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If a Best Buy technician is a paid FBI informant, are his searches legal?

175 points by tuna-piano 10y ago

akjainaj 10y ago
No offence but if the Washington Post wants to convince people that computer technicians should not be able to report to the FBI whatever they find in their costumer's computers, they should use examples other than a doctor having child porn in his drive.
- jameskilton 10y ago
  Did you miss the part where the FBI is paying this technician to specifically look for any potentially questionable material? No-one is arguing that reporting something that you stumble upon while doing your job is wrong. This isn't what happened here. This tech was paid to go out of his way to search the computer for the potential of incriminating data. Aka, this is a search without a warrant. Also, of course the media is going to use and abuse "think of the children". This is how politicians convince the public to accept more surveillance and give up their freedoms.
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    I don't agree with the "search without a warrant" part, because it sounds like they specifically were going after this doctor, when they were just looking for whatever they could find in any consumer drive to report it. There is also no proof that this technician was looking into unallocated sectors of the drive just to find something to incriminate customers, since looking into unallocated sectors is standard practice to recover missing files.
    - h_r 10y ago
      In the absence of proof of exactly how they are searching, the troubling aspect to me is the financial incentives being offered to low paid employees to somehow find criminal material. I have no trouble imagining unethical workers even going as far as planting material because "baby needs a new pair of shoes" or the FBI will pay extra to bust some juicy target.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      > because it sounds like they specifically were going after this doctor, when they were just looking for whatever they could find in any consumer drive to report it. Walking into every house on a street or in a city and searching it for drugs is still a highly illegal search. Whether or not a specific person was targeted is entirely beside the point.
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Walking into a house when the owner says "Please walk into my house and look for my lost stuff. I'll pay you" changes the equation, right?
        pavel_lishin 10y ago
        Not if the owner says "Walk into my house and fix my boiler", and you start digging through his underwear drawer.
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    Well, IIUC, he didn't go out of his way. He was asked by the customer to recover deleted files, so he stumbled where otherwise he would not have looked at all. Which makes me wonder why he was paid at all. Normal people don't need an offer of money to call the cops when they come across CP.
- konceptz 10y ago
  Not sure why they should use other examples when the example isn't hypothetical. It reports on what is happening with this exact case. Perhaps you have more issue with the overly general title?
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    What I mean is that these opinion pieces are usually written to change the mind of the readers, but saying "if we let the FBI do this, we will catch more pedophiles" will only make people side with the FBI, I think.
xntrk 10y ago
Hasn't chain of custody been broken then? How can we be sure that the Best Buy tech didn't put illegal images on the machine.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Even without the FBI discussion this is an open question; the content in this case was recovered from an unaddressed location, and there's some court precedent saying that material located their is inherently dubious since its origins are so unclear.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  It's likely that the tech's testimony that they found the images there will be part of the evidence.
- roel_v 10y ago
  'Chain of custody' only starts on seizure. There are no 'chain of custody' issues either when a drug lab is dismantled - sure, some guy in a ski mask might have broken into that garage the night before and put all that stuff there, doesn't make it a chain of custody issue. More similar to the OP, when an electrician finds a mj plantation when doing routine network maintenance (replace a meter, maybe), there is no chain of custody problem either.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    So then it is on the FBI to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the files were placed on the computer by the owner. Not by the technician. Which in court will effectively end up being computer forensic expert vs computer forensic expert lecturing a jury of people who don't understand computers.
    - roel_v 10y ago
      Sure, but (unless I'm misreading your undertone) what's the problem then? When the police find a bloody knife on somebody's kitchen table and the blood matches that of the victim that bled out outside, they also have to prove that it's the owner's. Everybody in this thread is up in arms how there is no way to 'prove' the files were the owner's, like it's some sort of special case that no lawyer or judge ever had to consider before. There's nothing special about the 'evidence' angle of this issue.
edwhitesell 10y ago
This article isn't about searches; it's about the technicians reporting something they happen to see in the course of their business relationship with the customer. I don't see how this is any different than a CI reporting information to LEOs on crimes "in the street". In other words, a warrant is still required before LEOs can look for information themselves to persue charges. If the FBI were really asking Best Buy to search everything they work on for illegal/contraband items, that would be entirely different.
- dhimes 10y ago
  What is a CI? I assume LEO is Law Enforcement Official. Thanks.
  - edwhitesell 10y ago
    CI: Confidential Informant LEO: Law Enforcement Officer
- talmand 10y ago
  In the long run there's likely not much difference. Except there are usually rules and procedures involving a CI. As long as they are following the same rules then I would imagine the practice would be allowed. It'll just as likely kill the business model if it becomes common knowledge that they search for stuff through your hard drive you thought you deleted and possibly make it public. After all, there are personal security problems with all this. Identity theft being a simple one, having your personal stuff made public is another. Never mind the fact that there have been CIs that just made stuff up to get paid.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > This article isn't about searches; it's about the technicians reporting something they happen to see in the course of their business relationship with the customer. If I witness a hit-and-run, will the local police department pay me for it? If I wave a traffic cop over to an illegally parked car, do I get a cut of the fine the driver pays?
Nrsolis 10y ago
Something I'm sure is missing from this discussion is that there is a specific legal duty to report anything that constitutes child pornography to the authorities. The NCMEC is the clearinghouse for this sort of information and my former employer had regular training on what our legal responsibilities were with respect to this. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A I can't be certain about this case, but I'd suspect that this was somehow wrapped up in the reporting requirement and things went off the rails after that.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  The initial reporting suggests that abandoning this reporting requirement is basically the problem here. Specifically: the (good) reporting requirement holds that discovered content must be reported. The new setup effectively pays bounties for anything discovered, and there's a lot of concern that it will prompt fishing expeditions without cause. It also blurs the lines of private search since it's possible to put bounties on other content without a reporting requirement. And, of course, the FBIs initial filings in the case appear to have systematically tried to hide that this was anything other than normal reporting.
  - ensignavenger 10y ago
    It also taints the evidence- how can the prosecution prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the files weren't planted their by the technician in order to collect the bounty?
- mikecb 10y ago
  Best Buy may not be subject to this particular statute. Do you have a reason to believe they are?
  - Nrsolis 10y ago
    By my understanding, ANY person who in the course of their work encounters child pornography MUST report it to the NCMEC. IN the past, I know that film developers were obliged to report child pornography to the police and I'm assuming that this applies here as well.
reverend_gonzo 10y ago
If the Best Buy employee is paid for a successful find, what's to prevent an entrepreneurial employee from placing his own images onto a computer?
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  That's definitely one of the concerns, since the case at hand is about content discovered in unaddressed space. There's already some court precedent saying that such images can't be prosecuted for mere possession since it's unclear how they arrived there. In the past, that's meant "malware or remote access", but it does create concern about "the person doing the search, who put the image somewhere that there would be no record of how it arrived there".
- talmand 10y ago
  As another poster has used the CI model as a comparison, there have been cases where the CI made up accusations to get paid. Which, of course, didn't go well for the target of the inaccurate allegation.
- minikites 10y ago
  And it's not like we haven't figured this out already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
koolba 10y ago
This is interesting: > The search of Rettenmaier’s hard drive has a further wrinkle. The image was located on “unallocated space,” which is where deleted items reside on a computer until they are overwritten when the space is needed. Unallocated space is not easily accessed — it requires special forensic software. > Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored. Riddet argued that the technician was going beyond the regular search to deleted material to find evidence the FBI might want. It's not difficult to recreate files that have been deleted but not fully wiped from the disk. But it's also not trivial. If the Best Buy techs are finding things in those regions of the disk then that means they're explicitly looking at what's there. It's not just a matter of, "Hey the desktop wallpaper of this guy's laptop is kiddie porn, I should report this!", these guys are actively searching people's computers on behalf of the Feds.
- anilgulecha 10y ago
  > Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored Depends on what was asked to be recovered, but I'm guessing it's just a brute-force 'undelete' type program that was run, which usually lists all scourable/recoverable nodes from the "free" space. In this scenario, there is no difference between what was asked to be restored, and was found.. since the undelete types of programs always list all found files, and ask you to pick which to restore. So if some file-names there were suspicious, that's not different from the "I saw a CP wallpaper". Conjecture, of course. We do not know the exact communication.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    This was my thought originally, but then I read the article. I no longer believe this is what happened. Official Best Buy policy is exactly as you state -- we don't perform an invasive search for illegal content, but if we find it in the course of normal operations, we will report it. Official Best Buy policy is that individual employees will not accept payments from the FBI. But, one supervisor did accept payments from the FBI. That same supervisor remained in contact with the FBI for years. And that same supervisor lied under oath about receiving those payments. He was in regular contact with the FBI, accepted regular payments from the FBI, and -- what's more -- felt the need to lie about that relationship. I think it's extremely likely that he was having those he supervised perform searches that would not otherwise have been performed has he not received payment from the FBI. That's probably the factual question that this case will boil down to -- would this material have been uncovered if a different supervisor, following all of Best Buy's policies, had been in charge that day?
6stringmerc 10y ago
As a political independent, one very concerned with personal privacy, yet also with conduct in society as a whole according to rules / laws / expectations, I think here's the crux of the argument: >The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches? This would be a good piece for the legal eagles on here to mull over I think. In my view, a business transaction should be defined; in the way First Amendment doesn't mean diddly on Twitter, Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in a private party exchange that is open ended. >Best Buy searching a computer is legal — the customer authorized it, and the law does not prohibit private searches. But if Best Buy serves as an arm of the government, then a warrant or specific consent is needed. Well how about that! Pretty clear cut, except for the interjected of OOOOH BUT WHAT IF GOVERNMENT angle. If an Electrician stumbles upon a drug lab after being hired by a private party, then reports the crime and is potentially compensated, do I have a problem with that? The Electrician was functioning as an Electrician, not as a government agent. I'm actually kind of okay with private citizens having concerns about inheriting illegal activity knowledge and being, well, powerless. That leads to vigilantism maybe? I'd like to think, hard as it might be from time to time, that the justice system will function as intended, and this is a Defense Attorney holding a deck of cards that pretty much all allude to guilt, so attacking the source is a reasonable move. Get the evidence thrown out, right? Except I don't think it's so easy in this case. Maybe when somebody starts going door-to-door offering computer repair services but really are just on the payroll by an LEO, yeah, a line has been crossed. Hm.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I think it comes down to whether these people are acting on their own initiative or whether they're being told to do this stuff beforehand. To take your electrician example, I have no problem with the scenario you present. Where I'd have a problem is if the police set up a program to recruit electricians and ask them to keep an eye out for illegal activities, and promised them payment if they find stuff. Protections against illegal searches can't be this easy to work around, otherwise what would be the point of having them? If this was sufficient to satisfy the 4th Amendment, then any time the police wanted to search a house, all they'd have to do is, say, contact a local utility and have one of their employees pretend to check the property and report back all the illegal stuff they saw. (And I'm sure someone will post a link to a story about police doing exactly that.)
thedevil 10y ago
Forgive the petty distraction, but did anyone notice the outdated dress code in the picture at the top of the story? They've got people doing manual labor in a repair shop far from customers, and making them wear white shirts and ties. They try to compensate for the inappropriate dress code by wearing loose and short-sleeved clothing (they probably have to do something to hold their ties too), but that only makes it look more awkward. Is this common in computer repair? Is it common in the eastern US? I had hoped we had moved past that era. Or perhaps I've become too prima donna since I've become a developer. But the oppressive dress code hurts my soul as much as the FBI using geeks to search for child porn.
- analog31 10y ago
  It may have to do with the "geek squad" name and image. Historically, a short sleeve dress shirt, necktie, and polyester pants, were considered to be the uniform of an engineer or service tech. There was no corresponding stereotype for women, but I remember during my summer internship in a computer facility 30+ years ago, that pretty much everybody held to a similar aesthetic.
  - thedevil 10y ago
    I can understand why they might want to project an image, even an outdated image if, for example, their customers are older. But who are they projecting that image to? There's no customers around and I don't think that projected image holds the same meaning to the millenials in the picture. To them, it sends the message that they work at a company like Initech.
rayiner 10y ago
This is pretty clear cut and I hope it gets decided the right way. The 4th amendment doesn't apply to private actors acting of their own accord, but does apply to private actors acting as agents of the government. The payments make this a slam dunk--the Best Buy employees were working as agents of the FBI and any searches they did require a warrant.
- celticninja 10y ago
  I'm not sure it is as clear cut. If those payments were upon conviction or something then they would be similar to rewards, if they were paid a monthly stipend then it is very clear they are government agents.
  - finid 10y ago
    Seems they were paid per report. What that means is those guys have an incentive to conduct a search for interesting material on every computer they work on. Think about it. Considering how much those guys are paid, an extra $500 per report is a good incentive for looking at every hard drive outside the scope of normal repair activities. So now your local electronics repair man is spying for the govt. You airline and bus employee is doing the same. The police state, it seems, is upon us already. We're still too busy on social media to notice. By the time most people realize what's going on, it will be too late.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  But where does that put 'mandatory reporters'? Many folks in a position to observe children are required to report signs of abuse. Are they 'agents of the government'? I imagine this complicates their job e.g. health care where they ask very personal questions. Also, no warrant would be required to perform a search when requested by the citizen, right? "Please, officer, look in my trunk!"
droithomme 10y ago
The FBI is acting in bad faith. If this is found to be permitted, then search warrants are no longer necessary in many situations since the police can simply hire anyone who is not a LEO to conduct a warrantless search on their behalf. Given that the file in question was in the deleted free space, the technician didn't just stumble into it accidentally and then report it. He went looking for it to begin with. And he was searching for such files because he was paid to do so.
- patcheudor 10y ago
  Chain of custody should play a big factor here. Between the accused and the technician how many people had access to that system? Further, since the technician is paid when something is found, what is the motivation for the technician to not plant evidence? It's trivial to plant evidence on a hard-drive to the point that if done properly it's impossible for a forensics investigator to come in after the fact and determine the tampering. This is all before even getting into the topic of potential malware infections, running as a TOR exit node, being used for torrent hosting unbeknownst to the user, etc. There was a case many years ago and I wish I could find the reference to it in which the defense called in an expert witness who convinced the judge to have his machine inspected by a forensic analyst who found it clear of pictures of kittens. The expert witness then had the judge visit an 'innocuous' looking website which didn't have pictures of kittens visible, but loaded them in hidden iFrames. The system was then inspected again by the forensics analyst who then found pictures of kittens, the point being that when your computer is connected to the Internet it really isn't your computer anymore.
  - cmurf 10y ago
    The whole repair process is fraught with liability whether the customer is the target of a criminal investigation or not. In either case, you'd probably need to image the drive as a first step, and then date stamp, hash, and then sign the date and hash. Or use something like dm-verity. Maybe the physical handling of drive removal and putting it on a docking station for imaging is video'd and that video is also verifiable (mainly you'd want a system that ensures whole frames aren't deleted..i.e. oh hey I see 5 seconds were yanked here and over here, so conceivably the drive was removed and returned to the docking station and altered prior to imaging). Also, as COW filesystems become more common (ReFS, AFS, ZFS, Btrfs) there will be a lot of stale metadata that is non-trivial to fake. Basically snapshots are constantly being taken, even if they are not preserved for very long. On an SSD ostensibly these unused blocks get trimmed and should immediately return zeros, but there might be modes were they return stale data instead if it's before erase block GC/erasure happens. Edit: And now you have this copy of the customer's drive... itself a liablity for it to exist for very long, or deleted too soon. dm-verity at least does produce a read-only encrypted image so the liability is both access to the image and the security of that image's passphrase.
Lawtonfogle 10y ago
So the Best Buy employees were in possession of child abuse material and even used it to make profit? Sounds like they should be charged for abusing children. Merely viewing it or possessing it harms children, so no excuses. Even the FBI shouldn't be allowed to posses it.
nraynaud 10y ago
The US is more and more looking like East Germany, everybody spies on everybody else.
TACIXAT 10y ago
>“There was no evidence of how the contraband got onto Dr. Rettenmaier’s hard drive,” Riddet wrote, “and it could have gotten there before he possessed the computer or against his will.” Ha ha ha, no mention of his cell phone which contained ~800 images of (fully and partially) nude girls. [1] Another article I saw on this was claiming it wasn't child pornography because it wasn't depicting a sexual act. While that is true on a technicality, you still have multiple devices with pictures of underage girls. The image found on his computer was of a prepubescent girl, which a choker on, on all fours. [2] I am in computer security. If you allow someone else to access your computer (or your traffic, see: ISP) and they find something, and report it, I don't see how that constitutes an illegal search. I had some friends on FB freaking out about this case and the fourth amendment, I am totally fine with it. Good on the Best Buy tech and good on the FBI. This guy had pictures of under age girls on his devices and works in a position of power (gyno doctor). I'm glad this has come to light and I hope he goes to prison. 1. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbis-use-best-buy-geek-squad-informants-exposed-long-running-child-porn-probe-1600279 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbis-use-best-buy-geek-squad-inform... 2. http://www.ocweekly.com/news/best-buy-geek-squad-informant-use-has-fbi-on-defense-in-child-porn-case-7794252 http://www.ocweekly.com/news/best-buy-geek-squad-informant-u...
- icebraining 10y ago
  Is there any actual evidence of those phone pictures, besides "sources reported"? Also, he had photos in his unallocated space. Which could happen to you, if someone sent you an email or link, you opened it, and immediately deleted them. Sure, you might be aware enough not do this. Should we jail someone because they aren't? It's easy to forget the legal protections when it's someone we have prejudged. Hopefully they will still be around when they come for you.
  - TACIXAT 10y ago
    Is there usually evidence provided to the public in ongoing court cases? There is just as much evidence that the Best Buy employee was paid by the FBI. We have what is reported in the news. So, with the reported deleted photo, and the reported photos on his mobile, yes, I have prejudged him. He can be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the state, I am not the state though. In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it? 1. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-geek-squad-child-porn-20160521-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-geek-squad-child... Edit: Oh, but what if someone emailed him those 800 photos, he only opened them momentarily and then deleted them? Get your head out of the sand.
liquidise 10y ago
So, would anyone care to comment on the analogous, "offline" scenario here for a better baseline? Consider the two scenarios. Do either (both?) have legal or moral standing? 1. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave a firearm in the pocket. The feds visit me to inquire about the firearm. 2. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave pictures of child porn in the pocket. The feds visit me about said porn.
- digler999 10y ago
  the nuance is how big or small the "pocket" is. If your dry cleaner opens up your suit examining every nook and cranny, even areas between the fabric which you have no access to, then collects the dust particles and scans them in a chromatography machine and calls the cops when they find one particle of cocaine, they knew without a doubt came from your suit, and forward the chromatograph results to the FBI who prosecutes you for drug possession. Thats a closer offline scenario to whats going on here.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

175 points by tuna-piano 10y ago

No offence but if the Washington Post wants to convince people that computer technicians should not be able to report to the FBI whatever they find in their costumer's computers, they should use examples other than a doctor having child porn in his drive.

jameskilton 10y ago
Did you miss the part where the FBI is paying this technician to specifically look for any potentially questionable material? No-one is arguing that reporting something that you stumble upon while doing your job is wrong. This isn't what happened here. This tech was paid to go out of his way to search the computer for the potential of incriminating data. Aka, this is a search without a warrant. Also, of course the media is going to use and abuse "think of the children". This is how politicians convince the public to accept more surveillance and give up their freedoms.
- akjainaj 10y ago
  I don't agree with the "search without a warrant" part, because it sounds like they specifically were going after this doctor, when they were just looking for whatever they could find in any consumer drive to report it. There is also no proof that this technician was looking into unallocated sectors of the drive just to find something to incriminate customers, since looking into unallocated sectors is standard practice to recover missing files.
  - h_r 10y ago
    In the absence of proof of exactly how they are searching, the troubling aspect to me is the financial incentives being offered to low paid employees to somehow find criminal material. I have no trouble imagining unethical workers even going as far as planting material because "baby needs a new pair of shoes" or the FBI will pay extra to bust some juicy target.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    > because it sounds like they specifically were going after this doctor, when they were just looking for whatever they could find in any consumer drive to report it. Walking into every house on a street or in a city and searching it for drugs is still a highly illegal search. Whether or not a specific person was targeted is entirely beside the point.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Walking into a house when the owner says "Please walk into my house and look for my lost stuff. I'll pay you" changes the equation, right?
      - pavel_lishin 10y ago
        Not if the owner says "Walk into my house and fix my boiler", and you start digging through his underwear drawer.
- ocschwar 10y ago
  Well, IIUC, he didn't go out of his way. He was asked by the customer to recover deleted files, so he stumbled where otherwise he would not have looked at all. Which makes me wonder why he was paid at all. Normal people don't need an offer of money to call the cops when they come across CP.
konceptz 10y ago
Not sure why they should use other examples when the example isn't hypothetical. It reports on what is happening with this exact case. Perhaps you have more issue with the overly general title?
- akjainaj 10y ago
  What I mean is that these opinion pieces are usually written to change the mind of the readers, but saying "if we let the FBI do this, we will catch more pedophiles" will only make people side with the FBI, I think.

xntrk 10y ago

Hasn't chain of custody been broken then? How can we be sure that the Best Buy tech didn't put illegal images on the machine.

Bartweiss 10y ago
Even without the FBI discussion this is an open question; the content in this case was recovered from an unaddressed location, and there's some court precedent saying that material located their is inherently dubious since its origins are so unclear.
wyldfire 10y ago
It's likely that the tech's testimony that they found the images there will be part of the evidence.
roel_v 10y ago
'Chain of custody' only starts on seizure. There are no 'chain of custody' issues either when a drug lab is dismantled - sure, some guy in a ski mask might have broken into that garage the night before and put all that stuff there, doesn't make it a chain of custody issue. More similar to the OP, when an electrician finds a mj plantation when doing routine network maintenance (replace a meter, maybe), there is no chain of custody problem either.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  So then it is on the FBI to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the files were placed on the computer by the owner. Not by the technician. Which in court will effectively end up being computer forensic expert vs computer forensic expert lecturing a jury of people who don't understand computers.
  - roel_v 10y ago
    Sure, but (unless I'm misreading your undertone) what's the problem then? When the police find a bloody knife on somebody's kitchen table and the blood matches that of the victim that bled out outside, they also have to prove that it's the owner's. Everybody in this thread is up in arms how there is no way to 'prove' the files were the owner's, like it's some sort of special case that no lawyer or judge ever had to consider before. There's nothing special about the 'evidence' angle of this issue.

edwhitesell 10y ago

This article isn't about searches; it's about the technicians reporting something they happen to see in the course of their business relationship with the customer. I don't see how this is any different than a CI reporting information to LEOs on crimes "in the street". In other words, a warrant is still required before LEOs can look for information themselves to persue charges. If the FBI were really asking Best Buy to search everything they work on for illegal/contraband items, that would be entirely different.

dhimes 10y ago
What is a CI? I assume LEO is Law Enforcement Official. Thanks.
- edwhitesell 10y ago
  CI: Confidential Informant LEO: Law Enforcement Officer
talmand 10y ago
In the long run there's likely not much difference. Except there are usually rules and procedures involving a CI. As long as they are following the same rules then I would imagine the practice would be allowed. It'll just as likely kill the business model if it becomes common knowledge that they search for stuff through your hard drive you thought you deleted and possibly make it public. After all, there are personal security problems with all this. Identity theft being a simple one, having your personal stuff made public is another. Never mind the fact that there have been CIs that just made stuff up to get paid.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
> This article isn't about searches; it's about the technicians reporting something they happen to see in the course of their business relationship with the customer. If I witness a hit-and-run, will the local police department pay me for it? If I wave a traffic cop over to an illegally parked car, do I get a cut of the fine the driver pays?

Nrsolis 10y ago

Something I'm sure is missing from this discussion is that there is a specific legal duty to report anything that constitutes child pornography to the authorities. The NCMEC is the clearinghouse for this sort of information and my former employer had regular training on what our legal responsibilities were with respect to this. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A I can't be certain about this case, but I'd suspect that this was somehow wrapped up in the reporting requirement and things went off the rails after that.

Bartweiss 10y ago
The initial reporting suggests that abandoning this reporting requirement is basically the problem here. Specifically: the (good) reporting requirement holds that discovered content must be reported. The new setup effectively pays bounties for anything discovered, and there's a lot of concern that it will prompt fishing expeditions without cause. It also blurs the lines of private search since it's possible to put bounties on other content without a reporting requirement. And, of course, the FBIs initial filings in the case appear to have systematically tried to hide that this was anything other than normal reporting.
- ensignavenger 10y ago
  It also taints the evidence- how can the prosecution prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the files weren't planted their by the technician in order to collect the bounty?
mikecb 10y ago
Best Buy may not be subject to this particular statute. Do you have a reason to believe they are?
- Nrsolis 10y ago
  By my understanding, ANY person who in the course of their work encounters child pornography MUST report it to the NCMEC. IN the past, I know that film developers were obliged to report child pornography to the police and I'm assuming that this applies here as well.

reverend_gonzo 10y ago

If the Best Buy employee is paid for a successful find, what's to prevent an entrepreneurial employee from placing his own images onto a computer?

Bartweiss 10y ago
That's definitely one of the concerns, since the case at hand is about content discovered in unaddressed space. There's already some court precedent saying that such images can't be prosecuted for mere possession since it's unclear how they arrived there. In the past, that's meant "malware or remote access", but it does create concern about "the person doing the search, who put the image somewhere that there would be no record of how it arrived there".
talmand 10y ago
As another poster has used the CI model as a comparison, there have been cases where the CI made up accusations to get paid. Which, of course, didn't go well for the target of the inaccurate allegation.
minikites 10y ago
And it's not like we haven't figured this out already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

koolba 10y ago

This is interesting: > The search of Rettenmaier’s hard drive has a further wrinkle. The image was located on “unallocated space,” which is where deleted items reside on a computer until they are overwritten when the space is needed. Unallocated space is not easily accessed — it requires special forensic software. > Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored. Riddet argued that the technician was going beyond the regular search to deleted material to find evidence the FBI might want. It's not difficult to recreate files that have been deleted but not fully wiped from the disk. But it's also not trivial. If the Best Buy techs are finding things in those regions of the disk then that means they're explicitly looking at what's there. It's not just a matter of, "Hey the desktop wallpaper of this guy's laptop is kiddie porn, I should report this!", these guys are actively searching people's computers on behalf of the Feds.

anilgulecha 10y ago
> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored Depends on what was asked to be recovered, but I'm guessing it's just a brute-force 'undelete' type program that was run, which usually lists all scourable/recoverable nodes from the "free" space. In this scenario, there is no difference between what was asked to be restored, and was found.. since the undelete types of programs always list all found files, and ask you to pick which to restore. So if some file-names there were suspicious, that's not different from the "I saw a CP wallpaper". Conjecture, of course. We do not know the exact communication.
- throwaway729 10y ago
  This was my thought originally, but then I read the article. I no longer believe this is what happened. Official Best Buy policy is exactly as you state -- we don't perform an invasive search for illegal content, but if we find it in the course of normal operations, we will report it. Official Best Buy policy is that individual employees will not accept payments from the FBI. But, one supervisor did accept payments from the FBI. That same supervisor remained in contact with the FBI for years. And that same supervisor lied under oath about receiving those payments. He was in regular contact with the FBI, accepted regular payments from the FBI, and -- what's more -- felt the need to lie about that relationship. I think it's extremely likely that he was having those he supervised perform searches that would not otherwise have been performed has he not received payment from the FBI. That's probably the factual question that this case will boil down to -- would this material have been uncovered if a different supervisor, following all of Best Buy's policies, had been in charge that day?

6stringmerc 10y ago

As a political independent, one very concerned with personal privacy, yet also with conduct in society as a whole according to rules / laws / expectations, I think here's the crux of the argument: >The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches? This would be a good piece for the legal eagles on here to mull over I think. In my view, a business transaction should be defined; in the way First Amendment doesn't mean diddly on Twitter, Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in a private party exchange that is open ended. >Best Buy searching a computer is legal — the customer authorized it, and the law does not prohibit private searches. But if Best Buy serves as an arm of the government, then a warrant or specific consent is needed. Well how about that! Pretty clear cut, except for the interjected of OOOOH BUT WHAT IF GOVERNMENT angle. If an Electrician stumbles upon a drug lab after being hired by a private party, then reports the crime and is potentially compensated, do I have a problem with that? The Electrician was functioning as an Electrician, not as a government agent. I'm actually kind of okay with private citizens having concerns about inheriting illegal activity knowledge and being, well, powerless. That leads to vigilantism maybe? I'd like to think, hard as it might be from time to time, that the justice system will function as intended, and this is a Defense Attorney holding a deck of cards that pretty much all allude to guilt, so attacking the source is a reasonable move. Get the evidence thrown out, right? Except I don't think it's so easy in this case. Maybe when somebody starts going door-to-door offering computer repair services but really are just on the payroll by an LEO, yeah, a line has been crossed. Hm.

mikeash 10y ago
I think it comes down to whether these people are acting on their own initiative or whether they're being told to do this stuff beforehand. To take your electrician example, I have no problem with the scenario you present. Where I'd have a problem is if the police set up a program to recruit electricians and ask them to keep an eye out for illegal activities, and promised them payment if they find stuff. Protections against illegal searches can't be this easy to work around, otherwise what would be the point of having them? If this was sufficient to satisfy the 4th Amendment, then any time the police wanted to search a house, all they'd have to do is, say, contact a local utility and have one of their employees pretend to check the property and report back all the illegal stuff they saw. (And I'm sure someone will post a link to a story about police doing exactly that.)

thedevil 10y ago

Forgive the petty distraction, but did anyone notice the outdated dress code in the picture at the top of the story? They've got people doing manual labor in a repair shop far from customers, and making them wear white shirts and ties. They try to compensate for the inappropriate dress code by wearing loose and short-sleeved clothing (they probably have to do something to hold their ties too), but that only makes it look more awkward. Is this common in computer repair? Is it common in the eastern US? I had hoped we had moved past that era. Or perhaps I've become too prima donna since I've become a developer. But the oppressive dress code hurts my soul as much as the FBI using geeks to search for child porn.

analog31 10y ago
It may have to do with the "geek squad" name and image. Historically, a short sleeve dress shirt, necktie, and polyester pants, were considered to be the uniform of an engineer or service tech. There was no corresponding stereotype for women, but I remember during my summer internship in a computer facility 30+ years ago, that pretty much everybody held to a similar aesthetic.
- thedevil 10y ago
  I can understand why they might want to project an image, even an outdated image if, for example, their customers are older. But who are they projecting that image to? There's no customers around and I don't think that projected image holds the same meaning to the millenials in the picture. To them, it sends the message that they work at a company like Initech.

rayiner 10y ago

This is pretty clear cut and I hope it gets decided the right way. The 4th amendment doesn't apply to private actors acting of their own accord, but does apply to private actors acting as agents of the government. The payments make this a slam dunk--the Best Buy employees were working as agents of the FBI and any searches they did require a warrant.

celticninja 10y ago
I'm not sure it is as clear cut. If those payments were upon conviction or something then they would be similar to rewards, if they were paid a monthly stipend then it is very clear they are government agents.
- finid 10y ago
  Seems they were paid per report. What that means is those guys have an incentive to conduct a search for interesting material on every computer they work on. Think about it. Considering how much those guys are paid, an extra $500 per report is a good incentive for looking at every hard drive outside the scope of normal repair activities. So now your local electronics repair man is spying for the govt. You airline and bus employee is doing the same. The police state, it seems, is upon us already. We're still too busy on social media to notice. By the time most people realize what's going on, it will be too late.
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JoeAltmaier 10y ago
But where does that put 'mandatory reporters'? Many folks in a position to observe children are required to report signs of abuse. Are they 'agents of the government'? I imagine this complicates their job e.g. health care where they ask very personal questions. Also, no warrant would be required to perform a search when requested by the citizen, right? "Please, officer, look in my trunk!"

droithomme 10y ago

The FBI is acting in bad faith. If this is found to be permitted, then search warrants are no longer necessary in many situations since the police can simply hire anyone who is not a LEO to conduct a warrantless search on their behalf. Given that the file in question was in the deleted free space, the technician didn't just stumble into it accidentally and then report it. He went looking for it to begin with. And he was searching for such files because he was paid to do so.

patcheudor 10y ago
Chain of custody should play a big factor here. Between the accused and the technician how many people had access to that system? Further, since the technician is paid when something is found, what is the motivation for the technician to not plant evidence? It's trivial to plant evidence on a hard-drive to the point that if done properly it's impossible for a forensics investigator to come in after the fact and determine the tampering. This is all before even getting into the topic of potential malware infections, running as a TOR exit node, being used for torrent hosting unbeknownst to the user, etc. There was a case many years ago and I wish I could find the reference to it in which the defense called in an expert witness who convinced the judge to have his machine inspected by a forensic analyst who found it clear of pictures of kittens. The expert witness then had the judge visit an 'innocuous' looking website which didn't have pictures of kittens visible, but loaded them in hidden iFrames. The system was then inspected again by the forensics analyst who then found pictures of kittens, the point being that when your computer is connected to the Internet it really isn't your computer anymore.
- cmurf 10y ago
  The whole repair process is fraught with liability whether the customer is the target of a criminal investigation or not. In either case, you'd probably need to image the drive as a first step, and then date stamp, hash, and then sign the date and hash. Or use something like dm-verity. Maybe the physical handling of drive removal and putting it on a docking station for imaging is video'd and that video is also verifiable (mainly you'd want a system that ensures whole frames aren't deleted..i.e. oh hey I see 5 seconds were yanked here and over here, so conceivably the drive was removed and returned to the docking station and altered prior to imaging). Also, as COW filesystems become more common (ReFS, AFS, ZFS, Btrfs) there will be a lot of stale metadata that is non-trivial to fake. Basically snapshots are constantly being taken, even if they are not preserved for very long. On an SSD ostensibly these unused blocks get trimmed and should immediately return zeros, but there might be modes were they return stale data instead if it's before erase block GC/erasure happens. Edit: And now you have this copy of the customer's drive... itself a liablity for it to exist for very long, or deleted too soon. dm-verity at least does produce a read-only encrypted image so the liability is both access to the image and the security of that image's passphrase.

Lawtonfogle 10y ago

So the Best Buy employees were in possession of child abuse material and even used it to make profit? Sounds like they should be charged for abusing children. Merely viewing it or possessing it harms children, so no excuses. Even the FBI shouldn't be allowed to posses it.

nraynaud 10y ago

The US is more and more looking like East Germany, everybody spies on everybody else.

TACIXAT 10y ago

>“There was no evidence of how the contraband got onto Dr. Rettenmaier’s hard drive,” Riddet wrote, “and it could have gotten there before he possessed the computer or against his will.” Ha ha ha, no mention of his cell phone which contained ~800 images of (fully and partially) nude girls. [1] Another article I saw on this was claiming it wasn't child pornography because it wasn't depicting a sexual act. While that is true on a technicality, you still have multiple devices with pictures of underage girls. The image found on his computer was of a prepubescent girl, which a choker on, on all fours. [2] I am in computer security. If you allow someone else to access your computer (or your traffic, see: ISP) and they find something, and report it, I don't see how that constitutes an illegal search. I had some friends on FB freaking out about this case and the fourth amendment, I am totally fine with it. Good on the Best Buy tech and good on the FBI. This guy had pictures of under age girls on his devices and works in a position of power (gyno doctor). I'm glad this has come to light and I hope he goes to prison. 1. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbis-use-best-buy-geek-squad-informants-exposed-long-running-child-porn-probe-1600279 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbis-use-best-buy-geek-squad-inform... 2. http://www.ocweekly.com/news/best-buy-geek-squad-informant-use-has-fbi-on-defense-in-child-porn-case-7794252 http://www.ocweekly.com/news/best-buy-geek-squad-informant-u...

icebraining 10y ago
Is there any actual evidence of those phone pictures, besides "sources reported"? Also, he had photos in his unallocated space. Which could happen to you, if someone sent you an email or link, you opened it, and immediately deleted them. Sure, you might be aware enough not do this. Should we jail someone because they aren't? It's easy to forget the legal protections when it's someone we have prejudged. Hopefully they will still be around when they come for you.
- TACIXAT 10y ago
  Is there usually evidence provided to the public in ongoing court cases? There is just as much evidence that the Best Buy employee was paid by the FBI. We have what is reported in the news. So, with the reported deleted photo, and the reported photos on his mobile, yes, I have prejudged him. He can be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the state, I am not the state though. In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it? 1. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-geek-squad-child-porn-20160521-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-geek-squad-child... Edit: Oh, but what if someone emailed him those 800 photos, he only opened them momentarily and then deleted them? Get your head out of the sand.

liquidise 10y ago

So, would anyone care to comment on the analogous, "offline" scenario here for a better baseline? Consider the two scenarios. Do either (both?) have legal or moral standing? 1. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave a firearm in the pocket. The feds visit me to inquire about the firearm. 2. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave pictures of child porn in the pocket. The feds visit me about said porn.

digler999 10y ago
the nuance is how big or small the "pocket" is. If your dry cleaner opens up your suit examining every nook and cranny, even areas between the fabric which you have no access to, then collects the dust particles and scans them in a chromatography machine and calls the cops when they find one particle of cocaine, they knew without a doubt came from your suit, and forward the chromatograph results to the FBI who prosecutes you for drug possession. Thats a closer offline scenario to whats going on here.

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