Yet, in the motion to revoke Hannah’s husband’s bond, the only evidence prosecutors presented was information from the Covenant Eyes report.Īccording to Kate Weisburd, an associate professor at George Washington University School of Law, challenging probation and parole violations is difficult, particularly when they’re based on electronic evidence. Moreover, the terms of her husband’s bond don’t prohibit Hannah from looking at pornography, and it would be impossible for probation officers to know who was using the device from Covenant Eyes reports alone. This limitation in Covenant Eyes means it’s possible Hannah’s husband did not violate the terms of his bond. The alert Covenant Eyes sent when it detected a network request to Pornhub explicitly stated that the software cannot determine if the user “intentionally viewed” the webpage because “some apps generate activity in the background without the member’s consent.” The company has public documentation about the shortcoming. This is a known issue with Covenant Eyes. Within minutes, Covenant Eyes alerted our designated accountability partner that a request to Pornhub was made from our test device, even though we never touched it. We then installed Covenant Eyes and restarted our phone. Using an iPhone, we visited Pornhub enough times that it was a frequently visited tab on Google Chrome. WIRED tested Hannah’s claims that Covenant Eyes flags background network activity from websites that aren’t intentionally viewed. Instead, she says, her phone had made a network request to the website’s servers as part of a background app refresh from a frequently visited tab on her Chrome browser. Court records WIRED reviewed cite a visit to the adult website as the reason for revoking his bond.īut Hannah claims that her husband didn’t touch her phone and that no one had visited Pornhub. According to Hannah, the officer said Covenant Eyes detected that her phone had visited Pornhub. Less than a week after Covenant Eyes was installed on the four phones in her household, Hannah got a call from her husband’s probation officer saying that her husband had violated the terms of his bond. “This kind of abuse of judicial power to restrict people’s autonomy and ability to access critical information on the criminal legal system is exactly why The Appeal exists.” “It’s incredibly concerning to hear readers say they can no longer access our website as a result of this app,” she says. Molly Greene, The Appeal’s strategy and legal director, calls the censorship alarming. 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. AdvertisementĬovenant Eyes doesn’t just block pornography. Another shows screenshots of Hannah’s mother-in-law’s bank statements and her Gmail inbox, although the sensitive details in both are unreadable. The report clearly shows the name of the person being contacted. For instance, one Covenant Eyes report shows a screenshot of Hannah’s mother-in-law’s device while a phone call was in progress. While the images in the Covenant Eyes reports that WIRED reviewed are partially blurred, it is sometimes possible to discern sensitive information from them. “It was like the family was being charged with a crime,” Hannah says. She says her 12-year-old son approached her a half-dozen times to ask things like, “Mom, will Pocket Mortys get dad in trouble?” Her daughter was afraid to text with her friends, worrying that if she used bad language, her father could end up in jail. Hannah began skipping her online therapy sessions, fearing that the probation officers would snoop on what she told her doctor. The constant surveillance had an immediate impact on the family, Hannah says. 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 app also monitors every network request a device makes, blocking allegedly pornographic content and alerting allies about requests the software deems suspicious. For example, one Covenant Eyes report sent to Hannah’s probation officer, which WIRED reviewed, flagged an online advertisement for a back brace that included a woman in a tank top as “potentially concerning.” Images the system marks as possibly “explicit” are flagged for further review. It then analyzes the screenshots locally before slightly blurring them and saving them on a server. It captures everything visible on a device’s screen, taking at least one screenshot per minute. The Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former National Security Agency mathematician who now works as a data scientist for the company.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |