Fearing the spread of coronavirus, jails and prisons remain on lockdown. Visitors are unable to see their loved ones serving time, forcing friends and families to use prohibitively expensive video visitation services that often don’t work. Now the security and privacy of these systems are under scrutiny after one St Louis-based prison video visitation provider had a security lapse that exposed thousands of phone calls between inmates and their families but also calls with their attorneys that were supposed to be protected by the attorney-client privilege.
Databases exposed to the internet without a password, allowing anyone to read, browse, and search the call logs and transcriptions of calls between inmates and their friends and family members. The transcriptions also showed the phone number of the caller, which inmate, and the duration of the call. The calls between inmates and their attorneys, however, are not supposed to be monitored because of attorney-client privilege, a rule that protects the communications between an attorney and their client from being used in court. Despite this, there are known cases of U.S. prosecutors using recorded calls between an attorney and their incarcerated clients. Last year, prosecutors in Louisville, Ky., allegedly listened to dozens of calls between a murder suspect and his attorneys. And, earlier this year defense attorneys in Maine said they were routinely recorded by several county jails, and their calls protected under attorney-client privilege were turned over to prosecutors in at least four cases. Even prior to the pandemic, some prisons ended in-person visitation in favor of video calls. Video visitation technology is now a billion-dollar industry, with companies like Securus making millions each year by charging callers often exorbitant fees to call their incarcerated loved ones.
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