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NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

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Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#21

Post by hkai »

curiousgal wrote: post #11
themagician wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not possible. This is a classic example of the legal system confusing reality with science fiction. You can monitor Echo itself over your network and quickly realize that it’s not sending a constant stream of voice data. For the most part the device is off until it hears its name.

Maybe they're hoping one of the parties involved yelled "Alexa!" as the crime was taking place. /s

No, but calls to Alexa could at least establish certain timeframes when someone was doing something or was present at home.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#22

Post by oh-kumudo »

shakna wrote: post #3

I still don't understand why this is possible. I've frequently seen the claim that an Echo only records brief snippets, looking for the wake word. If that's so, there's next to nothing for Amazon to hand over.

Sending voice data constantly is easy to catch on the user's side, by simply monitoring the traffic. So once they got caught, it is going to cause them a huge fortune and completely meltdown in terms of customer trust. And on the technical side, this makes very little sense either, they only needs to have the Alexa keyword detected then went through the backend ASR service, otherwise the cost is going to be overwhelming.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#23

Post by trhway »

wpdev_63 wrote: post #15

This isn't really a shocker. They have been known since 2006[0] that the police(+TLA's) can use your cellphone as a eavesdropping tool. The biggest problem I fear is that this will become socially acceptable in US as it has with the authoritarian gov't in China. [0]: https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdr...

Why it may be not socially acceptable yet, it is already socially accepted :).

Between smartphone, car computer, video cameras everywhere, license plates readers, credit card records, etc. government has pretty much all the details of my life (in some fusion center by Palantir). Adding smart home, drones and whatever else just incrementally improves the quality of that collection while not changing the already established situation in principle.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#24

Post by PascLeRasc »

themagician wrote: post #8
shakna wrote: post #3

I still don't understand why this is possible. I've frequently seen the claim that an Echo only records brief snippets, looking for the wake word. If that's so, there's next to nothing for Amazon to hand over.

It’s not possible. This is a classic example of the legal system confusing reality with science fiction. You can monitor Echo itself over your network and quickly realize that it’s not sending a constant stream of voice data. For the most part the device is off until it hears its name.

iFixit reports that it has 4GB of storage onboard [1]. That's room for 97 hours of mp3 96kbps audio [2], and if we're going full conspiracy they could have put an entirely different flash chip in there with the wrong markings.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Dot+Teardown/613... [2] https://soundandpicture.com/2011/06/audio-memory-cards-how-m...

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#25

Post by ethbro »

rtpg wrote: post #16
ethbro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, if the government comes to Amazon with a valid sealed court order, are you willing to bet they'll stand up rather than start streaming audio recordings home? Amazon winning DoD cloud business is actually the smartest thing the US government could do to align interests.

What would even be the legal basis for such a court order?

Terrorism related investigations.

It's not a legal stretch to extend CALEA wiretaps to IoT devices. And if the device manufacturer cooperates (in the same way ATT does), then the hurdles shrink drastically.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#26

Post by dunpeal »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #24
themagician wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not possible. This is a classic example of the legal system confusing reality with science fiction. You can monitor Echo itself over your network and quickly realize that it’s not sending a constant stream of voice data. For the most part the device is off until it hears its name.

iFixit reports that it has 4GB of storage onboard [1]. That's room for 97 hours of mp3 96kbps audio [2], and if we're going full conspiracy they could have put an entirely different flash chip in there with the wrong markings. [1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Dot+Teardown/613... [2] https://soundandpicture.com/2011/06/audio-memory-cards-how-m...

It would be super sketchy if it records any audio, since there's no real reason or need to do that for the features it provides.

Also, if we're going conspiracy mode: we're all surrounded by devices with very good microphones that are always on, primarily our phones.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#27

Post by iknowstuff »

zaroth wrote: post #5
walrus01 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people looked at you like you were an absolute raving loon if you tried to explain the architecture of the ECHELON program, 15 years ago. Now who's laughing... I encourage everyone who is not familiar with them to read all of James Bamford's books on the NSA. And Robert Baer's books on the CIA.

But why make the government pay for it, when users will go on Amazon.com and pay to install their very own personal cloud home listening devices all by themselves?!

They're insignificant in all of this compared to smartphones.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#28

Post by arminiusreturns »

walrus01 wrote: post #4
zaroth wrote: post #2

In a surprise to no one, recording devices installed in users’ homes have recordings used in a court of law against the homeowner. In a surprise to no one, the third party doctrine means a warrant isn’t even required to demand these recordings from the cloud provider. In a surprise to no one, the NSA can intercept these recordings (and associated speech to text transcripts), load all the associated data into their mo…

And people looked at you like you were an absolute raving loon if you tried to explain the architecture of the ECHELON program, 15 years ago. Now who's laughing... I encourage everyone who is not familiar with them to read all of James Bamford's books on the NSA. And Robert Baer's books on the CIA.

You get it, but it's sad you get down votes instead of good discussion. Let's also not forget: John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, William Binney, Daniel Elsberg, James Risen, Ray McGovern, Sibel Edmonds, Michael Scheuer, and many more.

Collectively, they point to a much more insidious state of affairs than I think most people want to admit.

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#29

Post by Cyph0n »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #22
shakna wrote: post #3

I still don't understand why this is possible. I've frequently seen the claim that an Echo only records brief snippets, looking for the wake word. If that's so, there's next to nothing for Amazon to hand over.

Sending voice data constantly is easy to catch on the user's side, by simply monitoring the traffic. So once they got caught, it is going to cause them a huge fortune and completely meltdown in terms of customer trust. And on the technical side, this makes very little sense either, they only needs to have the Alexa keyword detected then went through the backend ASR service, otherwise the cost is going to be overwhelm…

Well, the recording could be near-continuous, but compressed and stored until a user makes a request. Therefore, you’d need to record the amount of data transmitted over a certain time period and set an upper bound based on that.

Of course, if you could install a custom cert on the device, you could just MiTM the connection and see exactly what is sent...

Re: NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

#30

Post by zaroth »

will_brown wrote: post #19
peteretep wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we read different articles? > recording devices installed in users’ homes have recordings used in a court of law against the homeowner I didn't read that Amazon have said they have recordings of the incident? Did they? It seemed like they "might". Was the alleged murderer the home-owner, or the victims? In the latter, it looks like they've been used to support justice for the homeowners? > the third party doctrin…

>Was the alleged murderer the home-owner, or the victims? It’s funny because the answer to this reveals a lot with respect to OPs comment about “being used against the homeowner in court”. 1. The homeowner was a known drug dealer to police and one of the victims was his girlfriend. (Normally these facts might make the homeowner a suspect) 2. As it turns out (maybe directly related the his reputation with police) he h…

How do the particulars of this case have any relevance as to;

1) The implication of widespread proliferation of these types of recording devices

2) The accessibility/retention of the recordings for law enforcement

3) The long-standing legal framework around the third party doctrine and the NSA’s willingness to abuse third-party private data for data mining

It smacks of “think of the children!” to talk about what a bad guy they’re using the tech to help catch. Of course the early cases are sympathetic!

It’s not hard to see what’s coming when they put large blinking neon signs like this case up for us.

It just so happens that the company that makes these devices will be deriving a large portion of its profits in the coming decades from the same government which will very deeply want access to these records.

It also just so happens the company that makes these devices has already demonstrated how eager it is to hawk its panopticonic AI to that very same government for the purposes of mass surveillance.

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