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Amazon Isn't Saying If Echo Has Been Wiretapped (zdnet.com)
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.
So...yes
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?
"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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There are reportedly more than three million Amazon Echo microphones out in the wild.
Fixed for relevance.
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 apps to add "listen" modules. Even Facebook has added features to let it listen in and share the data with itself, your friends and pretty much anyone else. But please note, that the person you talk to didn't agree to this, and you had no right to bug their private conversations for Facebook:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/05/22/facebook-wants-to-listen-in-on-what-youre-doing/#3d1cb0d0336b
"Facebook is rolling out a new feature for its smartphone app that can turn on users’ microphones and listen to what’s happening around them to identify songs playing or television being watched. The pay-off for users in allowing Facebook to microphone-lurk is that the social giant will be able to add a little tag to their status update that says they’re watching an episode of Games of Thrones as they sound off on their happiness (or despair) about the rise in background sex on TV these days."
It's a shit world, created by corporate lobbying and an undermining of the basic human rights.
"Amazon Isn't Saying If Echo Has Been Wiretapped " that means they were told to not say it has been and they decided to not lie. There is no reason whatsoever to not tell they were not wiretaped.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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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.
... 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.
Just like everything else than can be.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
All party members were expected to purchase the telescreen device and never switch it off so the party could monitor them. The telescreen could be dimmed but never turned off.
Even if you turn off the telescreen, erm, smartphone, IOT device, tablet etc., its camera and microphone do not switch off.
Even when you disable the internet connection, as soon as you turn it back on, a burst of data is sent from data previously recorded.
And you buy a phone with one app for one purpose, e.g. a Weather app, that has a GPS access to give the weather in your city. IBM comes along, buys it for billions, and suddenly you have a massive datamining operation with access to everyones location, who they meet, when, where, where they live, who they work for, where they party. Do you think for a second IBM is interested in weather forcasting? Or interested in billions of smartphone users data?
But recent rulings have started to push back against the notion that the government can surreptitiously install spyware on your computer without a court order to better make use of the microphone contained in your personal computer. Using the microphone that people voluntarily setup in their homes, pulled from a database that stores those recordings indefinitely, is a much easier and sure-fire way to get the same data without all of those pesky legal hassles...
Phones face some of the same issues, but as mentioned, apps are the way to get around that hassle as well. Better to use the audio sources and GPS loggers that smartphone users volunteer, than trying to get at that same audio and position data with a warrant and old-fashioned wiretap. Way too many people write off the issue with a "if they want to listen to my boring life, more power to them" attitude, not realizing that "more power to them" is exactly what they are giving.
To be fair to the citizens I doubt their behaviour has changed much with regards to being aware of, or acting in response to, government surveillance. The issue is that the ability and cost of surveilling citizens has dropped by orders of magnitude. In theory all your calls could have been monitored, your house could have been tapped etc in the past but the sheer effort required made it a theoretical problem.
Are we as a society too willing to give up information for convenience? Maybe. However, we're reaching the point where it'll be possible to determine who you are by things like how you look and walk if you ever appear on camera in public whether you have given up information yourself or not. In a world where near constant government surveillance can seem unavoidable I can see why a lot of people just accept the inevitable.
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.
With brief spikes of 1.21 Gigawatts, I imagine those drones will recharge very (~88 miles/hour) fast.
Yes! Most people complain about privacy issues yet openly accept devices like this with a open mic. Or turn on Google voice search, or Cortana and haven't a clue what it means. Most are clueless how technology works or works against their privacy. Never asking themselves what it means to have a device listening to them.
I was very surprised to see Echo devices as popular as they are given how people seem so obsessed with privacy these days.
I'm not saying I was with your mom last night...
(can we please do a little better with the integrity of headlines?)
captcha: Conjugal
Since the link in the summary goes to an unrelated article, you might want this instead: http://www.zdnet.com/article/a...
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)
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"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.
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.
proactively, by AMAZ. If you signed up for it - or hell, by default - it'd send you a transcription in text of what's been sent back and forth, vs wireshark and decrypting what's being sent. I am shocked that's not already a feature of the product (I haven't looked , may well be).
I'm also a proponent of actual hardware switches for all cameras and mics on electronics. I'm no where near a tin foil hat type, but am in the IT security field, and know what a privilege escalation is - one either stupidly agreed to by someone who wants that app, or one maliciously enabled by an exploit.
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?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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."
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sounds like someone doesn't understand what a physical switch is. If you have one on the one and only line that sends power to a device, when you switch it off, it's off. Period.
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.
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For a camera, you put in a slider. Unless that is IR-Transparent plastic (expensive), it will work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
True, that just leaves the microphone.
Just keep saying that. All million users. DDoS the NSA.
it's definitively not yelling fire in a movie theater, as it's not being tapped, right ?
Where did all the Google conspiracy theorists go? I'm pretty sure this Echo allegation should be at the top of their list if they were truly concerned about privacy, and not just bashing Google.
And the speaker, which can be used as a microphone. And the other microphone, the one that looks like a capacitor.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The speaker _cannot_ be used as microphone unless you put in some special, expensive custom chips for that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Your taxpayer dollars bought it too, and pay their salaries even today.
Bought them shit to spy on you with. Amazon speakers don't just play Netflix from your fuckin toilet. On the Internet, not encrypted? Wiretapped.
Use any version of Tails after 1.4.1 and don't change defaults? Ass out my niggas.
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.
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., RAGEMASTER and LOUDAUTO). We know the NSA would intercept shipments of PCs and routers at large scale and conceal these devices, and it never made the news before Snowden.
Now it's the era of phones. You really think there aren't modern projects, that don't require something the size of PC components for concealment? They had penny-sized modules in '08.
Spend some time reading through project summaries here. Really. You sound like the guys 3 years ago, arguing that the government couldn't be recording all phone calls in the US, when we knew they were.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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 an input and sort it all out in post-processing.
Your lack of imagination isn't a failure of understanding on my part.
Hey, slashdot, learn to split two topics into two articles.