Milk and Securus Money

In early 2024, Horizon Organic — one of the three or four largest organic milk brands in the United States — was acquired by Platinum Equity, the private equity firm founded by Tom Gores. Platinum Equity has owned, since 2017, a separate portfolio company called Securus Technologies, the dominant U.S. prison telecommunications and surveillance platform. The connection between a national organic milk brand and a national prison surveillance platform is not metaphorical — it is a single corporate ownership chain. This episode follows it.

The Securus Platform

Securus was originally a prison phone company. It became something much larger. The product called Location-Based Services (LBS) gives anyone with portal access the real-time location of virtually any cell phone in the United States within seconds — on any carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint), regardless of whether GPS is enabled, because the system uses cell-tower triangulation rather than GPS. The data pipeline runs from the carriers themselves, through a commercial location-data aggregator (LocationSmart), to Securus, and out through the Securus portal to law-enforcement and corrections-facility customers.

The system was supposed to require warrant-level legal authorization for each query. In practice, Securus accepted uploaded justification documents and did not verify them. Federal investigators later determined the system would accept blank pages, internal merit-promotion certificates, anything in the document field. Nobody was checking.

The Documented Abuse

In June 2022, the Department of Justice indicted a deputy U.S. Marshal named Adrian Pena on eleven counts of using the Securus LBS platform to surveil people in his personal life — nine separate civilian targets, including spouses of people he had personal relationships with. He uploaded fabricated authorization documents. The case was prosecuted in Texas. The exact abuse pattern that civil-liberties advocates had warned about for years was confirmed in court: the system can be, and has been, used by individuals with credentialed access to track civilians in the United States without legal authorization.

The American Civil Liberties Union has confirmed that Securus was providing not only marshals but jail and prison employees at the local level with access to real-time location data on virtually any individual in the country, with no verification of warrant authority. Anyone whose institution had a Securus contract had a potential back door into nationwide cell-phone location data.

Beyond Location: Voice Biometrics

Securus also runs a program called Investigator Pro that extracts a unique voiceprint — a biometric signature — from every person who speaks on a Securus-routed call. That includes the person on the outside calling in, who has never been charged with anything and has no connection to the prison system. Those voiceprints are permanently archived at Securus’s Texas facility. In some states, enrollment in the voiceprint database happened without notification to either party on the call. Once the voiceprint exists, it can be used to identify the speaker across any other call Securus has access to, regardless of what number or name is used. The ACLU has flagged the program as unconstitutional surveillance of civilians.

The Records They Keep

In 2015, The Intercept obtained 70 million Securus call records — with active recordings still downloadable — from a single hack. The 2018 hack exposed credentials of law-enforcement portal users dating back to 2011. The Pena indictment included a detailed log of his 11 specific queries with dates, times, and targets — that log existed because Securus retained it. The retention pattern, across multiple breach events and one federal indictment, indicates indefinite retention with no published deletion schedule.

The Connection to the Series

This series began with food and water contamination vectors and the regulatory gaps that allow them to operate undetected. It ends with the same private equity firm that owns the surveillance infrastructure now also owning the milk brand. Tom Gores has personally resisted demands to divest from Securus despite years of public-relations pressure. The behavioral profile of his Securus tenure — willingness to operate a system known to be abused, willingness to absorb the public criticism without changing course — is now the profile of the ownership of one major American organic dairy brand. That alignment does not establish that Horizon Organic is contaminated with anything. It does establish that the consolidation pattern of ownership across food and surveillance infrastructure has reached the point where one phone call from one private equity office can shape decisions in both categories simultaneously. The series will return in subsequent installments.

Working draft. Sources include the U.S. Department of Justice indictment of deputy U.S. Marshal Adrian Pena (June 2022); the original 2018 New York Times investigation of Securus location tracking; The Intercept’s reporting on the 2015 Securus call-record breach and the voiceprint program; ACLU formal letters to the FCC on Securus surveillance practices; the Worth Rises advocacy organization’s compiled record of Securus violations and federal actions; Vice Motherboard reporting on the LocationSmart pipeline; and public records on Platinum Equity’s 2024 acquisition of Horizon Organic.