Amazon refuses to provide authorities with data from Alexa servers as part of the police murder investigation

Amazon has become a member of the murder case. More precisely, the corporation itself has nothing to do with it, but law enforcement agencies believe that its servers contain important information on the 2015 case of the murder of a police officer, collected by the Alexa Voice Service. We are talking about audio files that were transferred by one of the Echo devices to the cloud. Now these data are required for the analysis of law enforcement officers. But the company's lawyers claim that the data recorded by Amazon Echo near the site of the murder are protected by the First Amendment .

Amazon representatives also state that law enforcement can negatively affect the market for voice-controlled devices, including various Echo models and similar gadgets from other manufacturers. According to the company, the police, demanding access to information stored on Amazon’s servers, must provide evidence that this data is necessary to solve the murder, showing that all other possibilities have been exhausted: “In order to avoid a negative effect, the court should require regional law enforcement to prove that the records created with the Echo device are really necessary. ”

How it all began

In 2015, a former police officer of the state of Georgia (USA) named Victor Collins was found dead in a hot tub in the backyard of a house previously acquired by James Andrew Bates. Bates said his friend drowned by accident. He stated this in the morning at 9.30 am by calling 911 emergency services. Next to the same bathroom was the Amazon Echo mobile column, which, presumably, could record all the data necessary for the disclosure of this case.
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The police suspected the murder immediately after the law enforcement officers discovered traces of some red substance near the Jacuzzi and in the water. It turned out to be blood. She was everywhere — except for the jacuzzi, blood was found on the patio and in other places. A little later, the police learned that the owner of the villa used a large amount of water between an hour and three o'clock on the night of the murder.


Documents filed in court

It may well be that all the audio information was recorded by the Amazon Echo mobile column. Despite the prescription of the incident, the data needed by the police may be located somewhere on Amazon servers. Bentonville (USA) police are looking for the possibility of receiving audio recordings or text recordings that were transferred between the Echo device and Amazon servers for two days, November 21-22, 2015.

Why Amazon Resists

As mentioned above, representatives of the company are confident that even if the verdict of the court is positive for law enforcement officers, the judge must familiarize himself with these data in order to make a decision whether they are connected with the murder to some extent or not. And then the audio files can be made public.

Amazon lawyers are trying to prove that not only the user's request, but also Alexa's answers are protected by the first amendment. In particular, the answers may contain various data, including podcasts, audiobooks or music requested by the user. Interestingly, the court had previously decided to provide the requested data to the police, but the company does not seem to do that. In any case, the police complained about providing Amazon with only a fraction of the required information.

The officials and the police have a slightly different opinion. Militiamen believe that users of devices like Alexa should provide data at the request of law enforcement officers, backed up by a court decision, and the First Amendment has nothing to do with it. The police’s request to provide information from Amazon’s digital assistant servers raised the general question of whether the authorities could use data collected by Alexa and similar services.

The company informed the court that Amazon Echo is a “9.3-inch voice-controlled speaker that is equipped with several microphones used to pick up any noise in the room, including music.” According to company representatives, to wake up Echo, the user must utter a word that allows the device to wake up. As soon as the user utters this word, "Echo connects remotely to Alexa Voice Service - Amazon's smart assistant - and transmits the sound recording to the Alexa Voice Service server to process the user request." If the code word was not spoken, then the column most likely did not record anything. Amazon stresses that audio data is not stored on the device, but it can be obtained in the "cloud", as well as in the Alexa application for Android, iOS and on the gadgets of the Fire range.

“If the defendant installed the Alexa application on his mobile device and the mobile phone is available, all the stored audio files and recordings, including the answers from Alexa, will be available on the phone,” the company said in a statement. The problem here is that all the data on the Nexus phone of the murder suspect, James Bates, is encrypted at the chipset level, so they are inaccessible to the authorities.

What's next?

The defendant pleaded not guilty and was released on bail of $ 350,000. The hearing of the Amazon case has not yet been scheduled. The case seems to be delayed for a long time. If the company refuses to provide data, the case may simply come to a standstill - it seems that the police have no other sources of information about the murder.