Word: prisons
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There is no doubt that the murkiest corner of the shadow war on terrorism has been the CIA's kidnapping suspected terrorists and shipping them to secret prisons around the globe--where obeying the Geneva Conventions is more an exception than the rule--a practice known as rendition. Unfortunately, some of those snatched by CIA officers were innocent. German citizen Khaled el-Masri was one such victim. El-Masri was vacationing in Macedonia in December 2003 when authorities arrested him on wrongful suspicions that his passport was fake. A tragic case of mistaken identity then played out. El-Masri...
...Prison authorities used to have almost complete control over an inmate's ability to communicate with the outside world. By checking their mail and parceling out telephone access - at scheduled times on easily and legally tapped landlines - communication for inmates was difficult and often expensive (their families had to pay for the hefty collect calls, usually the only kind allowed in jail). Today, however, as cell phones proliferate (with an estimated 3.5 billion and counting), they are reaching into every corner of the planet - including jail cells. Authorities in India recently confiscated more than 600 cell phones in a prison...
...Most prison cell-phone incidents, however, raise serious security concerns. Texas death-row inmate Richard Tabler allegedly used a smuggled cell phone in recent weeks to make threatening calls to Texas state senator John Whitmire, chairman of a key criminal jurisprudence committee. The calls were among 2,800 made in just one month from cell phones used by Tabler and nine of his fellow death-row inmates. After Whitmire alerted state prison authorities to the calls, the high-security East Texas prison was locked down and searched. Authorities found Tabler's phone hidden in the ceiling above a shower. They...
Even before Tabler's notorious calls, Texas prison authorities were investigating 19 cases of death-row cell-phone use and 700 cases throughout the entire state system. Tabler's mother and sister have been arrested on felony charges for buying cell-phone minutes and equipment for him. But it is not just family members who help smuggle the phones. Prison authorities say guards have been paid $2,000 - more than a month's wages - to bring in contraband cell phones. Small cell phones and postage-stamp-size SIMM cards are easy to smuggle into prisons in body cavities or simply...
Some states, like Florida and New Jersey, have passed new tough laws making cell-phone-smuggling a felony. They are also using cell-phone-sniffing dogs to hunt down the contraband and assigning guards to do metal-detecting wand searches for hidden phones. But Gelinas said South Carolina's prison system is "short-funded" and cannot afford to divert manpower to searches. "It makes much more sense to use the cell-phone jamming technology that's available," Gelinas says. The problem for state and local prison administrators is that jamming cell-phone signals is illegal and available only to federal...