Prison phone company recorded private lawyer-inmate calls, hack reveals

After removing a few of the duplicate data, the actual number was narrowed down to 70 million calls, made to 1.3 million phone numbers, by more than 63,000 inmates in 37 U.S. states.

The Intercept does not provide any details on its source, apart from that they are a hacker who hacked access to the records (presumably as opposed to an internal whistleblower at Securus).

However, it is common practice to monitor prisoner phone calls for the objective of protecting individuals working in the prisons as well as those on the outside. In a statement this week, the company said it found "absolutely no evidence of attorney-client calls that were recorded without the knowledge and consent of those parties", contrary to media reports.

"This may be the most massive breach of the attorney-client privilege in modern USA history, and that's certainly something to be concerned about", said David Fathi, director of the ACLU's National Prison Project was quoted as saying. Today, company that handles prison phone calls claims the leak was inside job and not the result of an outside hacker.

If the records are genuine, they could have serious legal implications for Securus.

Reporter , one of the co-authors of the article appearing in The Intercept, told Street Roots at least one of the calls included in the data leak was to an OR attorney.

An anonymous hacker has unearthed at least 14,000 phone records, totaling approximately 70 million calls, between inmates and lawyers, according to Engadget.

Attorney-client privilege legally protects conversations or letters between a lawyer and client that the lawyer may not reveal in order to guarantee defendants their constitutional right to receive "effective assistance of counsel". "Instead, at this preliminary stage, evidence suggests that an individual or individuals with authorized access to a limited set of records may have used that access to inappropriately share those records", the company said.

The publication also points out that automated log systems like Securus's that flag numbers that should not be recorded are imperfect and sometimes record calls they shouldn't.

While there have been complaints about Securus in the past recording attorney-client calls, the company says these calls were all recorded with permission. But in states like Missouri and Texas, there have been undertakings by Securus not to record attorney-client or "privileged" calls, or to delete them as soon as they take place.

The breach highlights two major issues, the first being that Securus' systems aren't as well protected as they claim; the second is that the current system for preventing attorneys' calls from being recorded isn't watertight.

In 2008, an attorney in San Diego, California discovered that a confidential phone call he had with an inmate about trial strategy had been recorded and shared with local prosecutors. "If it was encrypted and someone with the authority to view or access it in the first place was able to make copies and or move this data off site, then the question should be why was the data not segregated off and stored with multi factor access or even digitally encoded for tracing purposes?"