Thread by @georgejoseph94

NEW: Our @theappeal/@theintercept investigation has confirmed that prisons in NY, TX, FL, & elsewhere have quietly built up databases with **hundreds of thousands** of incarcerated people's “voice prints” powering voice recognition surveillance on calls:
theintercept.com/2019/01/30/pri…

2/ In states like NY, prison officials confirm their new voice recognition program can even generate voice prints for **outsiders** called by incarcerated people, then mine recorded call databases to identify who outsiders have spoken with inside prisons.

3/ Some prisons/jails have made voice extraction mandatory for phone use. Others are conducting “covert” voice recognition enrollment. In both cases, incarcerated interviewees said they had no real choice and weren’t told their voices were being captured.

4/ TX and NY state prison authorities say they keep incarcerated people's voice prints indefinitely, allowing them to be tracked on prison calls by name, even after release.

5/ Correctional interviewees cite the potential benefits of voice recognition, such as detecting violent plots and stopping unauthorized calls. Public officials, however, say they need to investigate this surveillance, rolled out without oversight or regulations.

6/ Activists fear these secretive biometric programs, once used by intelligence agencies like the NSA, can now be used by prison authorities to identify and retaliate against incarcerated people coordinating with outsiders for prison strikes.

7/ Civil liberties groups also are concerned that these large scale voice databases are being built without regulations limiting biometric retention and external sharing of data with police and prosecutors.

8/ From Amazon to Sing Sing Correctional Facility, voice recognition is spreading rapidly. But not everyone has an equal say in this development:

9/ Voice recognition surveillance was used over a decade ago by the NSA in military/ counterterrorism applications as @eyywa showed. Now it’s come home and quietly deployed on prisons populations and their networks in the US:
theintercept.com/2018/01/19/voi…