This Man’s Murder Might Get Solved by Amazon’s Alexa

bunch of guys watching TV. As the night drawn, three of them moved the party to the hot tub. Around midnight. One of them went home, but in the morning, one member of the group, Victor Collins, was found face down in the hot tub, apparently strangled and drowned in dark red water. The jacuzzis, head, wrists, and knobs were scattered on the ground covered with blood. Victor's left eye and lips were dark and swollen, and there was blood and

pink foam coming out of his nose. I just find it hard to believe that injuries such as that to cause a man's death, especially a guy like Vick, were needed. I just it shocks me, it really does. That's Victor's friend, Jamie Gianfala. And when he says especially a guy like Vic, what he means is that Victor was a big, tall, intimidating man. And Bentonville is a small, sleepy town with a very low crime rate. This is a kind of thing that's never supposed to happen there. It shocks me,

It really does. The homeowner, the thirty one year old Walmart employee, called James Andrew Bates, says he went to bed at one am and discovered the body. After sunrise, he called the cops, who came over to find the back patio dripping with water. Now fifteen police responded to Southwest elm Manor Avenue after nine one. One call reported a body laying in a hot tub, but it didn't seem like the water was coming from the hot tub.

The police suspected foul play homicide. Then if the cops saw something in the kitchen, a voice activated Amazon Echo speaker, they thought it might have special significance. If Alexa, which is the virtual assistant the powers the echo, had been listening, she might just help investigators discover who killed Victor Collins.

Hi Amaki Ito and I'm Nicole brand And this week on Decrypted we're exploring the proliferation of Internet connected devices like the Amazon Echo, the Google Home, and the just announced Apple HomePod. As more and more of the things around us get connected to the Internet, they're helping us at every turn, ordering us pizza, reminding us of our

friend's birthdays, playing our favorite podcast. At the same time, they're watching and recording our every move, which is bringing up all kinds of uncomfortable questions around our rights to digital privacy. How should this data be used and by whom? Will ask if it's even possible to own and use one of these gasgets without having to give up your privacy, and see what users can do to stay protected. Stay with us, Sinico. Take us back to that hot tub

in Bentonville. Well, there were two broken bottles that were found near the jacuzzi, and also spots of blood all over nearby. Investigators thought that they were signs of struggle. So in February, which was three months later, James Bates was arrested for the crime. And what do we know about the victim? Victor? He was forty seven when he died. He left behind his wife, Christine, and five children. Vick was probably six three six pounds This is Victor's friend Jamie.

He looked very intimidating, always had a haircut, real short um, but honestly, when you sat down and you talked to him, he was he was a ball lass. I mean, the guy always you know. It was good for having a good time in terms of laid back and and just real relaxing and real fun to talk with and hang out with. Victor and Jamie met when they were both police officers in Cherokee County, Georgia, which is a mountainous area not far from Atlanta. Victor Collins was my first

training officer. I was able to ride with him and I got to learn the tricks of the trade from him, and we began a friendship almost immediately. As a cop, Jamie has investigated homicides before and says he's very interested by the presence of an Amazon Echo at the crime scene. Right. This is the voice activated speaker that the police found in James Bates home. And just very quickly for a

listener who have never seen an echo before. It's this black cylinder shaped speaker that connects to the Internet and you can have it play music or answer random questions like this. Alexa will it be cold tomorrow. Tomorrow in New York, you'll see some sun in thunderstorms, and you can expect to high of eighty and a low of sixty four. Anyway, you can imagine the kind of audio it might pick up if it were just sitting there

the whole time, right next to a crime scene. Bentonville police got a search warrant to confiscate the echo is evidence, but the echo by itself couldn't tell the full story because none of the data is saved on the device. Amazon told me that records are stored in the cloud, in other words, on Amazon servers, which are scattered across the country and around the world. So the lead detective

got a court order to get Amazon to share its information. Now, an important thing to know about these virtual assistance is that you know whether it's a speaker like the Echo or on the phone like Apple Syrie. There does trying to wake up only when they're prompted to do so, otherwise they'd annoy you all the time. So the Echo will only start recording once someone calls it by its name, Alexa.

Amazon told me that saying the word Alexa also turns on the blue light that's on the speaker, so the echoes only streaming audio to the cloud when that blue light is on. In theory, this could still be useful to investigators. Someone may have been agitated and yelled at the Amazon to shut up because the music was playing. That's Craig Ball, a forensic technologist and former trial lawyer. Craig is what's called a court master in the legal system.

Instead of being an expert witness for one side or the other, he's hired by the judges to help them interpret digital evidence. You'll know the time, You'll know the voice because there's an actual recording of the boys. I'll repeat this since it's important. There's an actual recording of your voice. Every time you ask Alexa for something. Amazon keeps that audio and hill a user manually deletes their

command history. Plus, because it's triggered to record and transmit, you not only hear the commands, you also hear anything in the way of ambient noise at the time, So you might hear if the hot tub was running, you might hear if someone was groaning, crying, fighting in the background. The court order started a legal standoff with Amazon, and the company handed over James's account information and records of his transactions, but it didn't hand over data from James's

Echo device. Amazon told me in a statement that quote Amazon will not release customer information without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Amazon objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course, and quote in pushing back against the search warrant, Amazon side did both the company's First Amendment rights. In other words, the companies to free speech as well as the customers.

There are certain kinds of speech that are protected constitutionally in the United States. We begin to bump into that as we look at your interactions with new devices. Ultimately, it was the defendant James who gave law enforcement permission to access as data, which ended the stand off before it fully played out. Ever since, tech companies have been in this tug of war with the government over how

and when they should release customer data. For the industry, it's been this delicate balance between protecting their users from government intrusion and helping the government chase down criminals. It's something that Apple CEO Tim Cook just talked about last week in an interview with Bloomberg TV. In the wake of the London terror attack. We've been cooperating with the UK government in uh, not only in law enforcement kind

of matters, but on on some of the attacks. And I can't speak in detail about that, but in cases where we have information uh and they've gone through the lawful process, we uh not just give it, but we uh you know, we do it very very promptly. The public controversy, of course, all started with Edward Snowden's revelations. That's when we saw for the first time this scale at which the US government, through the National Security Agency,

was monitoring the communications of its own citizens. People are in fact outrage. They don't like the idea of this in any way, shape or form. It's very big brother feeling. On July four, there were protests against the n s A in eighty cities across the US. There were also

demonstrations in other countries around the world. Today, so a lot of people all over the world have been demanding greater privacy protections, and at the same time, these smart devices that promised to make our lives more convenient have gotten really popular. According to an industry report from Voice Labs, almost twenty five million smart speakers are expected to ship

this year. And these two movements have overlapped. You know, there are these young urban people who pushed back against government intrusion, would like to be early adopters of new tech. I can't tell you how many people I went to school with would buy the latest smart gadgets but stick tape over their laptop cameras so the n s A won't check in. I think I've done that more than once. But now, four years after the Snowden revelations, things are

shifting again. At first, the government told us that the surveillance was necessary for national security. But as we generate more and more data on more and more devices, judges and law enforcement agencies are seeing a lot of potential for those records to be used as evidence in more routine criminal and civil cases. Here's Craig again. He's the

guy who helps judges interpret digital evidence. The government will be able to go to a court be able to show, in many instances a compelling reason, clearing convincing evidence could cause depending upon the standard applied um and the government may be able to obtain a court order compelling an individual to release certain information or compelling a third party holder of information, a bank of business, a financial transaction

app company to turn over that information. And there was actually an interesting case of investigators using the popular online video game World of Warcraft to help solve a murder back and how did that work. So, the sixteen year old in British Columbia, Canada, CRUs Wellwood, raped and killed one of his classmates, Kim Proctor. Okay, he played World of Warcraft a lot and used the game's internal messaging

system to confess his guilt to his online girlfriend. A local tech crimes unit got legal access to his communications on the platform. So that sounds like a pretty legit use case for this kind of data. But there's a lot more to this that and what ended up happening in the Bentonville murder investigation is coming up right after this word from our sponsor. You know where you want to be? Red Hat has the broad portfolio of open

source technologies to get you there. Meet your evolving business challenges head on with secure solutions for the enterprise, including Linux platforms and containers, hybrid cloud infrastructure, application integration and development, operations management, and beyond. Visit red hat, dot com, slash and tech to learn more. Redhead the open technology to help you realize your vision. Hi, I'm Pagat Cary, a

producer here undecrypted. We hear a lot about the possibility that robots and algorithms could take away our jobs, but how real is this threat? If you're seeing or experiencing automation at work or suspect your job will be impacted, please get in touch with us. We want to hear your story, even use it for a future episode. Record a voice message on your smartphone and email it to

decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. Okay, we're back. Before the break, we told you that police investigators and judges are seeing the data that we generate on these voice activated devices as a new kind of evidence they can use in trial, kind of like how they might seize and search the

information on your smartphone or your laptop. When you talked about the Internet of things, and there's a very fine line between creepy and cool, and that really boils down to whether or not the organization got consent from their customers. That's Christina Bergmann, the CEO of Integrists Software, a data privacy startup that advises tech companies on how to comply

with the European Union's new privacy regulations. She was previously a group product manager at Microsoft with devices like Alexa, and while that has some very compelling scenarios for making things a lot easier, it also means that you're really losing your privacy in in in your home, which for a lot of people is an uncomfortable feeling, and that

that really boils down to consent as well. If you've got consent to listen on an ongoing basis, and the consumer has the ability to shut it off when they want to have that privacy, then then that creates a nice barrier. Okay, so maybe customers understand what they're signing up for when they buy an echo, but some companies haven't been so transparent. So a good example of a company that did not get consent before listening to what goes on in people's homes is Visio TVs. It would

be pretty creepy. It's the equivalent of having a technological peeping tom in your living room. I wouldn't be comfortable with it at all. So what Christina is referring to here is a case that Video had settled in February for two point two million dollars with the Federal Trade Commission in the state of New Jersey. The company smart TVs collected viewing data on eleven million customers since without consumers knowledge or consent, including what people watched on cable

and streaming services. That's according to a statement from the FTC. And that's really what a lot of this boils down to is people being able to trust the companies they're engaging with and buying products and services from. So you should be able to make an informed decision about whether the Internet of Things is right for you, although I do doubt most customers actually read the fine print on

those agreements. I know, I don't. And Christina also told me that the rise of big data, meaning companies could store lots of information cheaply and crunch it quickly, has some knock on effects, including the Internet of things the data that people are collecting and organizations are collecting about their customers. It's much more personal than it ever was before.

Ten fifty years ago, if you didn't want people to collect data on you, all you had to do with with close your laptop and walk away from your computer. The difference today is that you can't ever walk away from data collection. Your phone is always on you, and after constantly collecting information. People are wearing wearables. There are censors in homes and on streets and cars and in

office buildings through spatial recognition to technology. So basically, massive storage capacity allows companies to collect and process all the data they have on you. Information that's now more intimate than ever before. And let's talk about what these companies are actually doing with the data. There's a lot of information that can be inferred when uh, when data is collected about an individual. The real value of data is

not in the actual initial data collected. What's really valuable is what can be inferred based on that initial data. For instance, just by knowing something like your geolocation on your fitbit, somebody could determine without too much work and without too much time, where your home was and where your work was just based on location. And here's why that could be problematic. You can start to understand people's patterns of behavior and look at that type of information

to know if somebody's home or not. In the past, if some do you wanted to rub your house, all you had to do is sit on the front of the street and figure out when you leave for work and when you go home. They could look at things like how often or how recently you've opened up the fridge door or your washing machine, or how how often you've used the lock on your front door. As those

become increasingly digitized. Of course, tech companies are trying very hard to protect all of the data they're collecting on us, and Christina says devices from larger firms are more likely to have better privacy protections built into their products. So let's talk about how these electronic records are collected now, well, I asked Craig, was the legal and tech expert, whether the government could forcibly extract records if individuals and companies

don't cooperate. I'm a little area of the word forcibly, but let's just say and compel apart from the Fifth Amendment considerations in a criminal investigation, Yes, the government would have to jump through some procedural hoops. We want those procedural hoops to protect us, but we also want people to be able to be charged with crimes, and if they're guilty, be convicted of crimes. You know, but not everyone is going to be investigated for this kind of

violent crime. Certainly I hope I never will. So how do you think this big brotherness would affect just a normal law abiding person like me. Yeah. So, let's say you're being audited by the u S Tax authority, the Internal Revenue Service for potential tax evasion. Craig says that the process could get even more high tech and invasive when we come to the i r S. There's there's very little off limits in that regard, and the i r S, in issuing an audit notice, can demand that

you bring forward certain information. And so the i r S may look at your Amazon transactions, they may look at your transactions on PayPal, and a variety of other what we might call digital or non traditional banking channels. Okay, So let's say you've reported earnings of fifty dollars, but you actually spent a hundred thousand dollars online. The i r S could use that to catch you for tax fraud, right, But to be clear, the agency will notify you when

you're being audited and asks for your cooperation. Okay, So there's basically no room for lying to the government, and Craig says the same technology also means that powerful people in corporations will also leave behind digital traces of their actions. So when they do something wrong, it's going to be a lot easier to catch them and make them accountable to NICA. What do you think this all means for

the kind of future that we're heading into. Well, it's pretty clear that it will all be documented, right, will all be recorded at all times, including in our car when we're on the highway, and so if our cars are smart, they can drive themselves. Can we speak? Not just can we you know, get away with it, but can we will the cars stop us? Yeah? And that would mean that we would actually reduce traffic fatalities. Right, Yeah,

we'll do that. We'll catch more criminals. I mean, in some ways it could be good for public safety, but it does worry me, especially for people who live in authoritarian regimes around the world. I'm specifically thinking about the fact that I'm gay and that's illegal in a lot of countries. If I was trying to keep that a secret from my government, um, with all these devices around, I probably wouldn't be able to keep that a secret anymore.

And that's some really scary stuff. You know. Before I've never been very ideological about privacy, but have known other people who have been, and I have to say that reporting this story, I started to get it. I started to understand why people are scared. I mean, it starts to feel invasive. So James Bates, the man in Arkansas who hosted the hot tub party, is being tried for first degree murder. Nico, did they find anything on Amazon servers?

I wish I knew, but unfortunately we don't know. Not yet. Law enforcement only got access to the Echo Dada in March, and the prosecution hasn't made its case, so any information that was gleaned from Amazon's records won't be made public until later this year. What investigators did find, though, was that the Amazon Echo was not the only smart device

in James's house. A central part of the lead detective's argument to get an arrest warrant for the suspect is the records from a smart water meter at the defendant's home. Its data showed that someone used a lot of water in the middle of the night, like one forty gallons of water. The detective said the water was used to hose down the hot tub area and get rid of evidence of the crime. That would certainly explain the deck

dripping with water. James's lawyer says Victor's death was a tragic accident that could have been caused by alcohol poisoning. She claims his blood alcohol content is point three two, which is four times the legal limit to drive in Arkansas. The trial will start after a status conference in July. Both sides will meet with the judge to schedule future hearings, but in the meantime, Victor's loved ones are still processing

what happened that night. Just the things that surrounded I mean, the guy's you know, my age, if not maybe a year older than me. You know, you know, it puts things kind of kind of hit home, you know, Uh, if it could happen to him, could have happened to me. It's just kind of, you know, it's kind of section of faith that makes you wake up a little bit, you know, you kind of stop taking things for granted a little bit and kind of look at things. Yeah,

and that's it for this week's episode of Decrypton. Thanks for listening. What do you think about this brave new world we're entering? Please get in touch. You can record a voice message and send it to Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. Also, I'm on Twitter at me go a Grant and I'm at aki Eta seven. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a rating and a review.

It really helps more listeners Finder Show. This episode was produced by Pio gott Kari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next Week. Decrypted is brought to you by red Hat, whose broad portfolio of open source technologies for the enterprise helps you get from where you are to where you want to be. Red Hat the open technology to help you real as your vision. Learn more at red hat dot com, slash open tech