This new article published August 1 in Truthout and The Appeal was co-authored by Jeremy Busby with Isabella Lucia Maitino, a second-year law student at CUNY who worked with JoinJeremy for her Summer 2026 internship.
Those with connections to the “2 million people held in the nation’s jails, prisons, and detention centers,” including us at JoinJeremy, are largely dependent on a duopoly of telecom corporations, Securus and ViaPath, to receive phone calls and exchange e-messages with incarcerated individuals. Writes Busby with Maitino:
Under the guise of security, anyone who utilizes their services is given advance warning that their phone calls could be recorded. What happens to those recordings outside their stated security purposes is largely unknown. Calls between incarcerated individuals and their legal representation are supposedly exempt from this policy. As an incarcerated journalist, all my reporting is surveilled in some way or another.
Just as “foreign intelligence information” is defined broadly under FISA Section 702, “security” is loosely interpreted by Securus and ViaPath. Actions by both telecom corporations reveal “security” to mean anything that advances their profit margins or the U.S.’s expanding police state.
Back in 2018, a New York Times investigation revealed that Securus exploited a location-based services program run by cellphone providers Sprint and T-Mobile. It abused the program to illicitly access the customer location information (CLI) of people communicating with incarcerated individuals, without their knowledge or consent.
These acts were illegal. First, Sprint and T-Mobile violated the Communications Act, which requires telecommunications carriers to protect the confidentiality of customers’ information, including CLI. Next, Securus enabled the government to systemically violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Most disturbing were the “security” justifications Securus used to collect customer data: expanding law enforcement capabilities, including for non-law enforcement purposes.
Congress is currently debating the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), “the controversial program that allows the U.S. government to surveil foreigners and the individuals that correspond with them.”
From prison telecom corporations to Section 702, mass surveillance under the vague guise of “security” is something that every person should be concerned with:
Day-to-day communications from law-abiding U.S. citizens get caught up in this web of surveillance without their knowledge or consent, and without a warrant. This information is stored in government databases for years, if not indefinitely. Officials at the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other agencies can review this information for a wide variety of reasons, including criminal prosecution and immigration enforcement.
At a time when the Trump administration seeks to expand the definition of terrorism to encompass a wide range of dissenting views, Americans’ fears of abuse of government surveillance of their communications are more justified than ever; 15 activists in Minneapolis were recently indicted based largely on Signal chats, for example.
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Image: Jason Farrar | Flickr
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