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Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

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Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#101

Post by dogismycopilot »

politician wrote: post #86
rz2k wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the police be able to enter any house with locks they can pick? I suppose that would educate people, too. edit: I misread the comment as, " without a warrant"! Ugh

I don't understand your rebuttal. Are you disputing that LE does not have the ability to request a wire tap from a judge with a warrant? Wouldn't you want the police be able to intervene when they hear or observe shouting or fighting through an open door or window? Are you suggesting that a network-attached microphone is not equivalent to an open window? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine )

I, for one, do not want the police coming to "shouting". Talk about a nanny state.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#102

Post by politician »

supergeek133 wrote: post #96
politician wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given Stuxnet, your position seems dangerously naive. There is really only one question: can this device be remotely modified to passively monitor a specific device in a way that is relatively undetectable to the end user? If the answer is no, then fine. If the answer is yes, then what guarantee do you have that the ratchet of tyranny will not eventually deploy those capabilities? "I'm not hiding anything" is a poor…

People have discovered how to at least gain access locally. https://github.com/echohacking/wiki/wiki https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/4inesj/rooting_the_... Am I saying people shouldn't be skeptical? No. But I'm saying people are focusing on a subset of devices when they've had cordless phones, cell phones, and PCs in their homes for decades. I just get tired of the constant fear-mongering, if we have evidenc…

PCs, cell phones, and cordless phones have all previously been tapped or hacked on behalf of law enforcement and other actors, so people generally know and understand what they're getting into there.

These microphone devices are new. People, even HNers, mistakenly think that these devices are not listening until a magic word is uttered (full stop). Many people will not realize that the connection to the internet is bidirectional for data AND code (updates). That's really bad - it means that people don't understand the capabilities of the device they've brought into their homes.

There is a problem here and the evidence is plain: (a) wide spread ignorance about how these things work, and (b) the hot mic combined with the network connection imply a capability, even if currently unexpressed. Device manufactures are not adequately informing the public of the possible side effects of these products.

Therefore, I believe that LE should gain access to these devices with a warrant under the Third Party Doctrine, and that these warrants should be published on sites like HN so that people may become aware just as they are aware of taps on phones.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#103

Post by trevyn »

chrishacken wrote: post #65
cryptarch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would cost about $30m a year if you tailor the system to flagging specific data for storage and don't naively store every moment (e.g. you scrap silent moments and use VBR encoding). Storing a year's worth of 96kbps audio costs 380GB. If you don't record silence and you assume the people around an Alexa are only speaking for at most 4 hours a day on average, that goes down to 76GB a year. So if you then assume 5m…

Based on the costs of disks alone, their cost per PB is actually around $35k. They likely get a volume discount, so we can lower that estimate even more and say $25-30k. Bandwidth is essentially free even though they charge ridiculous amounts of money for it on their services. You can get a 10Gbps link for as low as $2,000 if you buy it on-net and in bulk, Amazon probably gets it even cheaper. So ~3PB/month for $1,00…

Pointer? My understanding was that economy 10Gbps transit would be closer to $4-5k/month.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#104

Post by happynewyear »

ajross wrote: post #77
gordyf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need for speculation: you can open the Alexa app and play back your own queries, audio and all. There's even a help section titled, "How do I delete Alexa voice recordings", which reads: "You can delete specific voice recordings associated with your account by going to History in Settings in the Alexa App, drilling down for a specific entry, and then tapping the delete button. Or, you can delete all voice recordin…

Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.

It's a great question. Reminds me of Uber and its new policy of monitoring location of customers few minutes after drop off "to improve service".

It is also true that if Alexa was listening in on conversations so as to have "social conversation context" for "improved processing of commands" ... well.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#105

Post by gordyf »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #90
gordyf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be making a distinction where none exists. Can you give me an example of what "other stuff" you're referring to? (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon on a related product.)

If I have a conversation about coffee without once saying the word Alexa, will that conversation be stored by Amazon

As others are posting here, the Echo is obvious about when it's recording: when the onboard hardware detects the wake-word, the LED rings light up blue and it begins streaming audio to Amazon until the Alexa service determines that the query has been completed or that there's nothing more to hear. People have monitored the network activity of their Echoes to verify this (and if you don't trust that, well, nothing I say will help you.)

Sometimes the wake-word detection is mistakenly triggered and some unrelated audio gets streamed to Amazon, but the LEDs will still light up, and at times it'll even reply to a query that was never intended (I've been watching TV when my Echo will hear something and reply that I don't have any timers set, or whatever) but these recordings would still be covered by the link I pasted in the help text above.

I think a lot of the HN paranoia about these devices is overblown. All of this functionality is provided by devices that you already own, including hardware wake-word detection on all modern smartphones, which I assume everyone here carries around everywhere and recharges daily without much concern.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#106

Post by politician »

dogismycopilot wrote: post #101
politician wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your rebuttal. Are you disputing that LE does not have the ability to request a wire tap from a judge with a warrant? Wouldn't you want the police be able to intervene when they hear or observe shouting or fighting through an open door or window? Are you suggesting that a network-attached microphone is not equivalent to an open window? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine )

I, for one, do not want the police coming to "shouting". Talk about a nanny state.

Agreed.

I meant to convey the idea of imminent and threatening speech.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#108

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

mcphage wrote: post #92
ajross wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once more though: that's just the audio flagged as a "query" by Amazon and stored as such. What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? It's a serious question, and one that I think Amazon (and anyone else streaming audio to the cloud, Siri and Google Voice Search are only slightly less constrained) needs to have an answer for.

> What about other stuff that gets uploaded prior to NLP & validation? I would be very surprised if Amazon sends everything up to the cloud; it would be very expensive to do so. Looking for "Alexa" in the audio is done locally, and probably triggers recording then.

I don't think the expensive part is accurate. Voice sounds okay using the G.729 VOIP codec at 8kbps. Capturing and storing that amount of data, for every Echo user, 24 hrs a day would be trivial for company the size of Amazon.

As others have pointed out, network monitoring has shown the Echo only transmits after it's heard the wake-word, so it would appear Amazon doesn't capture everything.

Re: Police seek Amazon Echo data in murder case

#109

Post by Fuzzwah »

Marazan wrote: post #78
frik wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> computational costs alone of doing NLP The speech recognition part could run on a Pentium 133 in the nineties (Nuance software, Dragon naturally speaking), the Echo device has probably a more powerful CPU than that. The NLP part could run on the device as well, it's mainly a storage problem, you need dozens of GB, at least 32GB sdcard. Ideally only the search phrases would be sent to Google/Amazon/etc. That's also…

And that software in that era ha to be painstakibgly trained for each individual voice. Echo "just works", and is clearly doing it by punting to the cloud.

Only the wake word needs to be processed locally.
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