Agreed, this is a complete non-story. I also think if Amazon did give the information, the HN crowd would be up in arms about a violation of privacy (correctly

Agreed, this is a complete non-story. I also think if Amazon did give the information, the HN crowd would be up in arms about a violation of privacy (correctly). This is exactly the kind of channel that easily gets hacked in social-engineering efforts. The only thing that was wrong here was that the initial customer service rep. said that a police report would be enough, but... that's it. One mistake by one customer service rep. (P.s. if the op is reading this - sorry about the stolen Kindle, I'd be upset too in your situation. I just don't think you should be upset with Amazon - I'd rather large corporations not go into spying and crimefighting)