus' pitch to prisons is that it will offer cutting edge secure storage for these communications, though the Intercept notes this latest hack wasn't the first.

Prisoners obviously don't expect the full historical right to privacy; indeed Securus makes sure to include a message warning inmates that "this call is from a correctional facility and may be monitored and recorded" at the beginning of each call. Waivers of rights and the monitoring and securing of phone communications was originally pushed as a way to prevent riots, witness tampering and generally secure the prison back in the 90s. But as the Intercept points out, that doesn't make the long-term storage of this data any less problematic, and securing the facility certainly shouldn't include recording secure communications between inmates and their lawyers. A behavior, it should be noted, Securus itself claimed it didn't do:

"A review of contracts and proposals completed by Securus in a handful of states reflects the company’s understanding of this right. In a 2011 bid to provide phone service to inmates in Missouri’s state prisons, Securus promised that each “call will be recorded and monitored, with the exception of privileged calls.” But the database provided to The Intercept shows that over 12,000 recordings of inmate-attorney communications, placed to attorneys in Missouri, were collected, stored, and ultimately hacked."

The Intercept's findings are particularly problematic for Securus, since the company is the target of a federal civil rights suit filed in Texas in 2014. That suit, by the Austin Lawyers Guild and a prisoners' advocacy group, alleges that Securus had been recording privileged conversations, and that intrusion into this communications (and the prosecutors' failure to disclose this information during discovery) undermines the legal ability to defend them. This despite Securus contracts explicitly stating that phone calls "to telephone numbers known to belong [to] attorneys are NOT recorded," and that "if any call to an attorney is inadvertently recorded, the recording is destroyed as soon as it is discovered." Or not.

The Intercept's latest findings not only stumble into yet another expansion of our wholesale surveillance state, but exemplify the kind of apathy about the prison industrial complex that allowed Securus to aggressively rip off inmates and families in the first place. "They're in prison so they deserve it" is a common refrain from the apathetic to the rights trampling of the guilty, the innocent, and the millions of Americans serving massive prison sentences for relatively innocuous marijuana offenses. On a positive note the Intercept's latest leak was courtesy of The Intercept's Tor-enabled SecureDrop platform, another sign we're (hopefully) moving past the Assange middleman era into one where the traditional media -- with a little help -- actually does its job.

Filed Under: attorney-client privilege, jails, phone calls, prisons, privacy, recordings
Companies: securus

Latest Abuse: Feds Reading Emails Between Prisoners And Their Lawyers

from the because-they-can dept

Another day, another story of abuse by federal prosecutors. The latest is that they're now regularly reading the emails between inmates and their lawyers. These are the kinds of things that most people believe should be part of confidential attorney-client privilege. And, for quite some time, prosecutors respected that. However, now they're claiming that since prisoners using the prison email system agree to a notice upfront saying their communications may be monitored, they gave up that right.

Inmates’ calls to or from lawyers, however, are generally exempt from such monitoring. But across the country, federal prosecutors have begun reading prisoners’ emails to lawyers — a practice wholly embraced in Brooklyn, where prosecutors have said they intend to read such emails in almost every case.

The issue has spurred court battles over whether inmates have a right to confidential email communications with their lawyers — a question on which federal judges have been divided.

The "divide" from judges seems pretty ridiculous. Some judges say it's okay in part because inmates have other ways to communicate privately with their lawyers, but everyone with a basis in reality notes that those "other ways" (mainly letters) take forever and really hamper the ability of an inmate to work with his or her lawyers. But, some courts just don't care.

The judge overseeing that case, Allyne R. Ross, ruled on Thursday that the government was allowed to review the emails. “The government’s policy does not ‘unreasonably interfere’ with Mr. DiFiore’s ability to consult his counsel,” she wrote.

In Dr. Ahmed’s case, the judge, Dora L. Irizarry, ruled against the government last month, barring it “from looking at any of the attorney-client emails, period.”

This certainly seems like one of those issues that's destined for the Supreme Court in the near future.

Filed Under: attorney-client privilege, doj, feds, inmates, prosecutors

9/11 Trial Grinds To A Halt As Evidence Surfaces That FBI Subverted Attorney-Client Privilege

from the hey,-it's-just-a-'privilege,'-amiright? dept

More evidence is being uncovered indicating that if the government wants access to privileged attorney-client communications, it will find a way to do so. This new incident, tied to the 9/11 trials, follows the news that the NSA gave Australian intelligence the go-ahead to intercept communications between an American lawyer and his Indonesian clients.

This previous incident resulted in the American Bar Association sending a letter to the NSA asking it to uphold the sanctity of attorney-clients communications. Gen. Alexander's response was basically "of course we respect that, but we grab so much stuff there's no way for us to guarantee we'll never intercept privileged communications." Not much in the way of reassurance there, and this following story shows there's even less reason to believe that investigative and national security agencies won't insert themselves into the attorney-client relationship.

Two weeks ago, a pair of F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced at the door of a member of the defense team for one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a contractor working with the defense team at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the man was bound by the same confidentiality rules as a lawyer. But the agents wanted to talk.

They asked questions, lawyers say, about the legal teams for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other accused terrorists who will eventually stand trial before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Before they left, the agents asked the contractor to sign an agreement promising not to tell anyone about the conversation.

With that signature, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyers say, the government turned a member of their team into an F.B.I. informant.

There's not much more available detail-wise, as the defense's motion informing the court of this subversion is -- like most of the documents related to this trial -- under seal. But everything leading up to this new revelation indicates the government views this trial to be a forum where the normal rules just don't apply.

To begin with, this was never meant to be much more than a show trial. The special tribunal system was set up by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, specifically for suspected terrorists. (Despite the stacked deck -- foreign terrorism suspects aren't afforded the same legal protections as US citizens -- the court has yet to secure a conviction in its 12+ years of existence.) This special system has resulted in several instances of access to attorney-client communications, some intentional and others (supposedly) more inadvertent.

Last year, the government acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside what looked like smoke detectors in the rooms where detainees met with their lawyers. Those microphones gave officials the ability to eavesdrop on confidential conversations, but the military said it never did so…

A botched computer update gave prosecutors and defense lawyers access to the other side’s confidential work. And the Pentagon acknowledged inadvertently searching and copying defense lawyers’ emails but said nobody read them.

And it's not just the defense that's bothered by these incidents.

Christopher Jenks, a Southern Methodist University law professor and a former military prosecutor, said he sympathized with the Guantánamo prosecutors, who appeared to have been just as surprised as defense lawyers by the appearance of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. in their cases.

But even more troubling is the fact that an agency supposedly uninvolved in the proceedings has gone so far as to subvert the judicial process altogether.

Last year, as a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed was speaking during another hearing, a red light began flashing. Then the videofeed from the courtroom abruptly cut out. The emergency censorship system had been activated. But why? And by whom? The defense lawyer had said nothing classified. And the court officer responsible for protecting state secrets had not triggered the system. Days later, the military judge, Col. James L. Pohl, announced that he had been told that an “original classification authority” — meaning the C.I.A. — was secretly monitoring the proceedings. Unknown to everyone else, the agency had its own button, which the judge swiftly and angrily disconnected.

After witnessing the amount of effort the CIA has made in order to thwart the release of the torture report, it's of no surprise that it tried to control the narrative here as well. It's also no surprise the agency feels it should defer to no one, not even a presidentially-directed tribunal.

The government does have a little more leeway, considering these aren't your normal, subject-to-due-process trials, but it's still problematic that despite the advantages of a quasi-tribunal set up by a presidential order in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, government investigative agencies still feel compelled to not only insert themselves into the process, but to subvert client-attorney privilege on top of it. All's fair in the War on Terror, it would appear, even when those suspects are safely locked up and going into their second decade of detention as the broken process labors on.

Filed Under: 9/11, attorney-client privilege, cia, fbi, guantanamo, nsa, show trial