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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

#131

Post by npongratz »

shostack wrote: post #77
dade_ wrote: post #21

At this point I assume they have a warrant, so I don't understand what the problem is. People should assume their devices can and will be used against them. A much more tricky conversation is when a friend of mine discovered that fragments of his a session with his psychologist recorded by his Android Wear watch.

Can you share more details? How did they discover it?

Not OP, but I'd guess through Google's Voice & Audio Activity page [0].

Mine happens to be littered with expletives directed at Google, from self-psychotherapy when my pocket computer false-positives my voice, or most surprisingly and infuriatingly, silence.

[0] https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?utm_source=help&res...

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

#132

Post by dade_ »

shostack wrote: post #77
dade_ wrote: post #21

At this point I assume they have a warrant, so I don't understand what the problem is. People should assume their devices can and will be used against them. A much more tricky conversation is when a friend of mine discovered that fragments of his a session with his psychologist recorded by his Android Wear watch.

Can you share more details? How did they discover it?

I don't have Android Wear. But as he explained it he went to the Google personal data page that shows you the data they've collected on you and said there were audio recordings and transcripts with words and phrases that seemed odd but then he realized where he said them.

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

#133

Post by squarefoot »

kbenson wrote: post #122
squarefoot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To spell it out, that's extremely unlikely, it's not impossible . Just very, very costly.

You don't need to record 24/7. A well planned spying operation would involve multiple devices and connections, location discovery, proximity with other devices etc. Phones, tablets, Home and laptop PCs, Car PCs, Smart TVs, and pretty much every connected device, can be hijacked into becoming a bug or cooperate with any of them if in proximity. The victim cellphone could establish a secure connection via WiFi or Bluetooth with the Echo o any similar assistant, grab the audio data to transmit, alert the user some important upgrade is needed on the phone then start transmitting the data and fake some random download just to make the downlink act as it's receiving something. That way those 12 megabytes of data would remain totally unnoticed.

This is of course the product of tinfoilhattery at its finest level, until someone does it for real.

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

#134

Post by throwaway2016a »

andrepd wrote: post #62
wyldfire wrote: post #47

This is a non-issue. The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. Yes, it's possible that the defendants cat meowed right before the murder and it sounded like "Alexa". But it seems incredibly unlikely. Prosecutors are just trying to cover every base but the likelihood that this will yield anything is very low.

> The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. I wonder, how on earth do you know that, that you are able to dismiss it with such confidence as a non-issue. That's the problem with proprietary systems (proprietary always-on microphones at that). I would be surprised if they weren't actually listening and analysing and storing data from the…

I hear this all the time and it boils down to what another poster said. I can monitor all the traffic going through my network. If the device was constantly streaming audio it would be very obvious.

To which someone once replied to me: "But what if they aren't sending traffic through your network? What if they are using 4G or something like that?"

To which I replied that while I have not personally done it. You could scan using software defined radio to detect that sort of thing. And if it was doing that someone would notice. Plus if you tore down the hardware they would notice the antenna.

To which they replied "what it it uses something you can't detect with that?"

To which I walked away because I didn't feel like explaining how physics works.

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

#135

Post by kbenson »

squarefoot wrote: post #133
kbenson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To spell it out, that's extremely unlikely, it's not impossible . Just very, very costly.

You don't need to record 24/7. A well planned spying operation would involve multiple devices and connections, location discovery, proximity with other devices etc. Phones, tablets, Home and laptop PCs, Car PCs, Smart TVs, and pretty much every connected device, can be hijacked into becoming a bug or cooperate with any of them if in proximity. The victim cellphone could establish a secure connection via WiFi or Bluet…

Sure, I was just providing an upper bound for requirements if they decided to store all audio all the time from every device. Of companies that have the capability to do so under their own resources, Amazon in on the short list. Amazon could possibly pull it off and hide it in the rounding of numbers for their normal business.

Companies that interact (peer) with them would likely see something though, but possibly not as easily as it seems. The average home internet connection probably downloads far more than 12.6 MB of content from AWS hosted services every day. The only question is whether the upload amount would trigger any alarms. I think in most cases not, as it would probably just go a very small amount towards evening those peering connections out, which are likely very heavy in the other direction.

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

#136

Post by jamornh »

danielvf wrote: post #74
andrepd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The audio Amazon receives is from only-just-barely-before the wakeword up to and through the command or timeout expiration. I wonder, how on earth do you know that, that you are able to dismiss it with such confidence as a non-issue. That's the problem with proprietary systems (proprietary always-on microphones at that). I would be surprised if they weren't actually listening and analysing and storing data from the…

You can just watch the network traffic from the device to see when it is streaming audio. Now this obviously doesn't rule out the device saving stuff locally, but plenty of people have verified that it does generally only send lots of data to the server when you have just asked it to wake up.

Although that does not rule out the possibility that it stores data locally and only transmit the recorded payload (since the time of last transmission) with the next legitimate payload when the wake word is spoken.

Not saying that they do though since if they were discovered to be doing that, it's way too damaging for Amazon's reputation for it to be worth going through the trouble.

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

#137

Post by njharman »

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…

Except Amazon refused until defendant said it was OK.

It's often easier to coerce single person rotting jail on contempt charges than a huge corporation.

Point being, like everything, it is not as b/w, not as simple as you imply.

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

#138

Post by LordKano »

Karunamon wrote: post #124
dandelion_lover wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing the attack surface is already a good defense, even if you have a smartphone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%...

I don't know about you, but I have no desire to become a digital pariah and avoid useful technologies just because they may , at some nebulous point in the future, be used against me in some nebulous way. If and when that happens, we can fight it then. I'm a believer in picking my battles, and see no reason whatsoever to pick this one.

If all of your friends jumped off of a digital bridge... You know the rest.

It WILL be used if it isn't smothered in its crib.

It's the nature of both government and technology.

Today, it's about convenience and whiz-bang "Look at what we can do" demonstrations but if allowed to continue, it will become a tool of the surveillance state. It's too powerful a tool to be ignored.

When CALEA was up for debate, those of us who feared that it would lead to widespread surveillance were ridiculed. It turns out, we were right. We're right about this too.

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

#139

Post by njharman »

joezydeco wrote: post #56
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…

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.

You do realize this is same company running AWS. One of if not the largest network of cloud services. They can probably do that with idle capacity of one region.

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

#140

Post by njharman »

dade_ wrote: post #21

At this point I assume they have a warrant, so I don't understand what the problem is. People should assume their devices can and will be used against them. A much more tricky conversation is when a friend of mine discovered that fragments of his a session with his psychologist recorded by his Android Wear watch.

> people should assume

What I assume is that the bill of rights will not be subverted just because I use technology. The right to not be subject to search and right to not self incrimate.

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