“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.”
Jayzuz. If the app’s EULA specifucally 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.
Isn’t cops another word police in the US? In the article they write it was the probation office who mandated the app and then a court prosecuted him because of 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Huh, I thought this was America, not North Korea.
I can maybe understand monitoring the accused, especially when accused of possessing cp, with this.
The article doesnt go a whole lot into the case, but it sounds like it was flimsy, but then again i like to think cases like that are hopefully well researched to make sure the person is guilty, but often in the legal system, with any accusation, the goal is not to find truth but to find jail time on sometrhing the prosecution has made its mind up about, because a loss i guess could be seen as embarrassing.
But if this was going to be deployed the limit should be the accused phone, not family members, and from what i understood they have to pay for it?
Several legal experts expressed concern about the monitoring conditions imposed by the judge in Hannah’s husband’s case. But Phyllis Emerick, the chief deputy public defender in Monroe County, argues that because Hannah’s husband and his family consented to the surveillance, they gave up their rights to privacy. “He agreed that he would not access electronic devices in his household in exchange for release,” she says. “It was the family’s choice to continue living with him.”
what the fuck kind of logic is this, lets say the guy is a piece of shit, if he is, still its not easy to just move, especially with the stress of leaving someone youve known for years, or forever. Not to mention the financial burden.
This is some CCP shit. If we allow this to permeate across the US, we will have a far worse problem than the NSA constantly monitoring us which most people didnt care about, device level spyware is next level, and maybe people wont care then either.
This feels like that shit in the game watch dogs, while i imagine not as fantastical as the game, what if control of these apps is gotten not just b the governemnt, already doing shady shit, but hackers as well. the precedent set here can be very alarming.
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.
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.
What the heck
So ToS is an oversight when money is involved. And the wife is paying for the sub aswell wtf
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.
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.
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.
And here I worry about eliminating ads, trackers and Google Play services on my phone. There’s no way I would agree to that shit.
They get you to agree because the alternative is sitting in jail for a year awaiting trial.
