This had a major thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263894, so by the usual standard this is a dupe, unless it contains significant new information. Since both articles are lifted from The Information's paywalled original, I'm guessing that's unlikely.
Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
151–160 of 190 posts
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#152More 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.
The Amazon Echo records data from all of its users, not just the murderers. It's creeping close to bulk monitoring.
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Eric Schmidt is as biased on this subject as you can get, he profits from our data. This. Eric Schmidt should release its own full dataset to show us that he thinks this is true. Unless he is doing things he should not be doing in the first place ?
If Eric Schmidt is ever suspected of murder, I would expect his full dataset to be called for.
Eric Schmidt did not mention murder in his quote.
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I like your qualifier, "most likely". Yeah, it gets harder when you need to be sure . >How would one determine if it is not buffering and compressing data client-side for later transmission during "firmware" updates? AFAIK you can root the device pretty easily, so you should be at least able to verify that the main OS of the device isn't doing this. >Also, how do we know that your Echo and my Echo are running the sa…
> AFAIK you can root the device pretty easily, so you should be at least able to verify that the main OS of the device isn't doing this. And if it doesn't, you still don't know. So why even bother? Why not simply throw it and anyone peddling it out of the window? That's making sure rather than derping about.
Do you really have 0 microphones in your house? What about speakers, those are basically microphones too?
If you have access to the main OS it's also relatively easy to verify that the secretly recorded audio data isn't being uploaded anywhere, unless these devices have some secret radio equipment in them.
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>Isn't it a good thing to record data that helps solve a murder? Recording everyones data everywhere just in case it might be relevant to an extremely rare event like a murder is very dangerous. The use of NSA recording capabilities by employees to digitally stalk victims of their affection (LOVEINT) is a clear example of how badly this kind of collection can go wrong.
I think the parent comments are a separate issue from concerns about the NSA. Most people would agree that warrantless access to all data everywhere is a bad thing (smart water meter or not).
In this case, there are traditional limitations on law enforcement (requirement of a warrant) and a specific crime that has been committed.
In my opinion, using a warrant to get the data from the water usage device is no more problematic than using a warrant to search the house.
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those patterns would be easily detected in the dataset. I tried logging my electricity use. You can easily see what time I wake up each day, when I get home, whether I watch TV or not, whether I cook using the microwave or the hob. It doesn't show up on my graph, but I'd bet from the data you can see exactly when I go to bed, since I plug in my phone (+1W) and switch off the last light (-5W). Within all this, the fri…
> It doesn't show up on my graph, but I'd bet from the data you can see exactly when I go to bed, since I plug in my phone (+1W) and switch off the last light (-5W). You'd probably have a viable business model if you could actually do that. Existing options like Neurio cannot reliably detect devices pulling single-digit power draws.
Assuming that digital electric meters are fair, it's quite easy to use them for this purpose. Most houses in the UK are fitted/will be fitted with them.
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it is. I expect cops to ask the provider for a copy of the messages as well. pretty sure deleting incriminating evidence is obstruction of justice Probably, but so what?
This thread started with the idea that someone might want their Alexa records as evidence of their innocence. I doubt that an innocent person would commit a crime to remove potentially incriminating evidence from their voluntarily offered evidence. The prosecution very well might subpoena those records if they thought there was value in so doing. Edit: grammars
And my point is that the records are useless as evidence, since the cops can't trust them, therefore an innocent person would want Amazon to provide the recordings themselves anyway.
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the cost of laser diodes is now pennies, how much would it cost to target every window in a city?
You still have to distribute and read those sensors.
I'm imagining drones putting sensor domes with ~100 laser diodes each on top of existing street lights, using in the order of a few watts from a small solar cell and battery to do basic signal processing (most windows will be silent most of the time) and uploading anything possibly interesting over a standard mobile data connection.
Then process the possibly interesting signals with a voice-to-text system similar to Alexa/Siri/Google/Cortana and now there's a searchable text database of everything spoken next to a window in a city.
That would be, what, mid tens to mid hundreds of millions of £ for London? Compared to the annual budget of £3.24 billion?
edit: possibility->possibly
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your first statement is correct, but not because of what you said in your second. Google "ubiquitous law enforcement" for some good reading.
That was an excellent read, as Vernor Vinge usually is. I've certainly used anti-surveillance arguments like "what if some employee misuses the data", and I mean them, but it's not my fundamental objection. On a much deeper level, I worry about surveillance as an inherent harm. Partly as the death of privacy (a right in itself, to me), largely as a de facto power transfer to the state. I think Seeing Like a State is…
> Seeing Like a State is right when it argues that states depend on 'legibility'.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn...
Re: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even having the discussion. It's default "no and fuck off" until then.
Unfortunately, that assumes that "you" have that choice. Individually, I'm sure you can rip out, mutilate, deface, damage or what have you to devices that report fine-grained time-series data. But the moment you go anywhere else, you're being recorded, watched, monitored, measured, and recorded. It's already being done, and it's way past time that we do have that discussion. Because without string and stark dialogue,…
>Unfortunately, that assumes that "you" have that choice.
>Individually, I'm sure you can rip out, mutilate, deface, damage or what have you to devices that report fine-grained time-series data. But the moment you go anywhere else, you're being recorded, watched, monitored, measured, and recorded.
There are a variety of ways that this can be done, most of them revolving around visibility and community education.
Stop using facebook, stop buying voice assistants. Refuse to sign up for accounts that require your personal data. Be offended. Tell cashiers in shops on no uncertain terms that they don't need your email address to sell you things. Be a leader by telling people around you that you have consciously made these decisions, and /why/ you have made them.
Attach your public key whenever you email someone. Inevitably, someone will ask what the attachment is. Use it as an excuse to tell them about encrypted email.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Early next month I'll be getting an old stock but new in box feature phone from the UK. it's from 2011, it cost me $30 including shipping. It has a browser, SMS, a phone and /nothing else/. I look forward to showing off my new phone to everyone at work and explaining I ditched my Galaxy ace 4 because I didn't feel in control of it. It's partially a token gesture, I can still be tracked via the GSM connection, but it's a talking point. It keeps the problem in peoples faces.
The US government doesn't give a shit about the legality of what they're doing. They have a "secret court" that no one is allowed to ask about that is "authorizing" all the things they are doing. Clearly, you're not going to win them over by town hall debates. What we need is gentle but powerful groundswell opinion against surveillance, the kind that threatens election results.
P.S, you can also move to places where this shit doesn't happen. I moved from Australia to Iceland, and at least 30% of my reasoning to do so was that Australia is actively turning into a surveillance state.