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from the Miss-Scarlet-in-the-conservatory-with-the-lead-pipe dept.
A 2015 Arkansas murder case that had raised privacy questions surrounding "always-on" electronic home devices took a step forward last week after Amazon agreed to release recordings from the murder defendant's Amazon Echo as possible evidence.
The Seattle-based e-commerce company had refused to comply with police warrants requesting the data in December and sought to quash a search warrant in February, court records showed. Although the company would not comment on this specific case, an Amazon spokeswoman told The Washington Post in December that it objected to "overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course."
That changed after the defendant, James Andrew Bates, agreed Friday to allow Amazon to release data from his Echo device to prosecutors. The company turned over the recordings later that day, according to court records.
"Because Mr. Bates is innocent of all charges in this matter, he has agreed to the release of any recordings on his Amazon Echo device to the prosecution," attorneys Kathleen Zellner and Douglas Johnson said in a statement to The Washington Post.
-- submitted from IRC
Previously: Police Seek Amazon Echo Data in Murder Case and Amazon Continues to Resist Requests for "Alexa" Audio Evidence in Arkansas Murder Case
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:32PM
Exactly correct, and it all goes back to the Third Party Doctrine which is the Government's method of evading the 4th Amendment. If you share your data with a third party, you have no - as in ZERO - reasonable expectation of privacy under the current interpretation of the 4th.
All of it based on some tiny little case from the 70s: How a Purse Snatching Led to the Legal Justification for NSA Domestic Spying [wired.com]. It is worth remembering this example when the authorities exceed their power to make certain some bad dude goes to jail, because abuse of power never stops with the bad dudes. It's just how they make the first exercise palatable.