Prosecutors in Indiana misinterpret digital surveillance data and use that 'evidence' to put an innocent citizen in jail.
Prosecutors in Indiana misinterpret digital surveillance data and use that 'evidence' to put an innocent citizen in jail.
A court used an app called Covenant Eyes to surveil the family of a man released on bond. Now he’s back in jail, and tech misuse may be to blame.
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Wait, what?
Some guy was accused of a serious crime and sent to jail pending a trial.
As a condition for being released from jail before the trial, he and his family had to install monitoring software on their internet-capable devices, and the accused was banned from using the internet. The developer of that software explicitly says its not suitable for criminal justice work.
An investigative journalist for Wired tested the software and found that it was picking up internet traffic from background processes on their phone, which made it look like the journalist had recently visited a website that in fact he had only visited before installing the monitoring software but not after.
This isn't the only case where data collected by the unsuitable-for-purpose monitoring software has landed people in jail, despite the fact that the data it provides does not indicate whether the logged internet use happened before or after a court order is issued to not use the internet.