Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NH judge orders Amazon to give Echo recordings in murder case

wmur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 185 posts

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

#111

Post by udkyo »

nolok wrote: post #41
danso wrote: post #6

I know that this article itself doesn’t have much content but I’m interested in what the police are actually requesting, and what they end up getting. Do they assume/suspect that Echo/Amazon continuously records and logs audio, akin to a security camera? Or do they have evidence that Echo was actually activated around the time of the murders, or afterwards by the suspect himself? I was also interested in this quote:…

I sincerely doubt people don't realise that anything after the trigger is sent home, since a "feature" of alexa is that the app let you see each request you made, how alexa answered, and let them know if she got it wrong. I think it's more a case of "don't care" / "don't realize the risks"

On going into the app to let it know when it gets things wrong: I’d love to have it just listen for a “thank you” for a few seconds after it does whatever it thinks we’ve asked it to do.

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

#112

Post by will_brown »

zaroth wrote: post #30
will_brown wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ba…

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

Because the facts of this case are direct counter examples to all your points.

You claim no one is surprised Alexa is used in court against homeowners. Surprise Alexa (and video surviellence) are actually being used as a alibi for the homeowners innocence and potentially helping bring the murderer of the homeowners girlfriend and friend to justice.

You bring up warrantless searches. Again in this case no warrant would be needed because the homeowner would want to voluntarily waive their rights and turn over any and all recording that might help prove his innocence and bring the murderer to justice.

It’s strange you would question why I would bring up the facts of the case and call that a think about the children arguement. Whereas ignoring the facts to make arguements that are contradicted by the facts of this case is exactly that...a think about the children [privacy] arguement.

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

#113

Post by andrepd »

jeremyjh wrote: post #105
ryanlol wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Echo is doing far more surreptitious surveillance and analysis, i.e. not just listening for the trigger word This should be trivial to prove.

It has been demonstrated that it does not send network traffic apart from requests made to it; e.g. it is not continuously streaming data. Of course that could be changed at any time with a software update that you have no choice about accepting. To prove it is not recording locally could be much more difficult, but there are practical questions there. What media is it recording to, and if the recordings are never se…

That does not demonstrate anything. It could "buffer" the data it wants to send and only send it after the trigger word is detected, precisely to trick such naive analysis.

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

#114

Post by etskinner »

exolymph wrote: post #98
msla wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if the judge is feeling especially generous, they'll respond to you with a Wikipedia article on contempt of court.

No, because the point of client-side encryption is that the service provider does not have the data to hand over.

I think the point is, if all they sent was a wiki article, they wouldn't be responding to the spirit of the subpoena. Instead they'd be expected to write up an explanation that they don't keep full data, and they would probably still be required to hand over metadata that might be useful.

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

#115

Post by hiram112 »

andrepd wrote: post #113
jeremyjh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been demonstrated that it does not send network traffic apart from requests made to it; e.g. it is not continuously streaming data. Of course that could be changed at any time with a software update that you have no choice about accepting. To prove it is not recording locally could be much more difficult, but there are practical questions there. What media is it recording to, and if the recordings are never se…

That does not demonstrate anything. It could "buffer" the data it wants to send and only send it after the trigger word is detected, precisely to trick such naive analysis.

I would hope the researchers were competent enough to space out their explicit uploads with varying periods of noise, while also finding a decent approximation of how much data is uploaded per x seconds of audio.

Sure, Amazon could use all sorts of tricks to attempt to throw off reverse engineering, but it would be pretty hard to do so with a large enough set of tests.

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

#116

Post by ghaff »

jacquesm wrote: post #103
danso wrote: post #6

I know that this article itself doesn’t have much content but I’m interested in what the police are actually requesting, and what they end up getting. Do they assume/suspect that Echo/Amazon continuously records and logs audio, akin to a security camera? Or do they have evidence that Echo was actually activated around the time of the murders, or afterwards by the suspect himself? I was also interested in this quote:…

> she It. Alexa is a a device, not a person.

As are ships. But we still often say she.

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

#118

Post by ReverseCold »

ghaff wrote: post #116
jacquesm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> she It. Alexa is a a device, not a person.

As are ships. But we still often say she.

I think using pronouns reserved for humans on a ship (engineered mass of wood/metal that doesn't spy on you and you can own) is more acceptable than using it on a company (which spies on you, is not something you own, etc).

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

#119

Post by ethbro »

michaelmrose wrote: post #47
ethbro wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't see any distinction between A) Giving the government access to communications that provider already has legal access to. B) Collecting additional data from inside homes by exploiting current legal access to the software?

When the only difference is Amazon making a silent firmware push, or endangering $10B+ of business?

No.

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

#120

Post by danso »

etskinner wrote: post #114
exolymph wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the point of client-side encryption is that the service provider does not have the data to hand over.

I think the point is, if all they sent was a wiki article, they wouldn't be responding to the spirit of the subpoena. Instead they'd be expected to write up an explanation that they don't keep full data, and they would probably still be required to hand over metadata that might be useful.

And to be fair, the original commenter didn’t say that the only thing sent was the wiki article. It might be one of a dozen URLs included in the company’s reply boilerplate.
Post reply on HN