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Prisons Across the US Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People's Voice Prints (theintercept.com)
In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. From a report: Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people's voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York's, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.
Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona's Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology
Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people's phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public.
Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona's Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology
Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people's phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public.
I mean, you read the last part of TFS, but what about the rest? Did you miss this part?
"Some programs, like New York's, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly."
Don't want mass biometric surveillance in prison? Don't do something that would put you in prison, dumb ass. If I had my way, you wouldn't get out again.
That would be all well and good if the laws and justice system in the US were a little more sane. The population of the US is currently 326 million (2017). The population of the world is 7.5 billion(2017). The 2016 US prison population was 2.3 million including federal, state, local, immigration, military, juvenile. and civil detention facilities. The 2016 prison population for the entire world was 10.35 million. The US has 4.3% of the worlds population but houses 22% of the prisoners in the world. There are also 3.8 million people on probation and 820K on parole. That works out to 6.92 million people who are actively registered in the criminal justice system. That's a little over 2% of the US population.
With the number of laws on the books in the US, damn near the entire population could be arrested on any given day for an infraction. It just matters if you get caught, of if a police officer feels like finding something to charge you for. There are many states that have laws about which positions are legal to have sex with your spouse, in the privacy of your own home. In one of the Carolinas it's illegal to sing off key. There's a town in Arizona that it's illegal to wear suspenders, and another that it's illegal for a woman to wear pants.
There are 646K people incarcerated in local jails. Of those, 70% haven't been convicted yet as the justice system is backed up. There are almost 5500 people who are in civil detention centers in over a dozen states. These are people who were convicted of sexual crimes and have already served their entire sentence. But they are still confined, well, because.