Cops Serve Up Warrant To Get Amazon Echo Data Related To Murder Investigaton
James Andrew Bates from Arkansas is currently accused of murdering his friend Victor Collins. The latter was found dead in a bathtub at the suspect’s home in November last year after an evening of drinking. During the investigation, the police found that an Amazon Echo was streaming music the entire time. That made them think that the device which is always on and always listening may have evidence related to this murder, seeing as Amazon stores all your voice related data on its servers. Thus, they’ve served Amazon with a warrant for that data. Here’s what happened next:
Amazon was issued with two search warrants, according to court filings, but refused to share any information captured by the smart devices. The police said that detectives were eventually able to take data from the device itself.
Now it’s interesting that the cops were able to get the data they were looking for themselves after Amazon rebuffed them. That sort of echos (pun intended) what the FBI had to do to get access to the San Bernardino Shooter’s iPhone. It is also unsurprising that Amazon refused to help the cops. After all they have a interest in keeping that data to themselves. Plus they score points with users for doing so. But I hope they’ve beefed up their legal team as I suspect this will not be the last request that is made of Amazon for this sort of thing. Count on it.
March 8, 2017 at 8:48 am
[…] might recall that I wrote a story about Arkansas cops wanting data from an Amazon Echo in relation to a murder c… that they were investigating as the device is always listening to what’s going on. It looks […]