recording phone calls – Techdirt (original) (raw)

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

Another Prison Phone Service Caught Recording Privileged Conversations And Passing Them On To Law Enforcement

from the criminals-on-both-sides-of-the-bars dept

A few years back, prison communications provider Securus was caught — via hacker-obtained data — recording privileged calls between inmates and their legal reps. Yes, ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED, as the sign says, but certain calls shouldn’t be. Securus did it en masse, hoovering up 14,000 privileged calls over an unspecified time period. The total could be much higher than that. The data obtained only covered part of Securus’ massive network, with 12,000 privileged calls alone in this data dump coming from a single state.

Now, another prison phone company has been caught recording privileged conversations and turning them over to law enforcement.

An Orange County Sheriff’s Department employee revealed this week during a court hearing that the department improperly recorded more than 1,000 privileged phone calls between county jail inmates and their attorneys over a three-year period.

An employee with Global Tel Link Corp., a contractor that oversees the jail phone system, wrote in a July 27 letter to Sheriff Sandra Hutchens — obtained by the Daily Pilot on Thursday — that an update in the company’s system in January 2015 caused “a technical error” that led to 1,079 such phone calls being recorded, in violation of state law.”

In violation of state law. It violates a lot of things, not just state law. But that’s OK, state law enforcement was there to make sure laws were enforced.

Senior Deputy District Atty. Cynthia Nichols, the prosecutor in Waring’s case, became aware of the issue during Boston’s testimony Monday in Orange County Superior Court.

Nichols asked him during the hearing whether the Sheriff’s Department has made any effort to contact the district attorney or defense attorneys whose phone numbers and client communications were compromised.

“Not to my knowledge,” [director of inmate services Greg] Boston responded.

The law was broken and no one on the law enforcement side did anything to fix it. That split-second decision made during an rapidly-evolving situation (or whatever) may come back to haunt Boston and his Sheriff’s department cohorts. In this mess of 1,000 calls hang 58 serious criminal cases, running the gamut from gang-related charges to the attempted murder prosecution of the offspring of a reality TV star.

The “technical error” was exposed during the trial of Joshua Waring, the son of a star of “Real Housewives of Orange County.” Inmate services director Greg Boston testified during this case, exposing Global Tel Link’s screwup and the apparent partaking of ill-gotten goods by local law enforcement.

The Orange Court Sheriff’s Department claims it instructed the service provider to fix the problem when it discovered it had access to privileged recordings. But that hardly explains how Global Tel Link managed to record 1,000 calls it never should have recorded before someone on either end actually noticed the issue. According to Waring’s attorney, the “technical error” went unaddressed for three years, suggesting the OCSD didn’t mind having access to privileged conversations, even when it knew the recordings were illegal under state law.

And the official statement from the OCSD covers only part of the problem. Telling the provider to stop intercepting privileged calls is one thing. Deciding to keep this information to itself, rather than pass it on to affected legal reps and the DA’s office, isn’t nearly so noble or proactive.

Filed Under: attorney client privilege, law enforcement, prisons, recording phone calls
Companies: global tel link

Behind The Veil Part 3: Comcast Rep Confirms That You Should Always Record Customer Service Calls

from the we're-listening dept

As you probably know by now, Comcast has been in the news quite a bit lately for all the wrong reasons. It started with a recorded call of one Comcast customer attempting to cancel his service before being passed over to a “customer retention” representative who had watched entirely too much Boiler Room. Comcast made a great deal of noise about how this wasn’t how they told their reps to conduct their business, which, thanks to the Verge’s call for input from past and current Comcast employees, was shown pretty conclusively to a complete lie. It’s been a pretty, nice, little lesson in why breeding the kind of monopoly that Comcast tends to hold in many areas of this country is a really crappy idea. The other lesson that this should be teaching all of us is the importance of recording customer service calls with Comcast*.

And that appears to apply even for customers of Comcast that aren’t trying to flee their brand of customer service. Tim Davis uploaded a (NSFW due to language) recording to YouTube of a couple of conversations he had with Comcast’s customer service.

If you can’t listen to the audio, or want a quick breakdown: Tim had moved recently and chose to relocate his Comcast service because, according to the video, he didn’t have a choice due to a lack of competitive providers. I’ve gone through this myself several times in Chicago; it sucks. In any case, he did the internet portion of the install himself, as I too have done several times. All went well until a few weeks later when he was experiencing intermittent outages. An initial call with Comcast confirmed the problem was with the wiring outside the home, not the internal setup. Tim recorded that conversation, including when a Comcast rep confirmed that there is no charge to have a technician do work on outside lines to provide adequate service. Makes sense. A tech comes out, fixes the outside line issue, tests the network inside the home to assure connectivity is restored, and leaves. Then this happens.

All is fine until a week or two later when Davis receives a bill that includes 99.99for“FailedSelfInstall,”another99.99 for “Failed Self Install,” another 99.99for“FailedSelfInstall,”another32 for “Failed Video [Self Install Kit],” and 49.95for“WirelessNetworkSETUp.”That’s49.95 for “Wireless Network SET Up.” That’s 49.95for“WirelessNetworkSETUp.”That’s181.94 in total. But, insists Davis, the problem wasn’t that he failed to do the self-install correctly or that there was a failed self-install kit, since the problem involved cables entering his property that he never touched. Similarly, the tech never set up or did anything with Davis’s WiFi system, so the set-up charge is bogus.

When Tim calls up to dispute the charges, he’s told several things. First, the rep applies a “discount” that wipes out about fifty dollars. Then she insists she cannot apply any credits because all of the tech’s service charges are valid, despite Tim informing her of both the recording of the call with the other rep that said there would be no charge and the fact that the tech would have had to have the apartment landlord’s approval to access what the tech claimed he’d worked on. Instead of applying a credit, she suggests she upgrade his internet for a year for free instead, which would be of a 60orsovalue.60 or so value. 60orsovalue.121 or $60 in temporary service upgrades…guess which Tim wanted? He insisted the bogus charges to be credited back to him. The rep then claims she’d get back to him. When she did, she confirmed that everyone on the planet should be recording their calls to Comcast’s customer service.

She eventually calls back later than planned, and after escalating his call one final time she tells him that the full $82 will actually be credited back to his account. When Davis asks why she couldn’t simply do that during the earlier call, her explanation is enough to make you pound your head through a wall in frustration.

“We try to negotiate, and again, that is a valid charge,” she answers. “But since I advised my manager that there is a recording and you were misinformed, then she’s the one who can approve that $82.”

Seemingly flabbergasted, Davis asks to confirm, “You’re telling me that if I didn’t have a recording of that call, you wouldn’t have been able to do it?”

“Yes, that is correct,” answers the rep, confirming that the only way to get Comcast to erase a bogus charge from your account is to have recorded evidence that you were promised in advance that the call would be free.

Everyone got that? Customer service reps dealing with disputed charges will try to “negotiate” with you and you only have a chance at legitimate recourse if you record all your calls with them. Keep digging, Comcast. I don’t think the grave is big enough yet.

* Oh, but if you’re recording your call, you may want to pay attention to the local laws about such things.

Filed Under: customer service, recording phone calls
Companies: comcast