Investigators need logins for non-urgent requests. However, they only need to “declare and acknowledge” that they’re officers if there’s an emergency. We wouldn’t expect this to be widely abused (you could easily face legal trouble), but it’s theoretically possible to misuse the system.
We’ve asked Amazon for comment, although it hadn’t responded to TechCrunch inquiries as we wrote this.
This isn’t the first time a major tech firm’s police portal has been visible online. Motherboard found that anyone with an email address could reach Facebook’s portals. This does provide insight into how Amazon’s system works, though, and raises questions about security if the public can stumble across the request system.