Amazon Isn't Saying If Echo Has Been Wiretapped (zdnet.com) 86
An anonymous reader writes from a report via ZDNet: Since announcing how many government data requests and wiretap orders it receives, Amazon has so far issued two transparency reports. The two reports outline how many subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders the company received to cloud service, Amazon Web Services. The cloud makes up a large portion of all the data Amazon gathers, but the company does also collect vast amounts of data from its retail businesses, mobile services, book purchases, and requests made to Echo. The company's third report is due to be released in a few weeks but an Amazon spokesperson wouldn't comment on whether or not the company will expand its transparency report to include information regarding whether or not the Amazon Echo has been wiretapped. There are reportedly more than three million Amazon Echo speakers out in the wild. Gizmodo filed a freedom of information (FOIA) request with the FBI earlier this year to see if the agency had wiretapped an Echo as part of a criminal investigation. The FBI didn't confirm or deny wiretapping the Echo. Amazon was recently awarded a patent for drone docking and recharging stations that would be built on tall, existing structures like lampposts, cell towers, or church steeples.
It has (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It has (Score:5, Funny)
You mean Amazon ECH(el)O(n) ?
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You missed an "L", and you spelled "No" wrong. The "N" goes before the "O".
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This would only tell us if it's been wiretapped LEGALLY.
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+1000 Insightful here.
What they will do is use Parallel Construction to fake a case against anyone that had been illegally wiretapped.
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Also note that the transparency reports are incomplete. They don't include the number of times that the NSA simply asked GCHQ to hack an Amazon service, rather than bothering to make a legal request.
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Two separate topics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok what the hell's going on lately with a news stories ending with a single sentence talking about a topic completely unrelated to the rest of the post?
Can a story be moderated off topic to itself?
Re:Two separate topics? (Score:5, Insightful)
You will find that each instance is edited by BeauHD. It's his "shtick". But I agree it's more often than not irrelevant and annoying.
Re: Two separate topics? (Score:1)
Well it's a good way to link back to previous adverts, sorry I mean articles.
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I long for the old days where all summaries had a last sentence using the phrase "it will be interesting" to inject bias
Re:Two separate topics? (Score:4, Interesting)
But I agree it's more often than not irrelevant and annoying.
Really? I love that 1/2 the time the discussion completely disregards the entire primary story and fixates on the also-ran throw away sentence at the end now. Saves me reading the headline or summary... half time the discussion won't be about it anyway.
The only thing that would be better would be if every article could have a meta discussion about why this is happening that prevents either topic from being discussed! :) /sarcasm off
I agree with you. Its stupid and distracting. Editors please stop.
Re:Two separate topics? (Score:4, Insightful)
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the Zdnet link (Score:3, Interesting)
The ZDNET link takes me to an article about the Samsung phones warerproofing.
We have a Reddit business model here. Troll headlines, people who don't read the article, commenting and people keep coming back - it's all about generating advertising revenue, boys!
Infotainment is what media is about. Makes makes me want to throw every goddamn peice of electronic shit in my house out the door.
Re:the Zdnet link (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Two separate topics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Much of our interpretation of the news is based on emotion.
So a story about how Amazon is doing something scary to us. Is then quickly followed up by them doing something good or neutral, taints that story's tone, and makes it seem more worrisome.
We seem to forget that Organizations/Governments (especially large ones) do a lot of things with many different motives and sometimes they will do things that contradict itself. Because so much is going on there are many units running independent with each other, thus causing such confusion. Rarely do we have the Evil Corporation but sub units in such corporation doing bad things, while others are doing wonderful things. Granted such companies should have ways to stop the bad things from happening, and more often than not they will turn a blind eye, or reward them for hacking their metrics for success, encouraging such bad behavior. But for most of these things, there isn't Mr. Evil running everything with a devious purpose, but a bunch of people who are for the most part good, having to cut a corner or compromise to keep their jobs then it all adds up.
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It's got to be some stupid script "helping" the editors.
Imagine you were serving content-contextual ads. You could show an Amazon ad here. So some idiot figured "if it's close enough for the advertising department, then it's close enough for the editorial department." The problem is that they never tested it, and nobody at Slashdot actually reads Slashdot so they're unaware how ridiculous it looks.
Let this be a lesson, folks: if you don't eat your own dog food, then you have to test your dog food in the lab
Users provide equipment for their own survellance (Score:4, Interesting)
"Echo" is just one of the more obvious ways to do so. Smartphones, laptop-microphones, etc. are all fair game these days, because most citizens are asleep at the wheel.
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What I want to see as standard in all devices is a very visible hard switch for camera and microphone that will physically turn it off. If I want to have a private conversation, turn off the microphone. If I don't want video of me walking around naked in the living room being on the Internet, then flip the switch. I don't trust software switches... because they can be remotely switched by hackers. I mean an actual physical switch that sits between the microphone and camera and the rest of the device.
The NSA also loves this idea. "Now he thinks he's switching off the camera."
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Sounds like you don't understand that most people have no way of knowing if the physical switch shuts off the camera or just the little red light.
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Most people do, they open up their MyFaceTinderFoxTwit app and see the latest story about how the $600 privacy enhanced device they bought has been falsely marketed because Hobbyist Tom discovered the circuit is still closed even with the off switch engaged. Then, they take their pos device back and buy a different one that Hobbyist Tom confirmed the off switch IS actually an off switch.
Oh the circuit is open, but that other circuit Tom didn't see, because the traces aren't on an inner layer of the circuit board, those are still closed. Also, Tom had an unfortunate accident while cleaning his gun.
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For a camera, you put in a slider. Unless that is IR-Transparent plastic (expensive), it will work.
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True, that just leaves the microphone.
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And the speaker, which can be used as a microphone. And the other microphone, the one that looks like a capacitor.
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Yes, those too. Along with the tiny little hole in the camera slide.
At one time, I would have dismissed that as paranoid ranting, but given how much "ranting from the tin-foil hat brigade" has been proven recently, it's not so far fetched anymore.
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I spent some time reading through the detailed program information disclosed by Snowden. All the nifty little devices that the NSA has "productized" and can hide in a PC to snoop on it, and their programs to saturate areas where a person of interest might buy a PC (by intercepting shipments from manufacturers), so that he'd buy one pre-tapped. Not enough tinfoil in the world.
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And not only can they be defeated with a screwdriver and some electronics skills, this would also make a nice story to embarrass them on the Internet! I guess they desperately want that to happen...
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Can what be defeated by "a screwdriver and some electronics skills"?
The stuff we know from Snowden is pretty old now, but included firmware-level exploits for all common PCs, phones, routers, and firewalls of the time (e.g., IRATEMONK which lived in hard drive firmware to run arbitrary code at OS boot time). It included concealable (on a PC) taps for both video and audio, that emitted no signal by themselves, but were readable by hitting them with a low-power radar device from some distance away (e.g., RAG
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The speaker _cannot_ be used as microphone unless you put in some special, expensive custom chips for that.
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There's nothing expensive or special about it. I do it all the time using the highly esoteric method of plugging headphones into the microphone jack.
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And that is something completely different as these do not work as speakers anymore as long as they are connected that way. Seems to me you have absolutely no clue how things actually work. Having a speaker acting _only_ as microphone is trivial. Having it acting as speaker _and_ microphone is anything but. Or perhaps you missed the little detail that a speaker that does not work as a speaker is dead obvious?
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Perhaps you didn't realize that most people don't even want speakers to emit sound 24x7 in their electronics.
But if you do want to do both, the basic process isn't THAT amazingly complex. The ambient sound will be the difference between the signal from the preamp and the signal on speaker wire +/- some amplifier noise and gain adjustments.
Op-amps aren't all that exotic.
If you have the digital output available, you can skip all of that and just send the results of an AtoD converter with the speaker wire as a
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Indeed. IBM-Laptops had that physical (well, electronic, but OS independent and not software accessible) microphone switch. Cameras are easily dealt with by black tape. I would pay extra for a design with a physical slider for the camera and a physical switch for the microphone. As it is, I am just de-soldering the microphones in the devices I own.
Speakers? (Score:1)
There are reportedly more than three million Amazon Echo microphones out in the wild.
Fixed for relevance.
Wire tapped is such a loaded phrase (Score:1)
Wiretapped implies warrants and due process.
Echo listens in and sends all that data to Amazon, Amazon EULA for Echo makes you agree to sending your audio, including audio before the wake word, up to their cloud. None of that requires anything like a wiretap warrant. It would only require a request to Amazon, perhaps some form of compensation for their trouble.
This is not limited to Amazon. Your smartphone has a mass of apps that request access to the microphone and video and several advertisers are paying a
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It's a shit world, created by corporate lobbying and an undermining of the basic human rights.
The good news is that everything is changing all the time.
This surveillance world we live in is a phase we are going through.
It will end, one way or another.
The bummer is that we are the ones living in it now...
easy answer (Score:5, Informative)
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Now admittedly, I cannot think how that might benefit Amazon. But it could be a reason.
If you have Amazon echo... (Score:5, Insightful)
... you're an idiot, you're willingly giving up your right to privacy inside your house, and you simply deserve to be wiretapped. Any internet-connected device could be "wiretapped", but in this case we are talking about something whose only and explicit purpose is to listen to what happens inside your house and send everything to "the cloud" (i.e., somebody else that can do whatever it wants with it), without the user being able to set up any sort of security measures. That's purely idiotic self wiretapping, not government wiretapping. No sympathy for amazon echo users, sorry.
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Any internet-connected device could be "wiretapped", but in this case we are talking about something whose only and explicit purpose is to listen to what happens inside your house and send everything to "the cloud"
Isn't the main explicit point to sell you more and more shit so easily you don't realise you're buying it? The massive data uptake for the alphabet gangs to rife through is just a happy bonus.
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Actually, its purpose is to listen for a wake word, then send the next sentence to the cloud for processing.
For someone concerned about wiretapping, it would make sense to monitor outbound data use by the echo. Spikes caused by wiretapping should be obvious since it does not normally transmit everything it hears.
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Perhaps, but if you read the thread you will recognize that I am referring to the OPs use of purpose.
So, in the alternate, you could say that it's purpose it to intelligently respond to natural language after hearing a wake word. A cynic may go further and suggest that the intelligent response will be determined in part by Amazon's ability to monetize the response.
Nonetheless, the design and intent are for the device to transmit language after hearing a wake word. If it operates outside that design and inte
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The voice recognition of the Echo doesn't work at all for me.
If they could have a human being listening on the other end, that would be a huge upgrade for me.
Because it is being used as a surveillance device. (Score:3, Interesting)
Orwell's Telescreen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Echo the repeat of words to FBI (Score:1)
I can't believe how many whine about privacy and install a open mic into their household. Can you imagine the FBI coming to your door and asking you to install a mic in your house? Yet idiot Amazon customers see the Echo as such a neat device. Dumb consumers is all I can say.
Correct Article Link (Score:1)
Look for warrant canaries (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, kids, you too can try this at home.
Actual transcription from a "conversation" between me and Alexa:
"Alexa, do you work for the CIA?"
"Hmmm. I can't find the answer to the question I heard."
"Alexa, do you work for the FBI?"
"No, I'm not employed by them. I'm made by Amazon."
"Alexa, do you work for the NSA?"
(no voice -- descending 5th musical tone)
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"Alexa, do you work for the NSA?" (no voice -- descending flat 5th musical tone)
FTFY
FIRE BEAUHD (Score:1)
I don't want your fucking unrelated blurbs at the end of the goddamned story. Quit being a clickbait fucking site, Slashdot.
Whipslash, start paying attention to the bullshit your idiot editors are doing - they're one of the primary reasons we write exploit code for this site and continue to do so TO THIS DAY.
Ho ho ho (Score:3)
That's like if your friend asks you if you think he should go out with some girl you know, and you say, "You're both friends of mine and I don't want to say anything bad about anyone." You've answered his question by not answering it.
Whether Amazon says so or not, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Echo has been tapped. These days I'd be more surprised if it hadn't been. Think about it- the opportunity to eavesdrop on millions of people, with Amazon providing the hardware. What's not to like about that?
what have drones to do with amazon echo? (Score:2)
Hey, slashdot, learn to split two topics into two articles.