“This is the most extreme type of monitoring that I’ve seen,” says Pilar Weiss, founder of the National Bail Fund Network, a network of over 90 community bail and bond funds across the United States. “It’s part of a disturbing trend where deep surveillance and social control applications are used pretrial with little oversight.”
Covenant Eyes doesn’t just block pornography. Though the app is designed to block traffic to adult sites, Hannah shared reports that show she was unable to access The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on injustice in the criminal-legal system
LMAO.
the irony is so depressing.
Prosecutors and judges really need a reminder of the concept of innocent until proven guilty.
The day her husband was released on bond, Hannah sat down with their kids and tried to explain how all of their devices were going to be monitored: The probation department would see anything they looked at on their phones and assume it was their father using the device. The constant surveillance had an immediate impact on the family, Hannah says.
And:
In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”
Any reasonable person would describe that as not just a punishment, but a pretty severe one.
And one that affects children. Having a teenager know that a person she never met, who she has no way to contact, is looking at her activity every minute isn’t just punishment in fact. It’s victimization.
Thus, I think we can conclude from this that the Monroe County, Indiana prosecutors office is victimizing children. Full stop. Time to make some arrests.
The very idea that they can forcibly monitor the entire families devices in order for him to be granted bail is insane. Personally, I think the idea of not being allowed any electronic device shouldn’t be allowed anymore, but using that as a pretext to affect the entire family is absurd.
Absolutely.
In 1950, if you were told as a pretrial release condition, you weren’t allowed to use paper because your alleged crime involved a book, no one would have thought that reasonable. Today, devices are the equivalent of paper.
I agree that this is cruel and unusual punishment, however, I strongly dislike the paper == computer metaphor. The two are hardly comparable.
Compared to paper, it is easy to comit serious crimes from the comfort of your own home with a computer. Computers facilitate Lightspeed communication, and can be used for instantaneous financial transaction. They can be used to collect information anonymously, and deseminate information publically.
Very very different risk levels.
That said, subjecting an entire family to 24/7 electronic surveillance (and making them pay for it!?!) Is fucked up. I think we need a different paradigm for dealing with “e-criminals” like perhaps the state provides state-administered devices to those charges with electronic crimes? Idrk, but this ain’t it cheif.
Computers are remarkably efficient but at the dawn of the Gutenberg press, you could have made similar observations. For the first time with paper, it was possible to commit crimes in the privacy of your own home merely by writing things down and sending them to a publisher.
Except for the “instantaneous” and “Lightspeed” observations, which I think are the real key here. Also, commiting a book crime would require conscious cooperation and coordination with another person/people (the publisher), whereas internet crimes can be done completely solo.
I think a more sensible comparison could be made between computers and telephones or telegraphs
It’s more efficient, certainly. But telling someone pretrial in 2023 they can’t use a computer isn’t realistic.
In large part I agree, however, it leaves a problem unsolved.
In the case of cp possession/production, how do you effectively sanitize a person’s internet traffic?
I think providing devices that only connect to state DNS servers, and only serve approved content could be one way. But it also raises privacy concerns.
not just a punishment, but a pretty severe one
It’s also clear interference in this person’s ability to organize a defense, which is yet another way it could be unconstitutional.
Time to sue
Doesn’t this also violate right to privacy of everyone else in the home? I smell a civil rights issue.
Oh totally. And they’re not even alleged to have done anything wrong.
The prosecutor will say “well they could have lived in a Four Seasons instead of with their father.” Prosecutors are seldom reasonable people.
I believe the judge actually said something to the effect of “they chose to live with him still, and consented to the app”
Wasn’t there some other big police wrongdoing case in Monroe County Indiana recently? I can’t think of another reason I’d recognize a county in a state i don’t live in.
we’re gonna monitor all of your family’s devices, including people who are not charged with or suspected of a crime. if any of them do anything we don’t like, we’ll assume it’s you and charge you
we acknowledge that requests to forbidden sites can be made without the user’s knowledge or consent, but we’re still going to throw you in jail over it
Imagine you’re legally banned from driving a car. Let’s even make the hypothetical situation a little bit more cut and dry than the real one from the article and assume you’ve actually been convicted of something and aren’t just charged. This is the equivalent of saying “we’re going to put monitoring devices in every car in your driveway, if any of them start up we’ll get an alert. If we get an alert, we’ll assume you’re driving and come arrest you for violating the ban. We also get an alert if the alarm goes off and even if it’s because an acorn fell on your car we’re going to come and arrest you.”
This is truly an amazing violation of the rights of several people. Welcome to the panopticon, you’re never sure you’re not being surveilled so you have to always act like someone could be watching.
Huh, I thought this was America, not North Korea.
Jayzuz. If the app’s EULA specifically states it’s NOT to be used as a judicial tool, why in the f*ck are cops using it anyway???
Murica is so far down the Big Brother rabbit hole rn I fear for its survival.
The app is clearly done by religious nutjobs that get off on societal voyeurism, they don’t mind the cops, they are just covering their legal asses.
True … but again if the EULA clearly states the app will not hold up in court, why use it? At the very least it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and at worst it’s a blatant abuse of constitutional rights.
It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up in court. Most of the time it is enough to scare someone into taking plea deals.
And this is how innocent people spend 20 yrs in prison or end up on death row.
Murica and her justice system are FUBAR.
Laws and rules only apply to people, not cops.
I wish we could leave cynical takes like this back on Reddit. They don’t add anything of value to the conversation.
It does add to the conversation. Cops ruin lives, or end them illegally and only get let go from their current position and offered a new one somewhere else. Cops do not have to follow the laws, it’s not cynicism. Sometimes the truth just sucks. You have the same chance of being killed by the police as you do from any other stranger.
ACAB
Isn’t cops another word police in the US? In the article they write it es the probation office who mandated the app and then a court prosecuted him because if it.
I’m not a lawyer in the slightest, but wouldn’t stuff like that be grounds for a mistrial?
not a mistrial, this isn’t happening during trial. It might be interesting if they do arrest him for violating the pre-trial terms to see what sort of civil liability the courts may have if it turns out they were wrong, but even then these are often drawn up as ‘consent decrees’ which are essentially contracts you enter into with the court where a lot of things are possible that wouldn’t be normally.
even if the guy did and would be found guilty of child porn (for which he would deserve to rot in hell)
- he hasn’t been convicted and is therefore innocent at this time. subjecting someone who is innocent to this is insane, regardless of allegations
- the phrase “he chose to agree to be monitored and they chose to continue living with him” was uttered. what the fuck
- so like assume i’m adversarial to him. i send him an email which entices him to click a link like "hey neighbor, we went to the campsite and took picture (link)[pornhub.com]. he clicks the link and goes to jail?! actualy scratch that, he’s not allowed to touch electronic (again, insane but less so) his wife clicks it and he goes to jail?
- even if his wife went to pornhub deliberately, so what? is she not allowed to look at porn? if so, why? if she is and they’re just assuming he did it because reasons, is he not allowed to look at porn(beyond the using a computer at all thing)? would a porn mag be okay, and if so why or why not?
in this guy’s shoes i would be this close to encasing a bulldozer in concrete and going for a ride.
Based on the scenario laid out here, anyone in the world could instantly send him to jail by texting him a phub URL from a burner phone.
Nearly all texting clients would automatically pull the thumbnail and other metadata instantly.
He wouldn’t even need to unlock the phone. Go straight to jail, do not collect $200.
he chose to agree to be monitored and they chose to continue living with him” was uttered
That got me too.
“The alternative is that they could have rented a separate house while the breadwinner of the family was in jail. They agreed to it!”
Utterly absurd. I also think, especially for the 14 year old, that level of surveillance is itself a form of abuse.
Abuse? The ACLU needs to represent the family members and sue for 1st amendment violations
I have to say this is quite a worrying abuse. Both of software, and of privacy.
It’s being deployed for something it’s not meant for, and being used to remove liberties for it. Of course, much of this will be lost to media circles as in CSA cases, the presumption is guilt in the public’s mind.
Whatever the truth of the original conviction, the use of this software as a condition of bail should be banned, and abhorrent to anyone who values justice.
That is not to say the software doesn’t have it’s uses - especially in cases of porn addiction. However, the software is nowhere near good enough to be used in legal cases. It says so itself. It errs, intentionally, on gathering more data, on being more conservative, simply because it’s not good enough to make the judgement on its own.
That’s before we look at the unintentional consequences of impinging on the freedom of an innocent person (‘Hannah’), and the way in which the software is not ‘intelligent’ enough to make judgements on whether or not it should take a photo of emails. It also led to fear of accessing help (and an inability to access help).
Use of this software in this way is an abuse.
Not to mention the fact that any reasonable person would say that its use constitutes a punishment in and of itself.
We need a standard for pretrial release where if any measure could, if taken in isolation, be considered punitive, prosecutors are not allowed to ask for it.
Holy fucking shit
The legal system is so detached from reality when it comes to technology that it leads to this kind of horseshit where someone, before any court proceedings proving guilt are even started, is subject to extreme and unjust punishment.
Privacy on the internet is a lifeline at this point and they might as well be cutting off his water or electricity, which would be only slightly more egregious. But the people who create legislation and operate the judicial system are comprised largely of crusty old boomers who need a secretary just to send an email or open a fucking PDF. They are information troglodytes who are simply incompatible with the modern world.
I saw this application once in the past doing tech support for customers. It used a proxy or forced dns servers to allow you on to the internet it seemed “safe”. The user was trying to access websites we used for work. That crazy software takes screenshots of your desktop every few minutes. We worked in the healthcare industry… I forwarded it to our security dept and had to file a HIPAA report…
Terrible software. The persons family didn’t trust their own adult kid… I figured it was some form of religious thing.
It is a religious thing. I grew up fundamentalist Baptist and then softened up into the Evangelical world before leaving Christianity behind, and this was very common for both parents to use to get reports and see if their children were looking at porn and for men who had gotten caught or admitted to struggling with porn or cheating to have another man as an “accountability partner” and give access to his internet history through this program.
The software came up during the Josh Duggar trial because his wife had put it on his computer before either his cheating or his other inclinations became public knowledge.
You would have to be completely out of your mind to voluntarily add this app to your device. And I’m sitting here at work talking about it and my religious co worker just informed me that he has a group of friends that use this app. WTF?!
Far too many Christians have fallen under the idea that everything labelled as “Christian” is, in fact, based on Jesus’ teachings … which is clearly not the case. This is what happens when faith and fact are believed to be the same thing.
This just feels like the wrong generation to be in. The fact that this could have ever been passed by any judge is genuinely frightening to me.
Hard to believe they unlocked and gave their phone to these weirdos. If you truly have a reason to see this data you can send a court order their isp.
It was a condition of his release, so their choice was either leave him in jail or turn over their phones. The US justice system only exists to fuck people, not to provide justice or follow the laws.
To my knowledge, a lot of these tracking and accountability applications end up in hot water because of their usage from bad actors.
I know there was an app on Android called Cerberus that was supposed to help you track your phone if it was lost/stolen, and it had the ability to open the covertly take videos/screenshots, so you could provide it as evidence to authorities.
Eventually, Google Play Store pulled the application after it became a fairly popular app for people to stalk their significant others without them knowing. I know for certain that iPhones already limit a lot of features from these types of apps. Just look at the limitations that CE admits to having when installed on iOS, including the inability to grab text messages, and only working through Safari.
The major players in tech, imo, have done a good job in preventing people in accidentally installing these applications that could invade their privacy (and instead, allow their own applications to steal your data…) It’s another discussion to see how much personal data we allow big tech to access, but I can say that they’ve done a solid job preventing these third party tracking applications to stay on their devices. The only way they can be installed is if you agree to it being installed on your devices, or being coerced into it.
The only solution I can think that would work long-term is if people get educated on the benefits and sanctity of their right to privacy, and don’t give these tracking companies any business, leading to their eventual collapse. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, but until that happens, more and more of these stories will pop up.
She should sue the state of Indiana. I’m sure nonprofits like the eff, ACLU and freedom of the press foundation would be willing to help
