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Speaker 1: and November. A group of friends in Bentonville, Arkansas. We're
Speaker 1: hanging out watching a college football game. They were drinking beer,
Speaker 1: taken vodka shots. Nothing out of the ordinary for a
Speaker 1: bunch of guys watching TV. As the night drawn, three
Speaker 1: of them moved the party to the hot tub. Around midnight.
Speaker 1: One of them went home, but in the morning, one
Speaker 1: member of the group, Victor Collins, was found face down
Speaker 1: in the hot tub, apparently strangled and drowned in dark
Speaker 1: red water. The jacuzzis, head, wrists, and knobs were scattered
Speaker 1: on the ground covered with blood. Victor's left eye and
Speaker 1: lips were dark and swollen, and there was blood and
Speaker 1: pink foam coming out of his nose. I just find
Speaker 1: it hard to believe that injuries such as that to
Speaker 1: cause a man's death, especially a guy like Vick, were needed.
Speaker 1: I just it shocks me, it really does. That's Victor's friend,
Speaker 1: Jamie Gianfala. And when he says especially a guy like Vic,
Speaker 1: what he means is that Victor was a big, tall,
Speaker 1: intimidating man. And Bentonville is a small, sleepy town with
Speaker 1: a very low crime rate. This is a kind of
Speaker 1: thing that's never supposed to happen there. It shocks me,
Speaker 1: It really does. The homeowner, the thirty one year old
Speaker 1: Walmart employee, called James Andrew Bates, says he went to
Speaker 1: bed at one am and discovered the body. After sunrise,
Speaker 1: he called the cops, who came over to find the
Speaker 1: back patio dripping with water. Now fifteen police responded to
Speaker 1: Southwest elm Manor Avenue after nine one. One call reported
Speaker 1: a body laying in a hot tub, but it didn't
Speaker 1: seem like the water was coming from the hot tub.
Speaker 1: The police suspected foul play homicide. Then if the cops
Speaker 1: saw something in the kitchen, a voice activated Amazon Echo speaker,
Speaker 1: they thought it might have special significance. If Alexa, which
Speaker 1: is the virtual assistant the powers the echo, had been listening,
Speaker 1: she might just help investigators discover who killed Victor Collins.
Speaker 1: Hi Amaki Ito and I'm Nicole brand And this week
Speaker 1: on Decrypted we're exploring the proliferation of Internet connected devices
Speaker 1: like the Amazon Echo, the Google Home, and the just
Speaker 1: announced Apple HomePod. As more and more of the things
Speaker 1: around us get connected to the Internet, they're helping us
Speaker 1: at every turn, ordering us pizza, reminding us of our
Speaker 1: friend's birthdays, playing our favorite podcast. At the same time,
Speaker 1: they're watching and recording our every move, which is bringing
Speaker 1: up all kinds of uncomfortable questions around our rights to
Speaker 1: digital privacy. How should this data be used and by whom?
Speaker 1: Will ask if it's even possible to own and use
Speaker 1: one of these gasgets without having to give up your privacy,
Speaker 1: and see what users can do to stay protected. Stay
Speaker 1: with us, Sinico. Take us back to that hot tub
Speaker 1: in Bentonville. Well, there were two broken bottles that were
Speaker 1: found near the jacuzzi, and also spots of blood all
Speaker 1: over nearby. Investigators thought that they were signs of struggle.
Speaker 1: So in February, which was three months later, James Bates
Speaker 1: was arrested for the crime. And what do we know
Speaker 1: about the victim? Victor? He was forty seven when he died.
Speaker 1: He left behind his wife, Christine, and five children. Vick
Speaker 1: was probably six three six pounds This is Victor's friend Jamie.
Speaker 1: He looked very intimidating, always had a haircut, real short um,
Speaker 1: but honestly, when you sat down and you talked to him,
Speaker 1: he was he was a ball lass. I mean, the
Speaker 1: guy always you know. It was good for having a
Speaker 1: good time in terms of laid back and and just
Speaker 1: real relaxing and real fun to talk with and hang
Speaker 1: out with. Victor and Jamie met when they were both
Speaker 1: police officers in Cherokee County, Georgia, which is a mountainous
Speaker 1: area not far from Atlanta. Victor Collins was my first
Speaker 1: training officer. I was able to ride with him and
Speaker 1: I got to learn the tricks of the trade from him,
Speaker 1: and we began a friendship almost immediately. As a cop,
Speaker 1: Jamie has investigated homicides before and says he's very interested
Speaker 1: by the presence of an Amazon Echo at the crime scene. Right.
Speaker 1: This is the voice activated speaker that the police found
Speaker 1: in James Bates home. And just very quickly for a
Speaker 1: listener who have never seen an echo before. It's this
Speaker 1: black cylinder shaped speaker that connects to the Internet and
Speaker 1: you can have it play music or answer random questions
Speaker 1: like this. Alexa will it be cold tomorrow. Tomorrow in
Speaker 1: New York, you'll see some sun in thunderstorms, and you
Speaker 1: can expect to high of eighty and a low of
Speaker 1: sixty four. Anyway, you can imagine the kind of audio
Speaker 1: it might pick up if it were just sitting there
Speaker 1: the whole time, right next to a crime scene. Bentonville
Speaker 1: police got a search warrant to confiscate the echo is evidence,
Speaker 1: but the echo by itself couldn't tell the full story
Speaker 1: because none of the data is saved on the device.
Speaker 1: Amazon told me that records are stored in the cloud,
Speaker 1: in other words, on Amazon servers, which are scattered across
Speaker 1: the country and around the world. So the lead detective
Speaker 1: got a court order to get Amazon to share its information. Now,
Speaker 1: an important thing to know about these virtual assistance is
Speaker 1: that you know whether it's a speaker like the Echo
Speaker 1: or on the phone like Apple Syrie. There does trying
Speaker 1: to wake up only when they're prompted to do so,
Speaker 1: otherwise they'd annoy you all the time. So the Echo
Speaker 1: will only start recording once someone calls it by its name, Alexa.
Speaker 1: Amazon told me that saying the word Alexa also turns
Speaker 1: on the blue light that's on the speaker, so the
Speaker 1: echoes only streaming audio to the cloud when that blue
Speaker 1: light is on. In theory, this could still be useful
Speaker 1: to investigators. Someone may have been agitated and yelled at
Speaker 1: the Amazon to shut up because the music was playing.
Speaker 1: That's Craig Ball, a forensic technologist and former trial lawyer.
Speaker 1: Craig is what's called a court master in the legal system.
Speaker 1: Instead of being an expert witness for one side or
Speaker 1: the other, he's hired by the judges to help them
Speaker 1: interpret digital evidence. You'll know the time, You'll know the
Speaker 1: voice because there's an actual recording of the boys. I'll
Speaker 1: repeat this since it's important. There's an actual recording of
Speaker 1: your voice. Every time you ask Alexa for something. Amazon
Speaker 1: keeps that audio and hill a user manually deletes their
Speaker 1: command history. Plus, because it's triggered to record and transmit,
Speaker 1: you not only hear the commands, you also hear anything
Speaker 1: in the way of ambient noise at the time, So
Speaker 1: you might hear if the hot tub was running, you
Speaker 1: might hear if someone was groaning, crying, fighting in the background.
Speaker 1: The court order started a legal standoff with Amazon, and
Speaker 1: the company handed over James's account information and records of
Speaker 1: his transactions, but it didn't hand over data from James's
Speaker 1: Echo device. Amazon told me in a statement that quote
Speaker 1: Amazon will not release customer information without a valid and
Speaker 1: binding legal demand properly served on us. Amazon objects to
Speaker 1: overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course,
Speaker 1: and quote in pushing back against the search warrant, Amazon
Speaker 1: side did both the company's First Amendment rights. In other words,
Speaker 1: the companies to free speech as well as the customers.
Speaker 1: There are certain kinds of speech that are protected constitutionally
Speaker 1: in the United States. We begin to bump into that
Speaker 1: as we look at your interactions with new devices. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: it was the defendant James who gave law enforcement permission
Speaker 1: to access as data, which ended the stand off before
Speaker 1: it fully played out. Ever since, tech companies have been
Speaker 1: in this tug of war with the government over how
Speaker 1: and when they should release customer data. For the industry,
Speaker 1: it's been this delicate balance between protecting their users from
Speaker 1: government intrusion and helping the government chase down criminals. It's
Speaker 1: something that Apple CEO Tim Cook just talked about last
Speaker 1: week in an interview with Bloomberg TV. In the wake
Speaker 1: of the London terror attack. We've been cooperating with the
Speaker 1: UK government in uh, not only in law enforcement kind
Speaker 1: of matters, but on on some of the attacks. And
Speaker 1: I can't speak in detail about that, but in cases
Speaker 1: where we have information uh and they've gone through the
Speaker 1: lawful process, we uh not just give it, but we
Speaker 1: uh you know, we do it very very promptly. The
Speaker 1: public controversy, of course, all started with Edward Snowden's revelations.
Speaker 1: That's when we saw for the first time this scale
Speaker 1: at which the US government, through the National Security Agency,
Speaker 1: was monitoring the communications of its own citizens. People are
Speaker 1: in fact outrage. They don't like the idea of this
Speaker 1: in any way, shape or form. It's very big brother feeling.
Speaker 1: On July four, there were protests against the n s
Speaker 1: A in eighty cities across the US. There were also
Speaker 1: demonstrations in other countries around the world. Today, so a
Speaker 1: lot of people all over the world have been demanding
Speaker 1: greater privacy protections, and at the same time, these smart
Speaker 1: devices that promised to make our lives more convenient have
Speaker 1: gotten really popular. According to an industry report from Voice Labs,
Speaker 1: almost twenty five million smart speakers are expected to ship
Speaker 1: this year. And these two movements have overlapped. You know,
Speaker 1: there are these young urban people who pushed back against
Speaker 1: government intrusion, would like to be early adopters of new tech.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how many people I went to
Speaker 1: school with would buy the latest smart gadgets but stick
Speaker 1: tape over their laptop cameras so the n s A
Speaker 1: won't check in. I think I've done that more than once.
Speaker 1: But now, four years after the Snowden revelations, things are
Speaker 1: shifting again. At first, the government told us that the
Speaker 1: surveillance was necessary for national security. But as we generate
Speaker 1: more and more data on more and more devices, judges
Speaker 1: and law enforcement agencies are seeing a lot of potential
Speaker 1: for those records to be used as evidence in more
Speaker 1: routine criminal and civil cases. Here's Craig again. He's the
Speaker 1: guy who helps judges interpret digital evidence. The government will
Speaker 1: be able to go to a court be able to show,
Speaker 1: in many instances a compelling reason, clearing convincing evidence could
Speaker 1: cause depending upon the standard applied um and the government
Speaker 1: may be able to obtain a court order compelling an
Speaker 1: individual to release certain information or compelling a third party
Speaker 1: holder of information, a bank of business, a financial transaction
Speaker 1: app company to turn over that information. And there was
Speaker 1: actually an interesting case of investigators using the popular online
Speaker 1: video game World of Warcraft to help solve a murder
Speaker 1: back and how did that work. So, the sixteen year
Speaker 1: old in British Columbia, Canada, CRUs Wellwood, raped and killed
Speaker 1: one of his classmates, Kim Proctor. Okay, he played World
Speaker 1: of Warcraft a lot and used the game's internal messaging
Speaker 1: system to confess his guilt to his online girlfriend. A
Speaker 1: local tech crimes unit got legal access to his communications
Speaker 1: on the platform. So that sounds like a pretty legit
Speaker 1: use case for this kind of data. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot more to this that and what ended up happening
Speaker 1: in the Bentonville murder investigation is coming up right after
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Speaker 1: help you realize your vision. Hi, I'm Pagat Cary, a
Speaker 1: producer here undecrypted. We hear a lot about the possibility
Speaker 1: that robots and algorithms could take away our jobs, but
Speaker 1: how real is this threat? If you're seeing or experiencing
Speaker 1: automation at work or suspect your job will be impacted,
Speaker 1: please get in touch with us. We want to hear
Speaker 1: your story, even use it for a future episode. Record
Speaker 1: a voice message on your smartphone and email it to
Speaker 1: decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. Okay, we're back. Before the break,
Speaker 1: we told you that police investigators and judges are seeing
Speaker 1: the data that we generate on these voice activated devices
Speaker 1: as a new kind of evidence they can use in trial,
Speaker 1: kind of like how they might seize and search the
Speaker 1: information on your smartphone or your laptop. When you talked
Speaker 1: about the Internet of things, and there's a very fine
Speaker 1: line between creepy and cool, and that really boils down
Speaker 1: to whether or not the organization got consent from their customers.
Speaker 1: That's Christina Bergmann, the CEO of Integrists Software, a data
Speaker 1: privacy startup that advises tech companies on how to comply
Speaker 1: with the European Union's new privacy regulations. She was previously
Speaker 1: a group product manager at Microsoft with devices like Alexa,
Speaker 1: and while that has some very compelling scenarios for making
Speaker 1: things a lot easier, it also means that you're really
Speaker 1: losing your privacy in in in your home, which for
Speaker 1: a lot of people is an uncomfortable feeling, and that
Speaker 1: that really boils down to consent as well. If you've
Speaker 1: got consent to listen on an ongoing basis, and the
Speaker 1: consumer has the ability to shut it off when they
Speaker 1: want to have that privacy, then then that creates a
Speaker 1: nice barrier. Okay, so maybe customers understand what they're signing
Speaker 1: up for when they buy an echo, but some companies
Speaker 1: haven't been so transparent. So a good example of a
Speaker 1: company that did not get consent before listening to what
Speaker 1: goes on in people's homes is Visio TVs. It would
Speaker 1: be pretty creepy. It's the equivalent of having a technological
Speaker 1: peeping tom in your living room. I wouldn't be comfortable
Speaker 1: with it at all. So what Christina is referring to
Speaker 1: here is a case that Video had settled in February
Speaker 1: for two point two million dollars with the Federal Trade
Speaker 1: Commission in the state of New Jersey. The company smart
Speaker 1: TVs collected viewing data on eleven million customers since without
Speaker 1: consumers knowledge or consent, including what people watched on cable
Speaker 1: and streaming services. That's according to a statement from the FTC.
Speaker 1: And that's really what a lot of this boils down
Speaker 1: to is people being able to trust the companies they're
Speaker 1: engaging with and buying products and services from. So you
Speaker 1: should be able to make an informed decision about whether
Speaker 1: the Internet of Things is right for you, although I
Speaker 1: do doubt most customers actually read the fine print on
Speaker 1: those agreements. I know, I don't. And Christina also told
Speaker 1: me that the rise of big data, meaning companies could
Speaker 1: store lots of information cheaply and crunch it quickly, has
Speaker 1: some knock on effects, including the Internet of things the
Speaker 1: data that people are collecting and organizations are collecting about
Speaker 1: their customers. It's much more personal than it ever was before.
Speaker 1: Ten fifty years ago, if you didn't want people to
Speaker 1: collect data on you, all you had to do with
Speaker 1: with close your laptop and walk away from your computer.
Speaker 1: The difference today is that you can't ever walk away
Speaker 1: from data collection. Your phone is always on you, and
Speaker 1: after constantly collecting information. People are wearing wearables. There are
Speaker 1: censors in homes and on streets and cars and in
Speaker 1: office buildings through spatial recognition to technology. So basically, massive
Speaker 1: storage capacity allows companies to collect and process all the
Speaker 1: data they have on you. Information that's now more intimate
Speaker 1: than ever before. And let's talk about what these companies
Speaker 1: are actually doing with the data. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: information that can be inferred when uh, when data is
Speaker 1: collected about an individual. The real value of data is
Speaker 1: not in the actual initial data collected. What's really valuable
Speaker 1: is what can be inferred based on that initial data.
Speaker 1: For instance, just by knowing something like your geolocation on
Speaker 1: your fitbit, somebody could determine without too much work and
Speaker 1: without too much time, where your home was and where
Speaker 1: your work was just based on location. And here's why
Speaker 1: that could be problematic. You can start to understand people's
Speaker 1: patterns of behavior and look at that type of information
Speaker 1: to know if somebody's home or not. In the past,
Speaker 1: if some do you wanted to rub your house, all
Speaker 1: you had to do is sit on the front of
Speaker 1: the street and figure out when you leave for work
Speaker 1: and when you go home. They could look at things
Speaker 1: like how often or how recently you've opened up the
Speaker 1: fridge door or your washing machine, or how how often
Speaker 1: you've used the lock on your front door. As those
Speaker 1: become increasingly digitized. Of course, tech companies are trying very
Speaker 1: hard to protect all of the data they're collecting on us,
Speaker 1: and Christina says devices from larger firms are more likely
Speaker 1: to have better privacy protections built into their products. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about how these electronic records are collected now, well,
Speaker 1: I asked Craig, was the legal and tech expert, whether
Speaker 1: the government could forcibly extract records if individuals and companies
Speaker 1: don't cooperate. I'm a little area of the word forcibly,
Speaker 1: but let's just say and compel apart from the Fifth
Speaker 1: Amendment considerations in a criminal investigation, Yes, the government would
Speaker 1: have to jump through some procedural hoops. We want those
Speaker 1: procedural hoops to protect us, but we also want people
Speaker 1: to be able to be charged with crimes, and if
Speaker 1: they're guilty, be convicted of crimes. You know, but not
Speaker 1: everyone is going to be investigated for this kind of
Speaker 1: violent crime. Certainly I hope I never will. So how
Speaker 1: do you think this big brotherness would affect just a
Speaker 1: normal law abiding person like me. Yeah. So, let's say
Speaker 1: you're being audited by the u S Tax authority, the
Speaker 1: Internal Revenue Service for potential tax evasion. Craig says that
Speaker 1: the process could get even more high tech and invasive
Speaker 1: when we come to the i r S. There's there's
Speaker 1: very little off limits in that regard, and the i
Speaker 1: r S, in issuing an audit notice, can demand that
Speaker 1: you bring forward certain information. And so the i r
Speaker 1: S may look at your Amazon transactions, they may look
Speaker 1: at your transactions on PayPal, and a variety of other
Speaker 1: what we might call digital or non traditional banking channels. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's say you've reported earnings of fifty dollars, but
Speaker 1: you actually spent a hundred thousand dollars online. The i
Speaker 1: r S could use that to catch you for tax fraud, right,
Speaker 1: But to be clear, the agency will notify you when
Speaker 1: you're being audited and asks for your cooperation. Okay, So
Speaker 1: there's basically no room for lying to the government, and
Speaker 1: Craig says the same technology also means that powerful people
Speaker 1: in corporations will also leave behind digital traces of their actions.
Speaker 1: So when they do something wrong, it's going to be
Speaker 1: a lot easier to catch them and make them accountable
Speaker 1: to NICA. What do you think this all means for
Speaker 1: the kind of future that we're heading into. Well, it's
Speaker 1: pretty clear that it will all be documented, right, will
Speaker 1: all be recorded at all times, including in our car
Speaker 1: when we're on the highway, and so if our cars
Speaker 1: are smart, they can drive themselves. Can we speak? Not
Speaker 1: just can we you know, get away with it, but
Speaker 1: can we will the cars stop us? Yeah? And that
Speaker 1: would mean that we would actually reduce traffic fatalities. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll do that. We'll catch more criminals. I mean, in
Speaker 1: some ways it could be good for public safety, but
Speaker 1: it does worry me, especially for people who live in
Speaker 1: authoritarian regimes around the world. I'm specifically thinking about the
Speaker 1: fact that I'm gay and that's illegal in a lot
Speaker 1: of countries. If I was trying to keep that a
Speaker 1: secret from my government, um, with all these devices around,
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't be able to keep that a secret anymore.
Speaker 1: And that's some really scary stuff. You know. Before I've
Speaker 1: never been very ideological about privacy, but have known other
Speaker 1: people who have been, and I have to say that
Speaker 1: reporting this story, I started to get it. I started
Speaker 1: to understand why people are scared. I mean, it starts
Speaker 1: to feel invasive. So James Bates, the man in Arkansas
Speaker 1: who hosted the hot tub party, is being tried for
Speaker 1: first degree murder. Nico, did they find anything on Amazon servers?
Speaker 1: I wish I knew, but unfortunately we don't know. Not yet.
Speaker 1: Law enforcement only got access to the Echo Dada in March,
Speaker 1: and the prosecution hasn't made its case, so any information
Speaker 1: that was gleaned from Amazon's records won't be made public
Speaker 1: until later this year. What investigators did find, though, was
Speaker 1: that the Amazon Echo was not the only smart device
Speaker 1: in James's house. A central part of the lead detective's
Speaker 1: argument to get an arrest warrant for the suspect is
Speaker 1: the records from a smart water meter at the defendant's home.
Speaker 1: Its data showed that someone used a lot of water
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, like one forty gallons
Speaker 1: of water. The detective said the water was used to
Speaker 1: hose down the hot tub area and get rid of
Speaker 1: evidence of the crime. That would certainly explain the deck
Speaker 1: dripping with water. James's lawyer says Victor's death was a
Speaker 1: tragic accident that could have been caused by alcohol poisoning.
Speaker 1: She claims his blood alcohol content is point three two,
Speaker 1: which is four times the legal limit to drive in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: The trial will start after a status conference in July.
Speaker 1: Both sides will meet with the judge to schedule future hearings,
Speaker 1: but in the meantime, Victor's loved ones are still processing
Speaker 1: what happened that night. Just the things that surrounded I mean,
Speaker 1: the guy's you know, my age, if not maybe a
Speaker 1: year older than me. You know, you know, it puts
Speaker 1: things kind of kind of hit home, you know, Uh,
Speaker 1: if it could happen to him, could have happened to me.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of, you know, it's kind of section
Speaker 1: of faith that makes you wake up a little bit,
Speaker 1: you know, you kind of stop taking things for granted
Speaker 1: a little bit and kind of look at things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's it for this week's episode of Decrypton. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. What do you think about this brave new
Speaker 1: world we're entering? Please get in touch. You can record
Speaker 1: a voice message and send it to Decrypted at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot net. Also, I'm on Twitter at me go a
Speaker 1: Grant and I'm at aki Eta seven. If you haven't already,
Speaker 1: please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: While you're there, please leave us a rating and a review.
Speaker 1: It really helps more listeners Finder Show. This episode was
Speaker 1: produced by Pio gott Kari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson.
Speaker 1: Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you
Speaker 1: next Week. Decrypted is brought to you by red Hat,
Speaker 1: whose broad portfolio of open source technologies for the enterprise
Speaker 1: helps you get from where you are to where you
Speaker 1: want to be. Red Hat the open technology to help
Speaker 1: you real as your vision. Learn more at red hat
Speaker 1: dot com, slash open tech