Technology

On a Wednesday morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”
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Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.

Prosecutors in Monroe County this spring charged Hannah’s husband with possession of child sexual abuse material—a serious crime that she says he did not commit and to which he pleaded not guilty. Given the nature of the charges, the court ordered that he not have access to any electronic devices as a condition of his pretrial release from jail. To ensure he complied with those terms, the probation department installed Covenant Eyes on Hannah’s phone, as well as those of her two children and her mother-in-law.

In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar market of “accountability” apps sold to churches and parents as a tool to police online activity. For a monthly fee, the app monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an “ally” or “accountability partner,” who can review the user’s online activities.

For Hannah’s family, their Covenant Eyes “allies” are two probation officers in Monroe County’s Pretrial Services Program charged with scrutinizing their web activity and ensuring that Hannah’s husband does not violate the terms of his bond while using one of his family members’ devices.

Covenant Eyes doesn’t permit its software to be used in a “premeditated legal setting,” such as monitoring people on probation, according to its terms of service. But public spending documents, court records, and interviews show that courts in at least five US states have used Covenant Eyes to surveil the devices of people who are awaiting trial or released on parole.

Neither Covenant Eyes nor multiple officials in Monroe County responded to repeated requests for comment and detailed questions about the app’s monitoring.

While the use of Covenant Eyes in a criminal-legal setting likely only represents a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people under court-ordered electronic surveillance, the stakes are still high for those required to use it. The app’s accuracy could determine whether a loved one lives at home or behind bars. Legal experts say that its use raises serious constitutional and due process concerns.

“This is the most extreme type of monitoring that I’ve seen,” says Pilar Weiss, founder of the National Bail Fund Network, a network of over 90 community bail and bond funds across the United States. “It’s part of a disturbing trend where deep surveillance and social control applications are used pretrial with little oversight.”
“It Felt Like Entrapment”

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. It captures everything visible on a device’s screen, taking at least one screenshot per minute. It then analyzes the screenshots locally before slightly blurring them and saving them on a server. Images the system marks as possibly “explicit” are flagged for further review. For example, one Covenant Eyes report sent to Hannah’s husband'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.”

The app also monitors every network request a device makes, blocking allegedly pornographic content and alerting allies about requests the software deems suspicious.

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 constant surveillance had an immediate impact on the family, Hannah says.

Hannah began skipping her online therapy sessions, fearing that the probation officers would snoop on what she told her doctor. 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. “It was like the family was being charged with a crime,” Hannah says. “It felt like entrapment.”

While the images in the Covenant Eyes reports that WIRED reviewed are partially blurred, it is sometimes possible to discern sensitive information from them. For instance, one Covenant Eyes report shows a screenshot of Hannah’s mother-in-law’s device while a phone call was in progress. The report clearly shows the name of the person being contacted. Another shows screenshots of Hannah’s mother-in-law’s bank statements and her Gmail inbox, although the sensitive details in both are unreadable.

Covenant Eyes doesn’t just block pornography. 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.

Molly Greene, The Appeal’s strategy and legal director, calls the censorship alarming. “It’s incredibly concerning to hear readers say they can no longer access our website as a result of this app,” she says. ​​“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.”

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. According to Hannah, the officer said Covenant Eyes detected that her phone had visited Pornhub. Court records WIRED reviewed cite a visit to the adult website as the reason for revoking his bond.

But Hannah claims that her husband didn’t touch her phone and that no one had visited Pornhub. 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.

WIRED tested Hannah’s claims that Covenant Eyes flags background network activity from websites that aren’t intentionally viewed. Using an iPhone, we visited Pornhub enough times that it was a frequently visited tab on Google Chrome. We then installed Covenant Eyes and restarted our phone. 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.

This is a known issue with Covenant Eyes. 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 limitation in Covenant Eyes means it’s possible Hannah’s husband did not violate the terms of his bond. 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. Yet, in the motion to revoke Hannah’s husband’s bond, the only evidence prosecutors presented was information from the Covenant Eyes report.

According 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. Courts are largely reluctant to find due process problems with electronic surveillance, she says, and overworked defense attorneys often lack the capacity to bring a challenge.

Hannah printed the Covenant Eyes documentation and hand-delivered it to the prosecutors, the judge, and the probation department. She never heard back. As a last resort, Hannah emailed Covenant Eyes CEO Ron DeHaas. In an email exchange Hannah shared with WIRED, DeHaas was apologetic. “Hannah, I’m sorry that you are going through this,” DeHaas wrote. “I will have our legal department follow up with you.”

Jonathan Manes, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, says the surveillance Hannah’s family faces likely violates several of their constitutional rights. “This feels like an extraordinarily intrusive violation of the family’s First Amendment rights to be able to access the internet and communicate without being monitored,” he says. Manes adds that because the software effectively enables continuous and suspicionless searches of the devices of people who haven’t been charged with a crime, the family’s Fourth Amendment rights were potentially violated.

Lastly, Manes points out that by indiscriminately surveilling whatever the phone is displaying, the app could collect sensitive data that includes the family’s communications with their lawyers, as Hannah feared. “It’s interfering with his right to speak in confidence with his attorney,” he says of Hannah’s husband. “It’s impeding his ability to prepare a defense and exercise that Sixth Amendment right.”

“This strikes me as quite chilling,” Manes adds. “It’s what happens when someone’s home becomes their jail cell, and now everyone they live with is subject to the same kind of surveillance as the person who is charged.”

Several legal experts expressed concern about the monitoring conditions imposed by the judge in Hannah’s husband’s case. But Phyllis Emerick, the chief deputy public defender in Monroe County, argues that because Hannah’s husband and his family consented to the surveillance, they gave up their rights to privacy. “He agreed that he would not access electronic devices in his household in exchange for release,” she says. “It was the family’s choice to continue living with him.”

Weiss, of the National Bail Fund Network, disagrees with the idea that any type of surveillance is permissible so long as a person agrees to it to avoid jail time. “Sure, they consented to this, but it’s at the barrel of a gun,” she says.

The exact number of individuals or families in Monroe County who have been required to use Covenant Eyes as part of their pretrial release is unclear. In the county’s annual report from 2021, the Probation Department stated that they provided pretrial monitoring for 618 individuals; however, the report does not provide details about the specific type of monitoring involved. The number of individuals who were assigned to be monitored by Covenant Eyes is likely a small percentage of that.

Deputy probation officer Troy Hatfield would not answer specific questions about either Covenant Eyes or Hannah’s husband’s case, but he says the conditions of any defendant’s supervision are ultimately decided by the judge based on the specific facts of each case and department policy.
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Neither Monroe’s chief probation officer, Linda Brady, nor the judge in Hannah’s husband’s case, Mary Ellen Diekhoff, responded to repeated requests for interviews.

It’s also unclear exactly how many jurisdictions in the US have used Covenant Eyes. Court records WIRED reviewed show that courts in Washington, Montana, and Ohio have each ordered a defendant to use the software at least once. In all of these cases, the defendant faced charges related to child sexual abuse material or child exploitation. In Colorado, spending records show that the State Judicial Branch has purchased services from Covenant Eyes 60 times since 2017.

Multiple probation officer associations, public defense organizations, and bail funds WIRED contacted had never heard of the software and were unfamiliar with any screen-monitoring software being used for pretrial monitoring.

Independent legal experts who spoke to WIRED say that the use of an app like Covenant Eyes stems from a lack of oversight over how courts deploy punitive surveillance technology and judges’ broad authority to impose monitoring conditions without real accountability.

“There’s a black box around how all of this technology works and is deployed,” says Weisburd, of George Washington University. “We don’t know error rates, how the technology operates, or even if it’s reliable.” This leaves people vulnerable to faulty technology in high-stakes situations where their freedom hinges on the word of an app.

This includes Hannah’s husband, who remains in jail based on an automated report from an app that is not meant to be used in criminal proceedings and is known to produce false positives. Hannah, meanwhile, is afraid to stop paying $18.99 a month for a subscription with Covenant Eyes, which is still installed on some of her family’s devices, recording everything they do.