Amazon Echo does not record anything unless it has been activated with the wake word. You need to go read the article again. The warrant (not subpoena) is asking for anything the Echo device may have recorded, which would be after the wake word. I don't think it is surprising to anybody that owns an Echo that Amazon has this information. You can even see it in the iPhone app.
No, what's surprising to people is that massive dossiers of information are being amassed about them. It's alarming how easily people in the US and elsewhere are marching themselves to a Panopticon Orwellian future. Years ago, if a company had said we want to put a bunch of mikes that can record everything heard in your house so we can use it to build a file about you to sell your information to advertisers, people would have laughed in disbelief.
Why would you agree that Amazon or Google or anyone could record what is said in the privacy of your home? Why would you agree that Amazon or Google or anyone could amass that type of information on you that is easily retrievable and shareable, hackable, etc.? Amazing. Sad.
Imagine if you also told them that everyone of your letters that you send and receive will be opened and copied. We will follow you and record everywhere you drive and who you visit. We will record every book you check out or buy, every film you watch, every song you listen to, every spreadsheet or document you create, every letter to the editor you write, every thing you research, every photograph you take or are sent, everything you buy, and everything you say. And, we are going to do the same for all of your family and friends. And then we are going to put everything in a dossier that we will keep forever and use this information to keep track of you and what you do in the future and to sell access to you to others who want to know about you, advertisers, insurance companies, our subsidiaries, etc. And, in the future, we might just sell all of this to another company in another country. And the government can access it all. And criminals might break into our warehouse where we store it and steal it for who knows what. And foreign and domestic intel agencies might want to do the same. All of this would have been unimaginable except in a fiction novel like
1984. But it has now come to reality, and in the words of one intelligence official, "If Google didn't exist, we would have had to invent it."
