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Comment by andrewingram | Hacker News Reader

Feels a bit weird. Why does a defendant consenting change anything? Presumably if they were asleep as claimed, they're basically consenting to something that's unrelated to themselves.

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Even if they were sound asleep; what Echo recorded may be incredibly damning - a muffled voice, screams, no evidence of someone sleeping nor of an intruder, yet enough to pull a Jury's emotions that a conviction is needed and the death penalty is merited.

Yes, this sounds like agreeing to a police interview without your lawyer present -- there's almost no chance that it will help you (are they going to hear "Alexa, tell this person who is not James to stop murdering me"?) and basically any audio they hear that's not someone else confessing to the crime can be used against him in court.

That was my first thought. Why should the defendant have a say in what evidence can be collected? Did the Feds ask if they could take DNA samples from the scene, for example?

You could allow the police to do that without a warrant, if you wanted to. Amazon doesn't need to argue whether the prosecution have a legitimate order to seize the data if the 'owner' is willing to turn it over.

In this case, the defendant may have a say only because Amazon is claiming there is standing to enforce the defendant's First Amendment rights - the so-called chilling effect.

With the defendant consenting, Amazon's standing for litigating this issue becomes more fraught.

In this case it is because Amazon resisted the request from the legal system for the data.

The owner of the device giving consent to Amazon to release the data avoids having to play out the legal process of obtaining the data (it's likely the request would eventually have succeeded).

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