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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

#41

Post by nolok »

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"

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

#42

Post by adrianN »

lostlogin wrote: post #31
Dylan16807 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why sarcasm? If I was being attacked and remembered I would absolutely do that.

And the next question, what would you say to ensure it was recorded, identifiable, sent to the right person and had the right phrasing to ensure it could be used in court?

"Alexa, call the police"? Would that work?

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

#43

Post by ISL »

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

Alexa, call the police! #### is here, and he's trying to hurt me!

Seems like a pretty good use for a voice-activated service.

"Alexa, lock the doors!" also sounds useful in this context.

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

#44

Post by XorNot »

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…

Well for one thing the police still had to get a court order to get the data. That's not "warrantless".

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

#45

Post by uptown »

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…

Why would you need voice? Just translate to text and send that. It’d be a very very small payload.

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

#46

Post by peteretep »

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 [etc]

> It smacks of “think of the children!”

Your original comment of "against the homeowner" reads to me as a similar appeal to emotion.

> The accessibility/retention of the recordings for law enforcement

The particulars here seem to be that they probably don't have recordings, and those recordings -- if they exist -- were only obtainable under court supervision. You muddled -- deliberately or accidentally -- both of these points in your post.

> the NSA

Who were mentioned precisely zero places in the original article.

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

Except you've created a gigantic strawman:

* Law abiding citizen

* Warrantless seizure

* Referring to these devices as recording devices, where that's a serious distortion of the functionality they offer, and it's entirely unclear if there are any saved audio files, anywhere

* Claiming that the NSA would refer to diverting recordings from this as non-collections

And then attacked that.

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

#47

Post by michaelmrose »

ethbro wrote: post #25
rtpg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#48

Post by peteretep »

danso wrote: post #20
peteretep wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a valid sealed court order If the government show up with a valid court order, generally they can do what the hell they want? That's how justice works in a democracy?

I mean, yes? The need for a valid court order is so that the executive branch (e.g. law enforcement) can’t unilaterally surveil and detain people. The court makes this decision by looking at the laws, which are passed by the legislative branch. If the elected legislature passes a law that vastly lowers the barrier for govt intrusion, well, it’s not a great situation, but it is possible under democratic principles.

My comment was unclear, and I agree that this is how it's meant to work.

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

#49

Post by teraflop »

uptown wrote: post #45
oh-kumudo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you need voice? Just translate to text and send that. It’d be a very very small payload.

The Alexa hardware is cheap and doesn't have a lot of computational horsepower, so you can get better accuracy by doing the speech recognition on the server side.

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

#50

Post by monotone666 »

14 wrote: post #32
iknowstuff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is what I was thinking as well. Slowly creep until they have to power to turn on a persons phone at will to look and listen.

I once drew the ire of a large private security company and could have sworn they had the ability to listen to my cell phone microphone
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