An anonymous hacker has unearthed at least 14,000 phone records, totaling approximately 70 million calls, between inmates and lawyers, according to Engadget. These phone calls show massive legal violations and could give prosecutors details of cases to which they should not have access.
"This may be the most massive breach of the attorney-client privilege in modern U.S. history, and that's certainly something to be concerned about," said David Fathi, director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. "A lot of prisoner rights are limited because of their conviction and incarceration, but their protection by the attorney-client privilege is not."
Securus Technologies, a jail telephone service provider, was the target of the hack and made news last month when they were accused of price gouging with their exorbitant prices for prison phone calls, according to Gawker. Their systems are meant to be secure enough that certain flagged numbers are exempt from being recorded and stored, according to The Intercept.
Although no proof has yet to surface that any of these calls were available for anyone outside of Securus to access, the fact that they exist has proved worrying for many due to the fact that attorney-inmate calls are supposed to be private and privileged. Securus claims that it "promotes its ability to securely store those recordings, making them accessible only to authorized users within the criminal justice system," which contradicts the ease with which the hacker accessed them.
