For years, many of Brooklyn Defender Services' incarcerated clients suspected that phone calls with their lawyers were being recorded. While such communications are ostensibly protected from surveillance under the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution and the Federal Wiretap Act, there had been little trust that prison telecommunications vendor Securus Technologies was properly distinguishing between personal calls—which incarcerated people are told are monitored—and private calls with attorneys. 

"There was a general sense of unease," Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, director of the Science & Surveillance Project at Brooklyn Defender Services, told Motherboard. Then, around 2019, defense attorneys learned that prosecutors handed over attorney-client phone calls during the discovery process in several cases. But they were assured the disclosures were isolated exceptions.

After several more attorney-client calls surfaced in discovery, Brooklyn Defender Services' Civil Rights Counsel at the time, Brooke Menschel, confronted the Department of Corrections. "They repeatedly assured us that they had fixed all problems. We then demanded an audit," said Daniel Vasquez. Internal audits conducted by the company at the DOC's request revealed more than 1,500 protected jailhouse phone calls had been recorded, affecting at least 353 defendants' cases, according to the New York Daily News. In a statement to the Daily News, Securus claimed the issue was not widespread and that wrongfully recorded calls were prefaced with an automated message warning that the call was being recorded. Several defense attorneys said they weren't aware the calls were recorded, however.