14 DAY TRIAL // An anonymous hacker has breached the servers of Securus Technologies, a communications provider that logs phone calls made from US prison phones. The hacker has offered some of the stolen data to The Intercept, a website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer-winning journalist that published Edward Snowden's classified documents.
According to data and details provided by the hacker, Securus had improperly stored 144 million phone calls on its server. After removing some 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 US states.
The whole data amounted to 37 GB, consisted of calls made from December 2011 to the spring of 2014, and the hacker also claims that accessing it wasn't all that difficult.
Out of all these calls, over 14,000 seemed to be private calls made between prisoners and their attorney. The US guarantees client-attorney privilege by law, which Securus broke by recording the conversation.
The data breach has huge legal ramifications
Logging prison phone calls is not prohibited in the US since inmates have a series of public and private rights revoked when they are convicted.
This recent case is going to have many legal ramifications as there are no procedures in place to let prison administrations know when an inmate is making a private call or when calling the attorney. While the client-attorney law violation is clear, Securus may have a loophole that it could exploit to escape without a fine.
If privacy groups sue, and they will surely do, the case can be a cornerstone in US law, and help launch a restructuring of the entire prison phone call logging system.
The Intercept has not yet made available any of the data received from the anonymous hacker.
In the past, Securus has claimed it was logging one million phones calls per day, from over 1,700 jails, holding a total of 850,000 inmates.