The scene was grim when Bentonville police arrived at the home of 31 year old James Bates on November 22, 2015. Family man Victor Collins was found floating face down in Bates’ hot tub after a night of drinking. Bates told police that he had invited Collins and two other mutual friends over to watch football, and agreed to let the guys crash at his house after the game.

As the investigation continued, police began to suspect foul play- broken bottle, glasses, blood spatters, and signs of a struggle were found around the house and the hot tub. The medical examiner ruled Collins death a homicide and investigators obtained a search warrant for Bates’ house, where they discovered an unlikely asset: an Amazon Echo.

The Amazon Echo is a cylindrically shaped bluetooth speaker that houses Alexa, a personal assistant that controls your smart devices, plays music, and answers any question you can possibly think of Googling. The devices is equipped with seven microphones and responds to a “wake word,” most commonly “Alexa”. As it reacts to the wake word, Alexa streams the recorded audio to the cloud, where it is stored until you delete it.

This feature makes the Echo very valuable to the investigation, as Alexa may have recorded some of the murder and shipped it directly to the cloud. Detectives asked Amazon for the password to Bates’ Amazon account to get access to the recorded audio from that night, but Amazon denied their request.

“Amazon will not release customer information without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us,” a company spokeswoman said. “Amazon objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course.”

Apple said the same thing to the FBI’s request to release the password information of an iPhone that belonged to terrorists who opened fire at a work party in San Bernadino, California, and killed 14 people. The FBI ended up paying professional hackers to break into the phone.

As The Post reported in May, “The ensuing debate drove a wedge between Silicon Valley and Washington, as the tech industry, already wary of government surveillance, rushed to rally behind Apple. Amazon joined Microsoft, Google and a dozen other tech firms when it filed a legal brief supporting Apple’s position in March. “[The] government’s order to Apple exceeds the bounds of existing law and, when applied more broadly, will harm Americans’ security in the long run,” the filing said.”

Talk like this begs the question: Should tech giants be required, by law, to hand over password information to the government? Or should it be wrong, criminal even, to breach consumer security even in a case like this one? Our world is quickly changing, becoming more and more tech central, and we’re watching the law change right along with it.