I disagree? I don't think things will deteriorate quickly enough that it will be an issue on the current-gen hardware, but we're discussing the capabilities her

I disagree? I don't think things will deteriorate quickly enough that it will be an issue on the current-gen hardware, but we're discussing the capabilities here, and why people may be skittish about giving these companies an unconstrained inlet into their homes. Technical plausibility does not necessarily imply there's a likelihood of deployment, though I think there would be if the right political circumstances came about. We're talking about the abilities of the devices and the ease of misuse, not whether Jeff Bezos fancies himself a future evil emperor or not -- only Jeff Bezos knows that! All existing Echo models, afaik, are easily capable of being deployed and utilized for these purposes. I don't know whether a remote firmware update can change the wake words that can activate the device or not, but other than that, there is no good reason why this wouldn't happen other than just nobody has done it. From a technical perspective, this kind of use is completely plausible. Whether or not the political will to exploit this capacity en masse will arise or not is a different matter, and I'm not really betting one way or the other on that.