Is Your Smart Speaker Spying On You?

Is Your Smart Speaker Spying On You?

Those personal assistants everyone seems to be getting for their home are convenient voice-activated tools for an increasing number of tasks. But when Alexa and Google Home are constantly recording and uploading your voice to the cloud, a third-party server, you could potentially be exposing yourself to hackers, government intrusion, and corporate spying. Are these legitimate concerns or paranoid conspiracy?

Amazon Echo and Alexa 

By now, almost everyone is familiar with Amazon’s voice-command personal assistant, Alexa – arguably better than Siri, but not quite as intuitive as HAL 9000, though that’s probably for the best. Since the technology was introduced in 2014, a number of iterations from Amazon and Google have been created to put smart speakers in the homes of every consumer.

These speakers are able to play your favorite song, order pizza, activate other smart devices, and maintain your calendar. But some of the other conveniences they can handle involve personal data, like locating your phone, accessing bank account information, and calling your loved ones. All of this is accomplished by having a microphone ready to start recording at any given moment.

These days, new technological advents are a double-edged sword; they’re increasingly convenient, but also increasingly intrusive. That microphone recording your request to order take-out is also uploading it to a cloud server; a third party that is able to do what it wishes with that information.

Now, it would require a lot of data storage to record and save everything, all the time, so the device waits for a wake word to start listening. Your recording is then sent to the cloud to be translated by voice recognition software.

Amazon calls this the Alexa Voice Service, or AVS, which one can access and use to build your own voice assistant with a single-board computer like Raspberry Pi. That’s why the basic versions of the technology, like the Amazon Dot, that don’t include a Bluetooth speaker, can provide the technology so inexpensively; it’s basically just a microphone that sends your voice recordings to software in the cloud.

 

home intelligent voice activated assistant 3d rendering concept of hi tech futuristic artificial intelligence speech recognition technology

 

 

So, if the technology is that simple, doesn’t that leave it vulnerable to hackers? Yes, it does. In fact, there have been several different successful hacks that have forced Amazon to warn users of design flaws and vulnerabilities.

On Amazon’s pre-2017 technology, one programmer created a malware code that could be installed on Alexa-enabled devices to make it stream recorded conversations directly to his computer. This program was installed by physically removing the rubber bottom and soldering a connection between the device’s internal hardware, an SD card reader, and his laptop.

Though this particular connection would have been blatantly obvious to the person whose device was tapped, he said he would be able to create a 3D-printed plate that could be easily planted and go unnoticed with more time and development.

Amazon’s response? Don’t buy one of their devices from a third party. This might be the only advice needed for most consumers, but for those unfamiliar with the technology, they may be unwittingly spied on in public places where Amazon products are starting to be planted. Last year, the Wynne hotel in Las Vegas announced it would put Echoes in all of its rooms, while Amazon is adamantly targeting other hotel groups to do the same.

But that wasn’t the only instance of someone finding a security flaw in one of these speakers. Hackers have found a way to translate voice commands into high-frequency pitches able to be heard by Alexa but not by you – kind of like a dog whistle. Again, to use this hack you must be close to the speaker, though it’s much more reticent than having to install something.

While just about anything can be hacked by someone with enough know-how, there have been cases in which these devices have been recording everything as soon as they were turned on, straight from the factory. One tech blogger found his Google Home mini-speaker was recording and uploading his conversations without him saying the wake word. Google has since fixed this design oversight, but it goes to show just how easily it could “accidentally” happen.

Can Government Subpoena Your Voice Assistant?

The technology has only been available for a few years and already the police have tried to acquire a warrant to access recordings from one of these always-on devices. In a case in Arkansas, police sought access to an Amazon Echo in the home of a man convicted of murder.

The company refused to hand over the information and told police that there wouldn’t even be anything there unless the wake word was used to activate the device. Eventually, the defendant agreed to allow the police access to the Echo, from which they found no incriminating evidence, and the case was dropped.

But it wasn’t just the Amazon smart speaker that the police and prosecution hoped to find evidence in, it was also his smart water meter. Prosecutors pointed to a large amount of water used between 1-3 a.m., the time it was thought the defendant hosed down his porch to clean off blood from the victim. The defendant said the am/pm function wasn’t accurate and that he used that much water 12 hours earlier to fill the hot tub.

 

alexa spying on you

 

It’s this level of detail that our web of smart devices can unwittingly tell others about our activity. The use of a smart electric meter can even be used to see what television programs we’re watching by matching electricity fluctuations with the brightness of the screen. Essentially, each program creates a unique power signature, that can be matched to monitor your television habits.

Because these devices are recording data and uploading it to a third-party server, it can be made public or sold to advertisers who can calculate your habits with metadata. It’s unclear whether this type of intrusive data collection is actually being employed by many companies, but it’s highly likely. And as more and more of our appliances become part of the Internet of Things or IoT, every time you use them, data will be mined and analyzed in order to monitor your behavior.

The ACLU has proposed a set of rules and regulations that should be adhered to by law enforcement and other third parties for the protection of consumer privacy, though they haven’t been written into any legislation yet. It seems that unless we figure out a way to prevent the sharing of all this personal information from the use of smart utilities, we may be offering up access to every minute detail of our lives.



Did Nixon Leave Behind Evidence of Aliens in the White House?

If there’s anyone with insight into the existence of extraterrestrials, it’s the President of the United States. But when the topic of disclosure comes up, Richard Nixon’s name appears infrequently compared to other presidents tied to the government’s ufological secrets. But according to the testimony of one confidential informant, not only has the government made contact, but Nixon left evidence of the existence of aliens in the White House.

And it remains there to this day, he says, hidden in a time capsule – its location known only to a handful of people. Though, Nixon claimed it would surface when the time was right.

That informant is Earl Robert “Butch” Merritt, a man with a storied career as a confidential agent for the Nixon administration. A man who participated in a variety of intelligence operations in the nascent years of what would later become the NSA’s COINTEL program used to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt various organizations and target groups even before Watergate.

And while Merritt’s credibility might seem questionable when discussing alien disclosure, his career as an informant is well documented, as are his high-level government connections. Which is why his revelation of a clandestine conversation with Nixon regarding the existence of alien technology and a living extraterrestrial entity is hard to immediately dismiss.

Evidence of Aliens in the White House?

President Eisenhower is usually the first name that comes to mind when discussing the White House’s knowledge of an alien presence, particularly in regard to an apocryphal program known as MJ-12, or Majestic 12.

Essentially, MJ-12 was an alleged group of high brass military and government officials organized after the Roswell UFO incident to deal with the implications of an alien presence and its subsequent technology.

And it was that technology recovered from the Roswell crash that is believed to have led to exponential leaps in our technological advancements, many of which have been used to bolster the military industrial complex – an industry Ike so famously warned the world about before leaving office.

Though he didn’t immediately succeed him, Nixon was Eisenhower’s Vice President, making the ufological connection all the more intriguing. It was also relatively well known that Nixon believed in the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrials, despite his release of Project Bluebook’s conclusive analysis; an Air Force study known as the Condon Report, which allegedly put the existence of UFOs to rest.

But according to his testimony, Nixon divulged his knowledge of a “sophisticated intelligent being” to Merritt toward the end of his presidency when he realized the Watergate scandal was becoming an imminent threat. According to Merritt, Nixon claimed the being was alive and in government protection.

He says Nixon entrusted this information to him as he considered Merritt one of his only confidantes, asking him to personally deliver a letter on the subject to Henry Kissinger – a copy of which allegedly remains hidden today somewhere in the White House.

A Dark Journalist’s Disclosure

Merritt’s testimony is corroborated by Douglas Caddy, a man who acted as a defense attorney for the parties convicted in the Watergate scandal and who claims he knows where Nixon’s ET disclosure letter is hidden in the White House. The two published a book titled, Watergate Exposed: How the President of the United States and the Watergate Burglars Were Set Up as told to Douglas Caddy.

Interviews with both men, including Merritt’s accounts of meeting Nixon, and his subsequent mission as letter courier to Kissinger, can be found on the website of Daniel Liszt, an investigative reporter on government and alien conspiracies, who goes by the alias “Dark Journalist.”

Liszt’s interview with Merritt is fascinating in that it delves into his history as one of the most notorious informants for the president and for other city, state, and federal government entities, due to his cutthroat and non-conventional tactics.

In fact, a New York Times profile piece on Merritt confirms this history, focusing specifically on his role helping New York authorities reclaim the Kenmore Hotel – a drug-addled building in Manhattan that was one of the epicenters of the city’s criminal activity in the ’90s.

Merritt was an indispensable tool for Nixon’s Huston Plan – the aforementioned intelligence program to infiltrate and disrupt parties he felt threatened by, particularly political opponents and anti-war groups.

While serving as an informant under the Huston plan, Merritt says he was warned by one of his sources, a switchboard operator next to the Watergate Hotel named Rhita Reid, of the impending investigation into the administration. Merritt said he tried to warn Nixon, but that he wasn’t concerned at the time and didn’t foresee it’s major implications.

Despite this dismissal, Merritt claims he was one of Nixon’s most trusted sources and was even given nicknames including “003” – an obvious James Bond reference. So, when the Watergate scandal played out and the days of the administration waned, Merritt claims he was brought into a secret underground room beneath the White House where Nixon revealed the existence of an alien entity and technology housed at the infamous Nevada military base, Area 51.

“We have possessed knowledge and we have in our protection subjects from a planet X,” Nixon supposedly told Merritt. “Knowledge we obtained so vast and powerful, whoever possesses this knowledge would be the most powerful person in the world,” Merritt recounted.

Merritt claims Nixon then wrote out a lengthy letter that included encrypted formulae to be delivered to Kissinger. He also included two cassette tapes, before sealing the letter and writing something on its outer flap, omitting his normal signature. Nixon then strapped the letter to Merritt’s stomach and sent him to deliver it to its intended recipient for unknown reasons.

Now, he claims that letter remains hidden somewhere in the White House, its location known to he and Caddy who say they will only reveal its location if the National Archives allows one of them to be present to read the letter publicly.

What is there to make of this testimony? While incredibly intriguing at first, there are some pretty farfetched and bizarre aspects to Merritt and Caddy’s story that might be questionable.

It seems if Nixon wanted to clear his name in the annals of history, he would have released this information himself, whether at that moment or before his death. Though in every instance of a president’s alleged attempt at disclosure, the truth always seems to be stranger than fiction.

 

For more on a U.S. President’s attempt at disclosure check out this episode of Deep Space: 

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