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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: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday March 12 2017, @10:26PM
Here's a little unsolicited advice:
1. Make sure you can capture network traffic where it enters and leaves your house
2. Capture such traffic
3. Analyze said traffic with a tool like Wireshark [wireshark.org]
4. Identify the devices that are communicating with the Internet and:
5a. Block any traffic that may compromise your privacy
5b. Whitelist any traffic that you wish to allow
6. Where necessary, modify the network configurations of IoT devices so that they do not have access to the Internet.
Those steps, plus (assuming you have the equipment and know-how) a proxy server [wikipedia.org] (preferably an inline or transparent proxy server [tldp.org]) such as squid [squid-cache.org] to log (and where appropriate, selectively block) URLs that correspond to known surveillance mechanisms.
It's not a panacea, but it would be a good start.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr