Hacker News Reader

Comment by Asbostos | Hacker News Reader

> The company’s contract specifically provides that calls “to telephone numbers known to belong [to] attorneys are NOT recorded” and that “if any call to an attorney is inadvertently recorded, the recording is destroyed as soon as it is discovered.”

This sounds like they can cover their ass easily by claiming not to know those numbers were attorneys.

View on HN

that does indeed seem like the broadest CYA clause their lawyers could come up with, but perhaps it's not broad enough, because consider how the The Intercept was able to determine which of the calls were between prisoner and attorney: The Intercept just checked (for a sample of the 77 MM records) for membership of the phone number called, in a directory of lawyers and law firms (obviously under-inclusive because this directory usually lists office lines not individual lawyer's cell phones, as the article states). In other words, those phone numbers were indeed "known" to belong to attorneys--in fact, publicly known.

[IANAL] Given that that's there for legal compliance, they're screwed either way:

If they knew, and didn't do it, they're criminally negligent, and have willfully endangered the lives of numerous prisoners.

If they didn't know, then they're incompetent, and have endangered the lives of numerous prisoners through inaction, which could still be considered criminal negligence.

Unless at attorneys can show that they registered their phone number with Securus and that recording wasn't destroyed...

I suppose that comes down to whether there is a contractual obligation on the part of Securus to scrub recording archives for attorney numbers, or whether they are merely obligated to delete recordings upon allegation that they are improperly archived, or something else. That's not spelled out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com