Alexa
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Per John Kiriakou, Alexa, Amazon's smart speaker, reports directly to the NSA, a comparison he draws alongside Ring doorbell cameras, which he says report directly to police. He cites this as part of why he believes genuine privacy is no longer possible in 2026, arguing that people have simply given it away through everyday smart-home devices.

The exception he makes for himself

He owns one regardless, and says so unprompted and repeatedly, "against the advice of every intelligence officer I've ever known, I have an Alexa in my room", because it plays SiriusXM in the morning and serves as his alarm clock. Asked by a viewer how, of all people, he could have one in the house, his answer was that it sits in the bedroom "where nothing is going on," and that he does not mind it listening to him snore.

The exception is a narrow one rather than an inconsistency. On a separate occasion he described the same allowance for a kitchen unit, recipes and the weather, and added the operating rule that goes with it: he does not say anything in that room. It is, he says, the only smart technology he permits himself; otherwise he keeps to a waterproof shower radio for the morning news, and phones and televisions are removed from the room for anything private, on the reasoning that the CIA, the FBI and the Israelis kill people they do not like, so better safe than sorry.

Three in the morning

The device appears in one of the more personal stories Kiriakou tells about the period after his marriage broke down, when he was sleeping badly and lying awake at three in the morning. He asked it what percentage of marriages that begin as affairs end in divorce; it answered, in what he describes as a chipper voice, that the figure was ninety-three per cent. His reaction was relief, "oh, thank God. Okay, so at least I've got that", and, in the other telling, the thought that he would be vindicated, which he says he was, fourteen months later.

The answer did not fix the insomnia. What he credits with breaking the spell was repetition of a sentence out loud in the dark, "you're a nice guy and you don't deserve to be treated this way", several hundred times.

See also

- NSA
- NSA surveillance
- CIA smart TV surveillance
- John Kiriakou
