Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings

Post by maxerickson » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:07 PM UTC

zubspace wrote: post #22

FroshKiller wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A warrant is not the same as a subpoena. But look, "the innocent have nothing to hide" is an insidious and wrong idea. If people and corporations don't assert their rights against the will of the state, they erode the foundation of our shared liberties.

I'm not a lawyer, so excuse me if I'm asking trivial things: To obtain a search warrant or arrest warrant, the law enforcement officer must demonstrate probable cause that a search or seizure is justified. An authority, usually a magistrate, will consider the totality of circumstances and determine whether to issue the warrant. [1] I agree to your statement, if there is no search warrant. But in this case an authorit…

Post by sambe » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:10 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #31

When Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," this is pretty much what he was talking about. We live in a society where passive, ubiquitous, voluntarily-accepted monitoring is becoming the norm because of the vast convenience it affords the users. The flip-side of that coin is of course breaks in your regular pattern of behavior…

Post by Godel_unicode » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #24

Filligree wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a murder, it's a good thing. The risk is always the chance of abuse, and although in the case of water stats it's hard to imagine how you'd abuse it, having more information always means a higher chance. Ideally we'd want to get the benefits without the abuse, but that requires a solid bureaucracy and strong rules.

You can tell when someone's home or not from utility usage.

Post by imagist » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

Hondor wrote: post #13

superkuh wrote: post #10

More importantly, the headline should read: "Police use high time resolution data from modern water meter against man charged with murder." Basically this Abstruse Goose comic, http://abstrusegoose.com/553 , about the dangers of utility data logging have come true. The greater the time resolution of such things the more can be inferred. Such high resolution is completely uneeded and complex in order to just charge fo…

Isn't it a good thing to record data that helps solve a murder? The police are still getting it with a warrant and presumably from physical access to the device, so it's not the same worry as bulk monitoring.

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #32

Quarrelsome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its a fine line. There is a great fear of false positives from such inference. Let us imagine for a second that there is a legitimate reason for that water use that he doesn't wish to disclose because it would incriminate him for something else? Hypothetically speaking if you were doing some grey-hat, "illegal" probing/hack at the time of a murder the police question you about; admitting to your actual activity could…

"A legitimate reason for that water use that he doesn't wish to disclose because it would incriminate him for something else" is an odd definition of "legitimate." ;)