#securus technologies

Cops have a secret, unaccountable system for tracking you by your cellphone, and they abuse it like crazy.

In case you haven’t been keeping score, so far we’ve had Facebook, Stingray, Cambridge Analytica, and Black Cube violate our privacy rights to influence local and global politics. Now add Securus to the growing list of unregulated, unaccountable, unelected, privately owned, for profit corporations abusing their power. Corporations that are buying your personal data from greedy, unscrupulous phone carriers.

Securus Technologies markets a product to law enforcement that taps into realtime cell-tower data from mobile carriers to produce fine-grained location tracking of anyone carrying a phone; it is nominally marketed to find parolees and wandering Alzheimer’s patients, but because it has no checks or balances, cops can query it willy-nilly to find anyone’s location. (source)

Thousands of jails and prisons across the United States use Securus Technologies to provide and monitor calls to inmates. But Cory Hutchinson, the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used a lesser-known Securus service to track people’s cellphones, including those of other officers, without court orders, according to charges filed against him in state and federal court.

The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show. (source)

Deregulating the Telecommunications industry was an incredibly bad idea.

”1984” isn’t coming - it’s already here. Our privacy rights are under attack.