Sojourner Family Peace Center Accused of Violating Federal and Wisconsin Wiretapping Laws by Recording Victims’ Private Conversations

There is a reason the law treats listening differently from looking. A security camera mounted above a doorway can tell you who entered a building, document an assault in a hallway, identify an unauthorized person attempting to enter a protected facility, or allow security personnel to determine whether someone is standing outside an entrance. Those are the kinds of purposes most people associate with closed-circuit security cameras. A microphone changes the equation entirely because a microphone does not merely document where a domestic-violence victim walked. It can capture where that victim intends to move next, what the victim plans to tell police, the name of the person the victim is hiding from, what happened to the victim’s children, what the victim told an attorney, whether the victim intends to testify, what medications the victim takes, what criminal case is pending, what evidence the victim has collected, and what steps the victim intends to take to remain alive.

The danger posed by electronic eavesdropping is not a new problem. Long before digital cameras, cloud storage, network video recorders, and microphones embedded into modern security systems, courts were confronting the question of how much power technology should give someone to enter another person’s private conversation without physically entering the room. In Berger v. New York, 388 U.S. 41 (1967), the United States Supreme Court struck down an overly broad New York eavesdropping law and emphasized that electronic surveillance can invade constitutionally protected conversations just as surely as a physical search can invade a home. The Court noted that eavesdropping had been condemned for centuries and recognized that new technology had made it possible to capture private speech in ways the person speaking could not see or detect.

One year later, Congress enacted Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the statutory framework commonly referred to as the federal Wiretap Act. Congress was responding to what the Department of Justice has described from the legislative history as widespread concern that advancing technology was rapidly eroding the security of private communications and allowing electronic surveillance to become increasingly pervasive. Title III was therefore designed not simply to regulate telephone wiretaps, but to protect certain wire, electronic, and oral communications against unauthorized interception.

That distinction matters because the federal Wiretap Act does not protect only telephone calls. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2510(2), an “oral communication” is a spoken communication made by a person exhibiting an expectation that the communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying that expectation. Section 2510(4) defines “intercept” as the aural or other acquisition of the contents of a wire, electronic, or oral communication through an electronic, mechanical, or other device. In plain language, if an electronic device is used to acquire the contents of a private in-person conversation under circumstances in which the speakers reasonably believe they are not being electronically overheard, federal interception law can apply. That is true even when the device doing the listening happens to be built into something most people think of as a security camera.

This distinction sits at the center of an investigation involving Sojourner Family Peace Center, one of Wisconsin’s largest domestic-violence service organizations. I entered Sojourner in July 2026 as a documented domestic-violence victim seeking emergency shelter, protection, and services. I did not enter the shelter intending to investigate Sojourner, but over the following weeks I began documenting issues involving shelter safety, confidentiality, treatment of male survivors, housing and safe-exit resources, child safety, disability access, grievance procedures, surveillance practices, organizational funding, and whether services intended to protect domestic-violence survivors were actually reaching the people living inside the facility.

One of the questions that eventually became central to that investigation was whether Sojourner’s security cameras captured audio. Before September 2, I asked Sojourner employee Linda W. whether the cameras captured sound. Linda initially told me she did not know and said she would ask Consuelo Garcia. Linda later returned and told me that the cameras did capture audio, but only specific staff had access to it. Approximately ten minutes later, during a meeting I had requested with Garcia, I asked about the issue directly. Garcia told me that the cameras did not record audio. I challenged that answer because another Sojourner employee had just told me the opposite after specifically checking the issue. Journalistic sources later independently confirmed that the cameras captured audio. The resulting concern is therefore not simply that security equipment happened to contain a technical feature that residents did not understand. The evidence raises the much more serious question of whether Sojourner knew that its surveillance system could acquire victims’ conversations while residents were being told that it could not.

That question matters legally because federal law does not merely regulate whether a device is technically capable of recording sound. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(1)(a), a person generally may not intentionally intercept, attempt to intercept, or procure another person to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication unless a statutory exception applies. Section 2511(1)(c) separately prohibits intentional disclosure of the contents of an unlawfully intercepted communication when the person knows or has reason to know how the information was obtained, and § 2511(1)(d) separately prohibits intentional use of those contents under the same circumstances. Federal law therefore treats interception, disclosure, and use as distinct conduct, which means the legal inquiry does not necessarily end once someone first listens. What happens to the information afterward can matter independently.

Federal law also recognizes what is commonly called one-party consent. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d), a private person generally does not violate the statute by intercepting a communication when that person is a party to the conversation or one participant has given prior consent, unless the interception is undertaken for the purpose of committing a criminal or tortious act. The importance of that rule is not simply what it permits, but what it does not permit. Ownership of a building does not automatically make the building owner a participant in every conversation taking place inside it. A security employee does not become a participant merely because a microphone is mounted on a wall, and the visible presence of a video camera does not automatically establish that everyone within range knowingly agreed to electronic acquisition of the words coming out of their mouths.

The Seventh Circuit, whose federal decisions govern Wisconsin, has already addressed the difference between video and audio in Doe v. Smith, 429 F.3d 706 (7th Cir. 2005). The court explained that a video recording containing a sound track can implicate Title III because the sound component can acquire an “oral communication” protected by the statute, while silent video presents a different legal issue. That distinction is directly relevant to modern CCTV systems because the fact that a person knows a camera can see them does not necessarily mean the person knows or agrees that the camera can hear them. The legal question becomes whether the spoken communication falls within Title III’s definition and whether the statutory requirements and exceptions are satisfied.

The Seventh Circuit has also explained the expectation-of-privacy requirement in In re John Doe Trader Number One, 894 F.2d 240 (7th Cir. 1990). There, the court examined whether traders speaking in the crowded and noisy pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange had a protected expectation against electronic interception. The case illustrates that the analysis is contextual. A court asks whether the speaker actually expected the conversation not to be intercepted and whether that expectation was objectively reasonable under the circumstances.

Wisconsin uses essentially the same framework. The Wisconsin Electronic Surveillance Control Law, codified principally at Wis. Stat. §§ 968.27 through 968.37, was patterned after federal Title III. In State v. Duchow, 2008 WI 57, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the definition of an “oral communication” in Wis. Stat. § 968.27(12) incorporates the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy standard. A speaker must have an actual subjective expectation that the conversation is private, and that expectation must be one society is willing to recognize as reasonable. The Wisconsin Supreme Court expressly explained that Wisconsin’s electronic-surveillance law was intended to implement the protections of federal Title III and looked to federal law when interpreting the state statute.

The earlier Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in State v. Smith, 149 Wis. 2d 89, 438 N.W.2d 571 (1989) likewise recognized that the statutory definition of oral communication depends upon a reasonable expectation of privacy. The significance of Smith and Duchow is that Wisconsin does not treat every spoken word as automatically protected merely because it was recorded without the speaker’s knowledge. The surrounding circumstances matter, which means notice, location, the nature of the relationship, the conduct of the parties, and representations about whether recording is occurring can become critically important.

That is where Sojourner’s alleged representations about its surveillance system become particularly important. Wisconsin courts have recognized implied consent when people receive meaningful notice that monitoring is occurring and then proceed with the communication anyway. In State v. Riley, 2005 WI App 203, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals held that an inmate impliedly consented to the recording of jail calls because he received meaningful notice that those telephone calls were subject to monitoring and recording and nevertheless continued to use the system. The court’s reasoning was grounded in notice. The person knew what the system did before choosing to speak.

The circumstances inside Sojourner present the opposite factual problem. If meaningful notice that audio will be recorded can support implied consent, then an affirmative representation that cameras do not record audio is highly relevant to whether a resident knowingly consented to having private conversations intercepted. A domestic-violence survivor cannot make an informed decision about where it is safe to discuss an offender, a future address, a police investigation, or an attorney conversation if the institution has told the survivor that the surveillance system cannot hear while the system is actually capable of acquiring sound.

The Seventh Circuit’s decision in Amati v. City of Woodstock, 176 F.3d 952 (7th Cir. 1999) reinforces the importance of routine notice and ordinary practice in evaluating electronic recording. Amati involved telephone lines at a police department and discussed the significance of recording that was routine and known within the ordinary course of operations. The court emphasized that what is truly ordinary is often known and therefore supplies implicit notice. That principle cuts both ways. If a practice is concealed, contradicted by what personnel tell users, or implemented in a setting where the institution creates a contrary expectation, the ordinary-course and implied-consent analysis becomes considerably more difficult for the person doing the recording.

Other federal courts have reached similar conclusions when organizations attempted to justify extensive secret recording as part of legitimate business or security operations. In Deal v. Spears, 980 F.2d 1153 (8th Cir. 1992), an employer secretly recorded an employee’s telephone conversations because the owners suspected the employee might have information connected to a burglary. The court recognized that the employer had a legitimate business interest in preventing theft, but held that recording and listening to approximately twenty-two hours of private calls exceeded the scope of any ordinary-course business justification. The court also rejected the argument that vague prior statements about possible monitoring were sufficient to establish consent and affirmed civil liability and attorney’s fees under Title III.

The Fourth Circuit reached a comparable conclusion in Sanders v. Robert Bosch Corp., 38 F.3d 736 (4th Cir. 1994), where a workplace voice logger continuously recorded telephone conversations without an employee’s knowledge. The court rejected the argument that the continuous recording automatically fell within the business-use exception merely because the equipment had been installed for security purposes. Sanders is not controlling law in Wisconsin, but it illustrates an important principle found throughout federal interception law: calling a surveillance practice “security” does not automatically make every acquisition of private speech lawful.

Wisconsin’s own substantive prohibition is substantial. Wis. Stat. § 968.31(1) prohibits intentional interception of qualifying wire, electronic, or oral communications, subject to statutory exceptions. The statute also separately addresses the disclosure and use of unlawfully obtained communications. Wisconsin generally permits one-party-consent recording under Wis. Stat. § 968.31(2)(c) when the person doing the recording is a party to the conversation or one party has given prior consent, subject to statutory limitations involving criminal, tortious, or other injurious purposes. Just as under federal law, that does not transform an unseen third-party listener into a participant merely because the conversation occurs on property controlled by that listener.

Wisconsin also creates a direct civil remedy. Under Wis. Stat. § 968.31(2m), a person whose wire, electronic, or oral communication is intercepted, disclosed, or used in violation of Wisconsin’s electronic-surveillance statutes has a civil cause of action against the person responsible. The statute permits recovery of actual damages, subject to liquidated-damages provisions of at least $100 per day of violation or $1,000, whichever is higher, along with punitive damages, reasonable attorney’s fees, and litigation costs.

Federal law provides a separate private civil remedy under 18 U.S.C. § 2520. A person whose qualifying communication is unlawfully intercepted, disclosed, or intentionally used may seek equitable or declaratory relief, damages under the statutory framework, punitive damages in appropriate circumstances, and reasonable attorney’s fees and litigation costs. Federal law also imposes a discovery-based limitations period under § 2520(e), making prompt legal consultation important for anyone who believes an unlawful interception occurred.

The law also recognizes that interception can affect privileged communications. Under Wis. Stat. § 968.29(4), an otherwise privileged wire, electronic, or oral communication does not lose its privileged character merely because it was intercepted, whether the interception was lawful or unlawful. That provision can become critically important inside a domestic-violence shelter because residents may be speaking with attorneys, healthcare providers, counselors, or qualified victim advocates about matters that carry independent legal protections.

Wisconsin separately recognizes a domestic-violence and sexual-assault advocate-victim privilege under Wis. Stat. § 905.045. The statute gives a victim the privilege to refuse disclosure and to prevent others from disclosing confidential communications made or information obtained among the victim, a victim advocate acting within the scope of advocacy duties, and people participating in providing counseling, assistance, or support. The statute defines a victim advocate as an employee or volunteer of an organization whose purpose is to provide counseling, assistance, or support free of charge to victims. That protection exists because the law recognizes that meaningful advocacy depends upon victims being able to disclose sensitive information without assuming that every word will later be exposed to people who were never intended to hear it.

Wisconsin law separately protects the physical location of domestic-abuse service recipients. Wis. Stat. § 995.67 provides that an employee or agent of a domestic-abuse services organization may not intentionally disclose the location of a service recipient or certain minor children without the recipient’s informed written consent. A violation can carry criminal penalties. The statute does not itself prohibit every form of audio monitoring, but it shows why information security inside a domestic-violence shelter carries extraordinary legal importance. The legislature has expressly recognized that disclosure of where a survivor or child is located can create danger.

Wisconsin also recognizes a broader statutory right of privacy under Wis. Stat. § 995.50. That statute can provide a civil remedy for certain highly offensive intrusions into a place a reasonable person would consider private, depending upon the exact facts and location involved. It would be inaccurate to say that every hallway, common room, lobby, or outdoor area of a shelter automatically creates the same expectation of privacy, but it would be equally inaccurate to assume that the existence of visible video surveillance authorizes secret electronic listening to every private conversation occurring within microphone range.

The domestic-violence context changes the safety implications dramatically because victims do not enter a shelter as ordinary customers entering an ordinary business. They often arrive because someone has already weaponized information against them. An abusive partner may have monitored their phone, demanded passwords, tracked vehicles, accessed social-media accounts, read messages, followed location data, questioned children, monitored finances, impersonated them online, or used threats to force disclosure of where they were going and whom they were speaking with. A shelter exists in part to break that chain of information access, not to recreate it through another undisclosed monitoring system.

An audio-capable surveillance system can capture precisely the information an offender is trying to obtain. A victim may discuss a new apartment address, the school a child will attend, the time police will accompany the victim to retrieve property, whether a restraining order will be filed, whether the victim intends to testify, whether the victim has contacted a prosecutor, the location of a vehicle, a confidential medical condition, a new phone number, the identity of an attorney, the existence of evidence, or the exact day the victim intends to leave the shelter. Those are not abstract privacy interests. In a domestic-violence case, disclosure of some of that information can change the victim’s physical risk.

The technological danger is also broader than the possibility that one employee might intentionally misuse a recording. Once a private conversation is electronically captured, it can potentially become data that can be replayed, exported, copied, retained, backed up, accessed through administrative credentials, transmitted through a network, stored by a vendor, obtained through litigation, exposed through poor password security, or disclosed because someone simply made a mistake. Whether any particular Sojourner recording was stored, exported, or transmitted remains a factual question requiring examination of the surveillance system, but those possibilities are precisely why undisclosed audio monitoring inside a domestic-violence shelter is qualitatively different from ordinary video surveillance.

Federal domestic-violence funding law recognizes that privacy itself can be a safety issue. Under the Violence Against Women Act, 34 U.S.C. § 12291(b)(2) imposes confidentiality obligations on covered VAWA grantees and subgrantees relating to personally identifying information and individual information collected in connection with services requested, used, or denied. The implementing regulation at 28 C.F.R. § 90.4 requires covered recipients to protect victim confidentiality and places substantial restrictions on disclosures without informed, written, reasonably time-limited consent. Whether those requirements apply to a particular Sojourner program depends upon the actual funding source and grant structure, which must be established from the records, but if covered VAWA funds support relevant shelter services, those confidentiality rules become highly significant to any system capable of capturing resident conversations.

The reason for those protections is straightforward. A domestic-violence organization possesses information that can be uniquely dangerous if mishandled. The more a victim trusts the organization, the more sensitive the information the victim is likely to disclose. That trust can disappear instantly if the victim learns that staff could electronically listen to conversations the victim believed were private or that residents were affirmatively told a surveillance system did not capture sound when the system actually did.

My own experience provides one potential example of why the distinction matters. During the early morning hours of September 2, I participated in a private journalistic source conversation concerning my completed investigation of Sojourner. Sojourner management was not participating in that conversation, and I had not disclosed the substance and scope of my completed investigation to management. According to the evidence developed in my investigation, Sojourner personnel who were not participants in that conversation intercepted it through the shelter’s audio-surveillance system and thereby learned what the investigation contained. Hours later management and security confronted me and terminated my shelter placement.

The chronology continued after my removal. At 10:56:22 a.m. on September 2, Sojourner employee Renee Louve created a client record titled “Threat to Building Plan on 9/11/2026.” The body of the record claimed that a resident had reported seeing me at a gas station and that I had said I was planning to “do something to the building on 9/11.” I categorically deny that the alleged gas-station encounter occurred, deny making that statement, and deny threatening Sojourner Family Peace Center, its building, its employees, its residents, or anyone associated with the organization.

At 11:01 a.m. on September 3, Sojourner Director of Facilities/Public Safety Phil Salter distributed a HIGH ALERT-BOLO identifying me by name and date of birth, instructing personnel not to permit me into the facility, and directing Public Safety to be notified if I was seen attempting to enter or around the facility. The BOLO included a file named Kevin-G-Booking-Photo.jpg and Camera 8 surveillance material. The BOLO itself does not say “bomb,” “terrorism,” or “9/11,” and those words should not be falsely attributed to that document. The legal significance of the sequence is not that every later event automatically becomes a wiretapping violation. The significance is that federal and Wisconsin law separately recognize interception, disclosure, and use, which makes it necessary to reconstruct exactly how information moved from the surveillance system to management and what was subsequently done with it.

That reconstruction should not depend solely upon competing memories. Modern surveillance systems have manufacturers, model numbers, firmware versions, network architecture, microphones, audio settings, administrative accounts, user permissions, retention rules, storage locations, playback functions, export capabilities, and sometimes audit or access logs. The statement that only certain staff could access audio is particularly important because restricted access ordinarily requires some form of permissions structure. If the system was configured so that only designated personnel could listen, records may exist identifying who possessed that capability and potentially when the capability was used.

Relevant evidence would include the manufacturer and model of each relevant camera, microphone specifications, the model of any digital or network video recorder, surveillance-management software, audio-channel configuration, recording schedules, administrator accounts, role-based permissions, retention settings, storage architecture, cloud or vendor access, available playback or live-monitoring logs, export histories, deletion histories, configuration changes, and native surveillance files. Those electronic records should then be compared with internal communications, management messages, Public Safety communications, case-management activity, and the timing of institutional actions. The surveillance system itself may ultimately become a more reliable witness than anyone attempting to remember what happened months later.

Residents currently inside Sojourner also need to understand what they can legally do to protect themselves without damaging evidence or creating new legal problems. Wisconsin and federal law generally allow a person who is actually participating in a conversation to record that conversation under the one-party-consent rules contained in Wis. Stat. § 968.31(2)(c) and 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d), subject to the statutory limitations discussed above. That generally means a resident speaking directly with a staff member can lawfully create their own recording for ordinary documentation purposes without obtaining the staff member’s permission under interception law. It does not mean the resident can leave a hidden recorder in a room to capture conversations between other people, access Sojourner’s surveillance network, guess passwords, tamper with cameras, remove equipment, defeat technical safeguards, or secretly record conversations in which the resident is not participating.

A resident who is concerned about audio surveillance should also create a written record. Rather than relying exclusively on a verbal question, a resident can ask Sojourner in writing whether any camera, intercom, doorbell, security device, recorder, or surveillance platform captures sound; whether audio is continuously recorded or available only through live monitoring; which areas are within microphone range; who can access audio; how long recordings are retained; whether recordings are stored locally, remotely, or through a third-party vendor; whether audio can be exported; and what written policy governs listening, recording, retention, use, and disclosure. A written question and written response can later establish exactly what notice the resident received.

A resident may also provide written notice that the resident does not consent to electronic monitoring of private oral communications except as specifically authorized by law. That written statement does not automatically convert every location in a shelter into a legally private space, and it cannot defeat a statutory exception that otherwise applies, but it can remove ambiguity concerning whether the resident knowingly consented to undisclosed audio monitoring. The resident should retain a copy outside the shelter or in another secure location that cannot be accessed by an abusive partner.

Residents should request copies of every privacy notice, surveillance notice, resident handbook provision, confidentiality agreement, release of information, consent form, and policy they were asked to sign. If VAWA-covered funding applies, residents should also examine whether any purported release complies with the federal requirements governing informed, written, and appropriately limited authorization. A generic statement that “security cameras are present” is not necessarily the same thing as informed notice that microphones are electronically acquiring the contents of conversations.

Particularly sensitive conversations should be handled with added caution until the surveillance questions are resolved. Residents speaking with attorneys should ask whether there is a room or location in which audio monitoring does not occur and should confirm that the conversation is being treated as confidential. Residents speaking with qualified domestic-violence advocates can also ask whether the communication falls within Wis. Stat. § 905.045 and what measures are being taken to preserve that privilege. Wisconsin law specifically provides under Wis. Stat. § 968.29(4) that interception does not itself destroy an otherwise valid privilege, but preventing unnecessary capture in the first place is safer than later litigating over what happened to a recording.

Residents who believe their conversations have already been intercepted should not attempt to investigate Sojourner’s equipment themselves. Unplugging cameras, entering control rooms, opening recording equipment, accessing administrator interfaces, guessing passwords, deleting or copying files directly from Sojourner systems, or otherwise interfering with the equipment could destroy evidence and create independent legal problems. The safer course is to document what the resident lawfully knows, preserve communications and written policies, record dates and times, identify the approximate location of the conversation and any nearby camera, write down exactly what was said about audio capability, and preserve evidence showing what occurred immediately afterward.

If litigation is reasonably anticipated, an attorney can send a preservation demand requiring the organization to preserve surveillance recordings, audio streams, native video, system logs, account permissions, configuration data, retention information, internal communications, and relevant case-management records. Timing matters because many CCTV systems automatically overwrite footage after a defined retention period. A person who waits several months before asking for preservation may discover that the most important electronic evidence no longer exists even though the underlying legal claim remains viable.

Anyone who believes an unlawful interception occurred can also consult law enforcement or an attorney. Wisconsin’s electronic-surveillance statute contains criminal prohibitions, while both Wisconsin law and federal law provide civil remedies for qualifying violations. Whether a particular recording constitutes a crime or civil violation depends upon the specific facts, including who was speaking, whether the conversation qualified as a protected communication, who intercepted it, whether a participant consented, what device was used, the purpose and circumstances of the recording, and what happened to the information afterward.

There is another reason victims should document quickly. Federal civil claims under 18 U.S.C. § 2520 are subject to a limitations period tied to when the claimant first had a reasonable opportunity to discover the violation. Wisconsin limitation periods and related claims must be evaluated independently. A victim therefore should not assume that the absence of an immediate lawsuit means the issue can be ignored indefinitely.

The central safety problem remains much larger than any single legal claim. Domestic violence is frequently an information-control crime before it becomes another physical assault. Offenders monitor phones, track vehicles, obtain passwords, read email, access financial accounts, question children, install tracking software, impersonate victims, follow social-media activity, demand locations, and use private information to maintain control. A domestic-violence shelter is supposed to interrupt that flow of information. It should not become another place where a survivor has to wonder whether an unseen person can electronically listen to the details of a safety plan.

That is why the alleged contradiction inside Sojourner matters so much. If residents were merely told that cameras existed, there would still be legal questions concerning where audio was captured, whether the speakers had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and whether consent or another statutory exception applied. If residents specifically asked whether cameras captured audio and were told that they did not, while the organization knew that they did, the issue becomes materially different. The institution would not merely have failed to explain the technology. It potentially would have provided the assurance upon which victims relied when deciding where they could speak safely.

My previous reporting has often started with the reason a law exists before examining the institution accused of crossing the boundary that law created. In the TPR Target List investigation, that meant explaining how the murder of Rebecca Schaeffer helped expose the danger of unrestricted access to personal information, how Congress responded through the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, and then examining what law enforcement agencies did with protected DMV data years later. The same structure applies here because wiretapping statutes are not obscure technical rules. They exist because the ability to secretly acquire private conversations changes the balance of power between the person speaking and the person listening.

The question confronting Sojourner Family Peace Center is therefore not simply whether some cameras contained microphones. The questions are whether the system actually acquired victims’ oral communications, whether Sojourner knew that it did, whether residents were given accurate notice, whether any resident consented, who had access to captured audio, whether conversations were monitored live or recorded, how long recordings were retained, whether information was disclosed or used, whether VAWA confidentiality protections applied to any of the affected services, and how many residents may have been recorded.

Federal and Wisconsin courts would ultimately decide the legal consequences of any proven interception, and different conversations may produce different results because privacy expectations depend upon the circumstances. A conversation spoken loudly in a crowded lobby is not necessarily treated the same way as a quiet conversation conducted in an area where a survivor had reason to believe electronic monitoring did not occur. That factual precision matters because responsible reporting should distinguish what the evidence establishes from what a court has not yet adjudicated.

The safety principle requires much less legal complexity. A domestic-violence victim cannot protect information the victim does not know is being collected, and a survivor cannot make an informed decision about where to speak if the institution controlling the surveillance system provides false information about what that system can hear. Inside a domestic-violence shelter, confidentiality is therefore not merely an administrative preference or customer-service issue. It can be part of the mechanism that keeps a victim and that victim’s children physically safe.

The evidence concerning Sojourner’s surveillance system should now be preserved and independently examined. The answers should come from the cameras, the recorder, the software, the audio settings, the access permissions, the native files, the retention records, the internal communications, and the people who administered the system. Until those questions are answered, residents should understand their rights, document representations about surveillance in writing, preserve their own lawful evidence, protect privileged and safety-sensitive conversations, and seek legal assistance promptly if they believe their communications were intercepted.

Never Stop Media will continue investigating Sojourner Family Peace Center’s surveillance practices violateing federal or Wisconsin interception law, whether victims were accurately informed about audio monitoring, and whether information captured through that system was disclosed or used. The question at the heart of that investigation is not technologically complicated, but for a domestic-violence victim it may be one of the most important questions anyone inside a shelter can ask: when I believed I was speaking privately, who else was listening?