42
votes
An anti-porn app put him in jail and his family under surveillance - A court used an app called Covenant Eyes to surveil the family of a man released on bond
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- Title
- An anti-porn app put him in jail and his family under surveillance
- Authors
- Dhruv Mehrotra, wired.com
- Published
- Jun 13 2023
- Word count
- 635 words
Covenant Eyes used to come up a lot in /r/duggarsnark - - it was the software on Josh's computer to prevent him from looking at pornography. He worked around it to download CSAM by installing a Linux partition on his computer.
But yeah, the idea of the government using this on a whole family's devices in order to track a single parolee is disturbing and violates their right to privacy.
It's much worse than that. From what I gathered in the article, he's not a parolee, he's not even been convicted of a crime yet. He was out on bond awaiting trial. Now he's in jail awaiting trial. So not only was this a violation of the right to privacy of his family, because the parameters of his release are such nonsense, it's effectively no different than if they had just denied him release pending trial from the beginning.
I won't weigh in on what circumstances someone with the charges against him should be released or not as that is a very complicated subject, but one should note that its generally reserved for the most serious offenses and someone that might either be considered a serious flight risk or potentially a danger to others.
Perhaps not for the suspect, but it seems like a direct fourth amendment search/seizure issue on the rest of the family.
I wish we had as many people defending the 4th amendment as we do the 1st and 2nd.
That’s why the government loves it. They’re not afraid of the second amendment but it keeps us occupied while they trample the others that actually matter.
Of all the outrageous things in this article, the last paragraph broke me. It says Hannah has to pay the monthly fee for this software out of her own pocket. This is perverse on the level of authoritarian governments executing political prisoners by firing squad and then invoicing the family for the bullets.
Why do I come to suspect someone in the decision-making chain here has a personal or financial stake in Covenant Eyes?
The justice system in some places is horribly expensive for people accused or convicted and their families. The income threshold for obtaining a public defender is much, much lower than the actual income it would take to afford a lawyer - in New Jersey, you'd have to make less than $17k a year to qualify for a public defender if you live alone. Most states are similar. That's not enough to pay rent and feed yourself, let alone shell out thousands for a lawyer.
But it doesn't end there. If you go to prison, you might have to pay rent and board for the privilege. In Mississippi, if you have fines and restitution to pay, you might be kept indefinitely while being farmed out to fast food franchises to work it off, being strip searched every night when you come back to prison from work. If you're not in Mississipi, you still might end up in prison for not being able to pay your court fines and fees, or have your driver's license revoked, or whatever other counter-productive to earning an income punishment the judge comes up with. If you're ordered to submit to electronic monitoring, like a GPS ankle monitor, you may be ordered to pay those fees.
It's disgustingly unfair and stacked against low income and middle class people who don't have significant savings to cover the up front costs of being accused of a crime.
As an exmormon, my family used Covenant Eyes on my computer to track if we had watched porn or not. I wasn't allowed to have a cell phone, computer, or access to the internet until I bought a used smartphone for myself when I turned 18; only 10 years ago.
We only had one portal to the internet, which was our family computer with Covenant Eyes installed. This made finding porn one hell of a challenge, but I did learn how to outsmart the filters: Dress-up Games. I would go onto old flash game websites and find the dress up games where you could undress cartoon drawings. Covenant Eyes wouldn't label the site as containing adult content.
I did finally get caught. At some point, my mother decided to go through the internet history herself. This was before I knew how to delete your browser history. Queue my mother sending me to our local bishop who told me I was going to turn gay if I looked at porn, and gave me a book called "The Miracle of Forgiveness". This book calls any sexual sin as next to murder. I was also sent to a twice a week "therapy" course for 3 years that was basically akin to gay conversion therapy for straight people. That's a whole other post...
Anyways, f**k Covenant Eyes. Along with mormonism, it taught my parents that trustworthiness, and discussions around sexual content can be ignored and shamed.
edit: I should also say, thank you to Covenant Eyes. It sparked my tinkering side of tech. I quickly got into internet piracy, Linux, android applications, networking, and cybersecurity. My current job can be stemmed from these early experiences with finding workarounds....maybe I should thank porn instead. :D
Just the name Covenant Eyes rang all sorts of alarm bells for me.
Yeah. The new prophet is all about making sure everyone is on the "Covenant Path". That's his new catch phrase.
Of course this is a horrifying and chilling story, and demonstrates very well what the US government thinks of its citizens, but I find the legality angle interesting. It reminds me of an experience I had in high school. My school (a boarding school—so they controlled what was effectively the only source of internet for all the students most of the time) implemented a web filter at some point (targeting porn, piracy, and proxies). After this happened, I complained—and I am sorry that I did not fight harder against it, but it was a somewhat stressful time for me and I did not have much energy left over for such things—and was told that some government funding was partly conditioned on the existence of such filters, and they had slipped under the radar thus far, but it was clearly not sustainable. (I do, at least, appreciate that they were forthright with me.)
Of course, this seemed somewhat suspicious, legally, so I looked it up, and found that the policy in question had been challenged legally, and that a lower court had found it unconstitutional; but a higher court had overturned that ruling. I did not at all like the higher court's stated justification for its ruling—and place about even odds on its having been done in poor faith—but I did think it was a fairly reasonable and justifiable judicial argument (it's not the place of the courts to create legislation, only interpret it!). (I don't remember any of the details here; if someone knows a name or has a link, I would appreciate it.)
I think this, alongside other things—the kerfuffle a few years ago about 'net neutrality'; the electoral college; the contention about whether private companies providing public forums—notably twitter and youtube—should be required to uphold free speech on those forums, and to what extent they are legally responsible for the actions taken by users on those forums; to name a few—demonstrates how the US government, however presciently designed, is structurally inadequate to deal with the sheer scale and globalisation of our modern society.