Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: FEBRUARY 2017 15 S ome people might be shocked to learn that the electronic devices that they use are spying on and recording their every move. That’s why many individ- uals concerned with privacy issues have no use for the new “artificial intelligence” capabilities of things like Amazon’s Echo speaker. For the uninformed, these are those speaker things on the commercials where the people say, “OK Google, what kind of sound does a whale make?” They’re always on and record everything, it turns out. That could be super help- ful for police officers work- ing a homicide where one of these robots was recording everything during the mur- der. According to an article from the website “The Infor- mation,” police in Benton- ville, Arkansas have issued a warrant for the audio records of the Amazon Echo speaker belonging to a sus- pect in an ongoing murder investigation. Amazon, owned by the 67-billion-dollar man Jeff Bezos, has given police the suspect’s purchase history and account information but the company says it won’t hand over the speaker’s records. The idea that people would be convicted based on their own electronic de- vice could obviously have a negative impact on sales. Bentonville police arrested the suspect one year ago and charged him with homicide based on suspicions that the suspect strangled another man in a hot tub at the sus- pects’ residence. The suspect had one of Amazon’s Echo speakers (and “Alexa”) which records everything – even when a human user isn’t talking to the speaker. Anything you say to the speaker after activating it is stored on Amazon’s servers. Bentonville Police said that music had been stream- ing through the night of the murder and according to the website The Information that means the speaker might have been inadvertently ac- tivated. It’s these recordings that police are after. But Amazon isn’t play- ing ball with investigators and they have the lawyers necessary to prevail in legal proceedings should law en- forcement decide to sue. So it’s kind of a catch- 22 for cops and speakers equipped with artificial intel- ligence. On the one hand people can’t get enough of all this nonsense and are buying these things up like kids in a candy store. On the other hand, it will be Amazon or Google, not the traditional authorities, that will likely be in charge of deciding whether to make these recordings available to police. If you follow the increas- ing overlap between the tech industry and public safety, it’s easy to see that the CEOs fre- quently consider cooperation with law enforcement to be a threat to their bottom line. OK, Google: who did this here murder? Tech companies increasingly unwilling to risk profits by handing evidence over to law enforcement Warning! If you’re one of the folks that uses these products you might want to be very careful if you have young kids. A recent viral video explains why. In the video, a very young kid is sitting with his family and asks the robot in the speaker to play a song. But because the kid doesn’t pronounce the title clearly the speaker starts barking out types of and links to hardcore pornography. In addition, anything that the devices can hear gets recorded and stored. And while law enforcement authorities are having trouble getting access to those recordings, it’s unclear if the same would apply to lawyers in divorce or custody proceedings. “Smart speakers” for “smart” homes are all the rage these days. The robots have arrived. Image courtesy of Youtube