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Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

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Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#101

Post by pizzetta »

koolba wrote: post #3

This should be a lesson to people who don't understand the distinction between "can't" and "won't". If you're running things yourself and control the encryption keys required to access your data, then your service provider can't be compelled to release your data as it's not possible[1][2]. If you're delegating all of that to your service provider and they have access to the raw data, then you are putting all your tru…

But in this case, even if defendant had developed a system by themselves and had complete control over the data, nothing is preventing him from turning it over as well. Here they are complying with a customer's wishes and I imagine the same person would decide to open their own data if they had developed their own system.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#102

Post by dpark »

austenallred wrote: post #64
joezydeco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From looking at the internals, there's technically nothing that prevents uploading all audio constantly to AWS. Practically, it would be unwieldy to have 10,000,000 devices sending audio to 10,000,000 audio decoding and processes 24 hours a day nonstop. You'd also see a huge bandwidth hit at your ISP, which would certainly kill future adoptions if the word got out.

So record the audio 24/7 and compress and send once an hour? Once a day? Or eliminate empty space first. The files wouldn't be that big

Compression over an hour or a day won't do anything meaningful vs compression over, say, a minute. There's just not that much additional redundancy to eliminate. Uploading in a big burst doesn't save on overall bandwidth, either.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#103

Post by CPLX »

YCode wrote: post #71
danielsamuels wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without trying being rude, surely this was obvious before you purchased it?

Bruce Schneier wrote a great essay on this topic: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychol... In short, we "feel" security more than we reason about it and once a risk has been personified we lend a lot more weight to it.

That is a really interesting link.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#104

Post by CPLX »

acomar wrote: post #81
gtirloni wrote: post #2

> after the defendant consented

Why did the defendant's lawyer allow this? I don't understand how this could possibly help the defense.

Well at least one explanation is that the defendant is actually innocent, and thus isn't worried it will be incriminating.

Another explanation is the defense is sufficiently convinced that nothing conclusive will be found anyways, and think that acting as if they have nothing to hide will make them look more innocent.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#105

Post by squarefoot »

austenallred wrote: post #64
joezydeco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From looking at the internals, there's technically nothing that prevents uploading all audio constantly to AWS. Practically, it would be unwieldy to have 10,000,000 devices sending audio to 10,000,000 audio decoding and processes 24 hours a day nonstop. You'd also see a huge bandwidth hit at your ISP, which would certainly kill future adoptions if the word got out.

So record the audio 24/7 and compress and send once an hour? Once a day? Or eliminate empty space first. The files wouldn't be that big

Totally possible. As an example, Codec2 used in ham-radio applications can send pretty decent voice audio at a few kilobit/s or less, and it keeps sounding perfectly understandable even at 1.2 kbit/s like this short sample: http://www.rowetel.com/downloads/codec2/hts1a_1200.wav

More information here: http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#106

Post by nojvek »

pizzetta wrote: post #101
koolba wrote: post #3

This should be a lesson to people who don't understand the distinction between "can't" and "won't". If you're running things yourself and control the encryption keys required to access your data, then your service provider can't be compelled to release your data as it's not possible[1][2]. If you're delegating all of that to your service provider and they have access to the raw data, then you are putting all your tru…

But in this case, even if defendant had developed a system by themselves and had complete control over the data, nothing is preventing him from turning it over as well. Here they are complying with a customer's wishes and I imagine the same person would decide to open their own data if they had developed their own system.

That assumes the data is there in the first place. What if Alexa just didn't record everything everyone said. It just sounds really really dumb.

Like snapchat saving every image privately shared on a server. It's such a big scam. Sole reason I'm not buying their shares.

I'm hoping someday we'll get true offline speech to annotated text translation that we as consumers control. Like I control what data is in my machine's hdd.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#107

Post by squarefoot »

ynniv wrote: post #93
npongratz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain there exists nothing to reveal. Is there a technical limitation of the system that prevents or avoids recording of "non-'Alexa'" audio? Or do I just trust Amazon when they say their alway-on device only records when triggered with the magic word? As I think about it, I'd ask the same regarding the voice-controllable phone in my pocket. FWIW, I don't trust the devices, because their operations are out…

I don't have a link, but the echo doesn't transmit network data until the watchword is detected. It probably has a small local buffer, but not large enough to be useful here. So I expect that an unmodified echo would not provide historical evidence, but there's probably a way for one to be configured to stream audio continuously.

Unfortunately the only way to check if the above is true would be by examining the device firmware.

Also, the definition of "unmodified" and "configured" is very broad in this context. There's no need for a screwdriver or messing with a JTAG port when a well hidden magic packet coming from the Internet can trigger a watchword=off function.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#108

Post by scotch_drinker »

saycheese wrote: post #85
rayiner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. If you delete all data after a year pursuant to a well established practice, the court should not be able to hold you in contempt. But if your explanation smacks of destruction of evidence, then you've got a problem. Remember, it's not about what you did, in fact (the judge and the prosecutor can't know that). It's about what the circumstantial suggests you did.

Just to be clear, my assumption was the jurisdiction was US federal law, the entity deleting the data was an individual, the data was their data, and the systems deleting the data were owned by them; this based on the context as I understood it provided by the comment I replied to of this thread. As such, would you please explain why you provide a timeframe for keeping the data prior to deleting it?

I think he's saying "If you have a policy of deleting your data older than X, you are OK." You have to be able to prove that well before being asked for the data, you had a policy that resulted in it being deleted.

Where I work, we delete emails older than 6 months as a company policy. I have to assume this is done for exactly this reason. Don't ask why we might want to do that, I'm not in charge. :-)

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#109

Post by dheera »

austenallred wrote: post #64
joezydeco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From looking at the internals, there's technically nothing that prevents uploading all audio constantly to AWS. Practically, it would be unwieldy to have 10,000,000 devices sending audio to 10,000,000 audio decoding and processes 24 hours a day nonstop. You'd also see a huge bandwidth hit at your ISP, which would certainly kill future adoptions if the word got out.

So record the audio 24/7 and compress and send once an hour? Once a day? Or eliminate empty space first. The files wouldn't be that big

Not to mention that people aren't actually speaking 24/7. In any given space there are probably people talking for less than 10% of the day.

Re: Amazon to hand over Echo audio from alleged murder after defendant consents

#110

Post by dheera »

koolba wrote: post #3

This should be a lesson to people who don't understand the distinction between "can't" and "won't". If you're running things yourself and control the encryption keys required to access your data, then your service provider can't be compelled to release your data as it's not possible[1][2]. If you're delegating all of that to your service provider and they have access to the raw data, then you are putting all your tru…

Apple and Amazon also have some amount of clout that helps them stand their ground to a great degree in situations like this. The Feds realize that if they shut down Amazon or Apple, the country is going to fall to pieces.

As usual, startups are the ones that will suffer if faced with a situation like this.

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