Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect’s Echo recordings

Ideally we'd want to get the benefits without the abuse, but that requires a solid bureaucracy and strong rules.

Hypothetically speaking if you were doing some grey-hat, "illegal" probing/hack at the time of a murder the police question you about; admitting to your actual activity could result in more time behind bars than a murder. If this activity was somehow vaguely recorded and correlated with an activity of the murderer then you have a serious problem.

Recording everyones data everywhere just in case it might be relevant to an extremely rare event like a murder is very dangerous. The use of NSA recording capabilities by employees to digitally stalk victims of their affection (LOVEINT) is a clear example of how badly this kind of collection can go wrong.

That's obviously a slippery-slope argument, but it's not outwith the realms of possibility that if I can think of doing something like that, politicians (especially those!) can think of it as well.

2. The water company collects all this data from everyone with the device.

3. As the Mirai botnet showed, it's not just the government who might have access to that data.

You might trust the current custodians of $BACKDOOR, but do you trust all future possible custodians that have dominion over that role? Keep in mind that nothing is technically restricting them to look only at possible murder.

As long as these storage units don't simply begin to 'top off' when they are drained, the usage could be masked by averaging and predicting demand.

very simplified water day

6am - Toilet flush & hand wash 2 Gal

7am - Shower 36 Gal

8am - Breakfast - Coffee, Oatmeal, Dishwashing - 2 Gal

6pm - Dinner & dishwasher - 8 gal

10pm - flush and brush - 2.5 Gal

So you'd want a constant 2.1 gallons to be fed in from the street per hour, and you'd need a minimum 40 gallon reserve tank to cover that day.

Still, they need to get a warrant.

If my reading of this is correct, seems like all Amazon is really saying here is they're refusing to hand over the data until they're "properly served" the warrant.

The Guardian article did mention that "Arkansas police issued a warrant to Amazon to turn over recordings" but as IANAL it's unclear to me whether or not that's the same as actually serving the warrant, legally speaking.

Is "issuing" a warrant the same as "serving" it?

They aren't assuming Amazon holds everything said in proximity of the device.

It's still up in the air whether going to a third-party to whom you've voluntarily given a bunch of information about yourself and asking that third-party to render that information is "unreasonable." It's pretty simple to make a case that it isn't. To wit: there's plenty of legal precedent for compelling a witness to testify against someone; are we to believe that your Amazon logs or your water meter history should share the same privileged status as your attorney, psychotherapist, or priest? "Alexa, forgive me, for I have sinned..."

He said this 18 months before the real names policy, and he actually said it as a warning to users.

I haven't put a lot of thought into it, but from a practical standpoint, my argument would be something along the lines of a similar sentiment to Mr. Schmidt: "If you're homosexual in a country where that's a death sentence, please keep your head down until you can get out. Learn how to encrypt everyting. Don't rely on any third-party providers that you can't trust. Don't hand the murderer your own noose." And that sucks, because it's brutally unfair, but "brutally unfair" is assumed when talking about nations where homosexuality is punishable by death.

From a moral standpoint, my argument would be something along the lines of "Murder is a horrible evil and homosexuality is not. We should be able to reserve more tools legally to track down murderers than to pry into someone's personal sexual preferences, and I'm lucky to live in a country where (generally) things are seen that way, most of the time." We already do reserve more tools legally to investigate a criminal case; privacy can be encroached upon by existing common-law methods. The question of interest is really, are your water logs and Alexa conversations priest-and-spouse-like or best-friend-like?

Possibly more importantly: how does the replacement argument map to practical action? If we decide that we don't want to allow collected logs to be subpoenaed for murder trials (or we decide logs should be legally banned from being collectible---that'll make a lot of personal-improvement projects illegal, but let's entertain it for a second), how will that help homosexuals in countries where it's punishable by the death penalty? Those countries will look at our worst-case-scenario reasoning, say "That's nice," and then go on to log citizen activities anyway. The "should we" argument has absolutely no bearing on the capability argument, and if we're going to bring other nations into the risk model, we have to talk capability.

Article headline: Amazon refuses to let police access US murder suspect's Echo recordings.

If your point is that the suspect is not a proven murderer, then yes, of course I was speaking loosely and not adhering to the legal definition of innocence until proven guilty. But in point of fact, yes, we do strip some privacy away from murder suspects when suspcicion has justified a warrant or subpoena. It's quite necessary in investigating a murder to do so, and we generally have no issue with detectives asking a person's friends, employers, etc. about their activities on and about the night of a heinous crime.

The question of interest here is whether your Alexa logs should be considered "Something you told a friend" or "Something you told a lawyer / priest / spouse." The question of whether police are allowed to pry into a murder suspect's private life, indirectly, with a warrant when they are investigating a murder is well-settled common law.

This. Eric Schmidt should release its own full dataset to show us that he thinks this is true. Unless he is doing things he should not be doing in the first place ?

"the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

That seems like a good warning, hardly evidence of some nefarious bias.

Pragmatic question regarding this type of advice. It's easy to say "call a lawyer", sure, but like many Americans under age 35, I do not presently have a lawyer in a meaningful sense of the term. (I had one once, for a very specific matter regarding a visa for another country - it was four-figure expensive - that relationship is now over.)

Suppose the police show up at my door in half an hour. What do I actually do? Or, suppose that they're not showing up in half an hour but I'd like to be generally prepared. What steps can I take to do so while keeping the up-front pre-police-raid 'expensive' in the low to middle three figure sums, or thereabouts?

So this only applies to businesses and wealthy individuals? If this is the case, we already lost the fight for equal rights.

Yes. Because you value your privacy of hobbies and speech.

This is a murder case. How could someone value their hobbies and freedom above the jurisdictional process?

Not a great example of having nothing to hide, but a great example of a broad search that found an entirely different crime.

They do not have to fish for a crime. The crime is given, but the circumstances are probably not.

I just have the feeling, that refusing to provide the data to solve cases like this will probably hurt everyone more in the long run. If the police cannot get the data this way, they will probably try another way or change the law.

Very much agree, because there's a difference between being "innocent" and actually innocent. Only the former matters, it's subjective (jury/judge) and unknown to everyone but you, ex ante.

Sometimes the police are more invested in finding a criminal rather than the criminal.

To obtain a search warrant or arrest warrant, the law enforcement officer must demonstrate probable cause that a search or seizure is justified. An authority, usually a magistrate, will consider the totality of circumstances and determine whether to issue the warrant. [1]

I agree to your statement, if there is no search warrant. But in this case an authority already decided that the search is justified. What use are search warrants then if they can all be refused?

I understand, that even a magistrate or whatever can make errors. But if this happens a lot, the consequence will be, that search warrants are issued without second thought and the person/company affected by the search should always deny it first.

I'm all for privacy and defending individual rights, but cases like this make a farce out of court orders and the whole jurisdictional process.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fourth_amendment

"Here's the command from the Echo Dot." "Great, what should I do?" "Can't tell you; it's encrypted."

How would one determine if it is not buffering and compressing data client-side for later transmission during "firmware" updates?

Additionally, who has setup an automated testing framework for such things after each firmware upgrade?

How many firmware upgrades have there been for the Echo?

Also, how do we know that your Echo and my Echo are running the same firmware, and will always run the same firmware version?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone

EULA does not cover it, your visitors did not signed it. Only way is to put label: "This area is monitored by CCTV"...

Also recording phone calls could be illegal. Amazon should put disclaimer before every conversation :-)

me: "Alexa"

al: "This conversation might be recorded for monitoring and training purposes"

me: "Call Dad"

(I am not lawyer)