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I think people are missing the issue here. Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy. The issue is that they were getting paid to repo

I think people are missing the issue here. Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy. The issue is that they were getting paid to report crime. Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.

erikb 9y ago
Isn't flagging pictures making a suggestion so that a real law enforcement officer can check a reduced number of pictures instead of all pictures in existence? Starting from the real officer making a decision the process is normal law enforcement isn't it?
- amykhar 9y ago
  I had the same thought, but then realized the tech could plant images on the computer himself.
  - NutriSugar 9y ago
    I'm not as worried about techs planting the images because even among people willing to break the law to make money, this is an area often considered too immoral to touch and the consequences are massive if caught. I'm more worried about people over reporting images and people having lives ruined over the mere allegations and investigations. Photos of your own kids running around a water sprinkler on a hot summer day can be enough for some busy body to call inappropriate. Even fully clothed images fall on the copine (spelling?) scale. Or maybe there is some films of people who specialize in looking young, but who are of age (I remember a court case where a court expert testified than someone was clearly underage, until that person showed up and proved they were of age and were a professional in the industry; imagine what could've happened if she hadn't shown up).
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      It goes beyond that. My father once tried to print some photographs through Wal-Mart. They refused to do so without a copyright waiver from the photographer--which was him. They looked at the images, decided they were "too professional", and proceeded to enforce the copyrights of the imaginary professional photographer. Not only is this troubling from a law enforcement perspective, but it also provided him with a true story he could use to backhandedly brag about how great his photos are, and also an excuse to purchase expensive, top-of-the-line photo printers until the end of time. ~Thanks, Wal-Mart.~ There is good reason to avoid empowering busybodies to enforce laws on other people in public when they would have no standing to do so in a court. We simply can't trust random people to know the laws they purport to enforce, enforce them fairly and impartially, and preserve the rights of those they target for that enforcement. We can't even fully trust professional cops, judges, and lawyers with all that at once, which is why the legal system is set up to be adversarial. If you witness a crime, you can certainly report it if you feel that's necessary, but paid informants and vigilante enforcers are a few steps too many down a very dark path.
- gt_ 9y ago
  That is definitely the idea. But, the point here concerns the opportunity for crime-making by the incentivized Best Buy employee. Nothing in that process raises the barrier to that happening.
- gambiting 9y ago
  Yeah, but I'm sure there was a case of someone flagged in this exact way for possession of child pornography, and obviously the guy was branded a pedophile by local news, fired from his job, spent months in jail....and in that time, literally no one thought to look at those pictures and make a common sense decision. When he finally managed to get them in front of the judge, it was obvious the only pictures found were of his own kids playing in the kiddie pool outside in the summer. I think what I want to say is that I have no trust in the process, it's incredibly easy to ruin someone's life permanently.
petertodd 9y ago
Bingo. Digital evidence is really easy to fake, often leaves little if any evidence that it was planted, and the prosecutors don't have much incentive to look for evidence to determine whether the digital evidence was planted or not. A good analogy is imagine if dry cleaners were paid by the FBI every time they found a dime bag accidentally left in someone's pocket. How many of those dime bags do you think would get planted by the employees to collect their $500 reward?
- Asooka 9y ago
  As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. Of course, digital images cost nothing, so there isn't a right price to set. I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.
  - _jal 9y ago
    Or, you know, you could have law enforcement maybe not turn the rest of society in to paid snitches. Not everyone wishes to live in a reimplementation of East Germany. I realize that for many people 'pedophile' is the root password to the Constitution (not my line), but the existence of horrible people should not be an excuse to elevate authoritarians.
  - splintercell 9y ago
    > I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it. You're still missing an important implication of this, now a real child pornographer's lawyer can get him off by creating enough doubt in Jury's mind that Geek Squad's employees planted the evidence, especially since they are getting paid for it. In other words, not only there is a risk of innocent people getting arrested and possibly going to jail, there is a risk of guilty people going free.
  - loeg 9y ago
    > As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. A dime bag by definition retails for $10. $500 < $10. (The cost is reduced by buying in bulk, if you wanted to scale up this scheme.)
mfoy_ 9y ago
I haven't had my coffee yet and missed the perverse-incentive / fraud aspect... thanks for pointing that out. It's definitely a problem. Imagine you hire a plumber to snake your drains and he places a bag of weed behind the pipes, snaps a picture, and reports you to the police for possession. He gets paid for the plumbing job, paid for the reporting of a crime, and keeps his weed. Much easier with digital imagery. Just create a "new folder" in someone's "My Documents", plant some illicit imagery, and boom-- easy pay-day.
- jartelt 9y ago
  The plumber wouldn't get to keep the weed. The police would take that as evidence. This is why the reward would need to be higher than the price of the weed.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    I think they are making an equivalence to digital files. With digital files, you can copy it over and keep the original. In his example, essentially the plumber only took a picture of the weed, handed the cops the picture, and took the weed home with him. At least that's how I interpreted it.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    Close, but no dice. 100 EUR worth of weed (street value) is only worth 100 EUR if the person wants to keep it (ie. is a regular smoker) or wants to sell it (ie. is an aspirant dealer). Assuming an employee of Geek Squad is either is a rough stretch. For people who are neither (such as myself), weed can be worth 0 EUR (to me, weed is completely worthless as I don't want to put effort into selling it, and don't want to smoke it). An irregular smoker wouldn't smoke enough to finish 100 EUR of weed. They might rather prefer say 90 EUR cash instead. And even a regular smoker could possibly be able to know cheaper sources than street value.
    - jartelt 9y ago
      If a plumber wanted to plant weed in your house (to get a reward like that proposed above), they would need to acquire the weed. It only makes sense to acquire the weed if the price to acquire is less than the reward. It doesn't matter whether the plumber smokes or not.
bbarn 9y ago
Yeah, in general I agree here. I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment? It would be quite easy to plant some pictures but another matter to build a case solely on the existence of them. That chain of custody issue would likely be an argument brought up by the defense. Also, not to mention the act of acquiring the images to plant is probably also a crime. It's a lot of really risky moves and effort for a very small payout (500 dollars? Much easier to steal small valuable parts for that) So, yeah - paying for tips, I think it's a bad idea, but the abuse likelihood seems pretty small.
- treerock 9y ago
  > I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment? The article suggests the technician was paid even though the charges were dropped. >It was previously reported that the technician had been paid $500 (£360) by the FBI. > The charges were dropped in November 2017 when a federal judge ruled that the image flagged by the Geek Squad technician was not sufficient evidence for the FBI to request a search warrant. The judge also ruled that the photograph did not qualify as child abuse imagery.
  - GarrisonPrime 9y ago
    So, paid just to report anything? Yeah, that's a terrible idea. I'd imagine this leads to a ton of false alarms. "Kids running around in the sprinker, their wet swimsuits clinging a little too tenaciously? Report it to the FBI, dude! You could get paid and the feds would be your friends."
13years 9y ago
> Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy How about until that leads to discovery of maybe some unfavorable political opinions. What is to say the limits to criteria and how they might be interpreted. There is a reason people are concerned about privacy
ataturk 9y ago
I actually don't. Not that I condone criminal behavior at all, it's just that a society where everyone is always turning in the their neighbors is not one I want to live in. Also, our betters, the people who have been running this country for decades, are the biggest pedophiles ever know to mankind. If the cops want to bust someone, they should make themselves useful and bust the oligarchs trafficking in human flesh.
splintercell 9y ago
> Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in. Even you're only looking at one aspect of things. Even if all the Geek squad employees are completely honest, now this gives an actual child pornographer's lawyer a way to cause enough reasonable doubt to get his client off.
- GarrisonPrime 9y ago
  I seriously doubt that. Just looking at the metadata of the files should be enough to clarify what happened. And anything obtained in the raid of their home wouldn't be subject to such reasonable doubt. The only way I could see things happening the way you suggest is if law enforcement doesn't examine the evidence digitally before raiding the home. If the evidence then turns out to be planted, any evidence found in the home might be thrown out due to it being an illegal search. But in that case the prornographer will still have been publicly revealed. And the feds will have a geek squad to investigate as well.
logfromblammo 9y ago
It is worth noting that we can also see this at the police level, where a cop plants evidence, turns on the bodycam recorder, then "discovers" the evidence, getting caught at it only because he didn't fully understand what the record button did. With retail store employees, there isn't even an expectation of trustworthiness when it comes to handling evidence. They are not officers of the court, and have no duty to act in the interests of justice. They likely do have a duty to the customer to keep their private affairs private. There are few reasons for any repair technician to ever open files containing customer data, and zero reasons for them to do it outside of a well-sandboxed, auditable environment, with specialized applications rather than the default OS tools. Rather than opening as a rectangular array of pixels, an image would display its bytes in a hex editor, with decoder plug-ins displaying the header information and metadata for that file type, and the results of a file integrity and malware scan. It seems likely that Geek Squad is not set up for that kind of work. It's just too expensive to sell to consumers in a retail store. So if Joe Employee loads a suspicious image onto the customer's machine, then "discovers" it by opening it, and reports the discovery to the cops for monetary reward, that is indistinguishable from Joe Employee accidentally discovering genuine criminality, because it was not done in an auditable environment.
will_brown 9y ago
>there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in. Well witnesses and victims are generally compensated by the courts and/or victims-witness advocate programs (which go by different names in different states). I don’t think many people argue those programs or payments incentive crime in order to cash in. And in this case I’m not so sure it’s an opportunity to “cash in” as what the article references are one time payments of $500-$1,000, and while maybe comparatively a lot of money for these individuals, it’s a hell of a lot of risk to plant evidence only to turn it over to the FBI for inspection by their experts, with a very real possibility of implicating yourself, for a comparably small amount of money. And if one of these employees identifies more than one suspect, better believe that employee is going to come under FBI scrutiny. I have seen witnesses in federal cases paid 6 figures, and even then knowing the facts and the risks, I don’t think anyone would suggest it’s an opportunity to cash in.
- GarrisonPrime 9y ago
  It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar. The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Where they just baby photos? The article doesn't say. The judge threw out the case as a non-issue. But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. Would the Best Buy employee have reported the innocent image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. The bottom line is that paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused. I find it hard to believe computer techs encountering real child open need to be incentivised to report it.
  - 13years 9y ago
    > It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar. Yes, people do bad things without monetary incentive. It could just as easily be that some employee didn't like some 'jerk' customer. Well, maybe I will let the FBI harass them.
  - will_brown 9y ago
lr4444lr 9y ago
There are some valid cases for compensating whistleblowers in services fraud, for example, clinics that engage in scamming Medicaid.
- will_brown 9y ago
  These are called Qui Tam (on behalf of the king) cases and some of the largest judgments in all of litigation with quite a few in the billions.
GarrisonPrime 9y ago
Fake evidence? Maybe, but I think the primary worry is the incentive to lower the bar to the point they ruin lives. The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Was it just baby photos? The classic "naked baby on a fur rug" pose? Grandkids in the pool? The article doesn't say. All we know is the judge threw out the case as a non-issue. But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. No matter how clear his innocence is announced, he'll always be stained. Would the Best Buy employee have reported the image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. Many innocent photos of children can make us uncomfortable depending on the circumstances; it's human nature to be a bit oversensitive about any situation involving kids. Some false alarms will be inevitable. But if I was most likely a young, ignorant low level tech and someone offered me $500 (and the praise of a high authority), I could see myself pushing the button on every photo of a kid in a wet swimming suit. Paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused. I find it hard to believe a computer tech encountering real child porn needs to be incentivised to report it.

erikb 9y ago

Isn't flagging pictures making a suggestion so that a real law enforcement officer can check a reduced number of pictures instead of all pictures in existence? Starting from the real officer making a decision the process is normal law enforcement isn't it?

amykhar 9y ago
I had the same thought, but then realized the tech could plant images on the computer himself.
- NutriSugar 9y ago
  I'm not as worried about techs planting the images because even among people willing to break the law to make money, this is an area often considered too immoral to touch and the consequences are massive if caught. I'm more worried about people over reporting images and people having lives ruined over the mere allegations and investigations. Photos of your own kids running around a water sprinkler on a hot summer day can be enough for some busy body to call inappropriate. Even fully clothed images fall on the copine (spelling?) scale. Or maybe there is some films of people who specialize in looking young, but who are of age (I remember a court case where a court expert testified than someone was clearly underage, until that person showed up and proved they were of age and were a professional in the industry; imagine what could've happened if she hadn't shown up).
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    It goes beyond that. My father once tried to print some photographs through Wal-Mart. They refused to do so without a copyright waiver from the photographer--which was him. They looked at the images, decided they were "too professional", and proceeded to enforce the copyrights of the imaginary professional photographer. Not only is this troubling from a law enforcement perspective, but it also provided him with a true story he could use to backhandedly brag about how great his photos are, and also an excuse to purchase expensive, top-of-the-line photo printers until the end of time. ~Thanks, Wal-Mart.~ There is good reason to avoid empowering busybodies to enforce laws on other people in public when they would have no standing to do so in a court. We simply can't trust random people to know the laws they purport to enforce, enforce them fairly and impartially, and preserve the rights of those they target for that enforcement. We can't even fully trust professional cops, judges, and lawyers with all that at once, which is why the legal system is set up to be adversarial. If you witness a crime, you can certainly report it if you feel that's necessary, but paid informants and vigilante enforcers are a few steps too many down a very dark path.
gt_ 9y ago
That is definitely the idea. But, the point here concerns the opportunity for crime-making by the incentivized Best Buy employee. Nothing in that process raises the barrier to that happening.
gambiting 9y ago
Yeah, but I'm sure there was a case of someone flagged in this exact way for possession of child pornography, and obviously the guy was branded a pedophile by local news, fired from his job, spent months in jail....and in that time, literally no one thought to look at those pictures and make a common sense decision. When he finally managed to get them in front of the judge, it was obvious the only pictures found were of his own kids playing in the kiddie pool outside in the summer. I think what I want to say is that I have no trust in the process, it's incredibly easy to ruin someone's life permanently.

petertodd 9y ago

Bingo. Digital evidence is really easy to fake, often leaves little if any evidence that it was planted, and the prosecutors don't have much incentive to look for evidence to determine whether the digital evidence was planted or not. A good analogy is imagine if dry cleaners were paid by the FBI every time they found a dime bag accidentally left in someone's pocket. How many of those dime bags do you think would get planted by the employees to collect their $500 reward?

Asooka 9y ago
As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. Of course, digital images cost nothing, so there isn't a right price to set. I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.
- _jal 9y ago
  Or, you know, you could have law enforcement maybe not turn the rest of society in to paid snitches. Not everyone wishes to live in a reimplementation of East Germany. I realize that for many people 'pedophile' is the root password to the Constitution (not my line), but the existence of horrible people should not be an excuse to elevate authoritarians.
- splintercell 9y ago
  > I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it. You're still missing an important implication of this, now a real child pornographer's lawyer can get him off by creating enough doubt in Jury's mind that Geek Squad's employees planted the evidence, especially since they are getting paid for it. In other words, not only there is a risk of innocent people getting arrested and possibly going to jail, there is a risk of guilty people going free.
- loeg 9y ago
  > As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. A dime bag by definition retails for $10. $500 < $10. (The cost is reduced by buying in bulk, if you wanted to scale up this scheme.)

mfoy_ 9y ago

I haven't had my coffee yet and missed the perverse-incentive / fraud aspect... thanks for pointing that out. It's definitely a problem. Imagine you hire a plumber to snake your drains and he places a bag of weed behind the pipes, snaps a picture, and reports you to the police for possession. He gets paid for the plumbing job, paid for the reporting of a crime, and keeps his weed. Much easier with digital imagery. Just create a "new folder" in someone's "My Documents", plant some illicit imagery, and boom-- easy pay-day.

jartelt 9y ago
The plumber wouldn't get to keep the weed. The police would take that as evidence. This is why the reward would need to be higher than the price of the weed.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  I think they are making an equivalence to digital files. With digital files, you can copy it over and keep the original. In his example, essentially the plumber only took a picture of the weed, handed the cops the picture, and took the weed home with him. At least that's how I interpreted it.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  Close, but no dice. 100 EUR worth of weed (street value) is only worth 100 EUR if the person wants to keep it (ie. is a regular smoker) or wants to sell it (ie. is an aspirant dealer). Assuming an employee of Geek Squad is either is a rough stretch. For people who are neither (such as myself), weed can be worth 0 EUR (to me, weed is completely worthless as I don't want to put effort into selling it, and don't want to smoke it). An irregular smoker wouldn't smoke enough to finish 100 EUR of weed. They might rather prefer say 90 EUR cash instead. And even a regular smoker could possibly be able to know cheaper sources than street value.
  - jartelt 9y ago
    If a plumber wanted to plant weed in your house (to get a reward like that proposed above), they would need to acquire the weed. It only makes sense to acquire the weed if the price to acquire is less than the reward. It doesn't matter whether the plumber smokes or not.

bbarn 9y ago

Yeah, in general I agree here. I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment? It would be quite easy to plant some pictures but another matter to build a case solely on the existence of them. That chain of custody issue would likely be an argument brought up by the defense. Also, not to mention the act of acquiring the images to plant is probably also a crime. It's a lot of really risky moves and effort for a very small payout (500 dollars? Much easier to steal small valuable parts for that) So, yeah - paying for tips, I think it's a bad idea, but the abuse likelihood seems pretty small.

treerock 9y ago
> I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment? The article suggests the technician was paid even though the charges were dropped. >It was previously reported that the technician had been paid $500 (£360) by the FBI. > The charges were dropped in November 2017 when a federal judge ruled that the image flagged by the Geek Squad technician was not sufficient evidence for the FBI to request a search warrant. The judge also ruled that the photograph did not qualify as child abuse imagery.
- GarrisonPrime 9y ago
  So, paid just to report anything? Yeah, that's a terrible idea. I'd imagine this leads to a ton of false alarms. "Kids running around in the sprinker, their wet swimsuits clinging a little too tenaciously? Report it to the FBI, dude! You could get paid and the feds would be your friends."

13years 9y ago

> Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy How about until that leads to discovery of maybe some unfavorable political opinions. What is to say the limits to criteria and how they might be interpreted. There is a reason people are concerned about privacy

ataturk 9y ago

I actually don't. Not that I condone criminal behavior at all, it's just that a society where everyone is always turning in the their neighbors is not one I want to live in. Also, our betters, the people who have been running this country for decades, are the biggest pedophiles ever know to mankind. If the cops want to bust someone, they should make themselves useful and bust the oligarchs trafficking in human flesh.

splintercell 9y ago

> Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in. Even you're only looking at one aspect of things. Even if all the Geek squad employees are completely honest, now this gives an actual child pornographer's lawyer a way to cause enough reasonable doubt to get his client off.

GarrisonPrime 9y ago
I seriously doubt that. Just looking at the metadata of the files should be enough to clarify what happened. And anything obtained in the raid of their home wouldn't be subject to such reasonable doubt. The only way I could see things happening the way you suggest is if law enforcement doesn't examine the evidence digitally before raiding the home. If the evidence then turns out to be planted, any evidence found in the home might be thrown out due to it being an illegal search. But in that case the prornographer will still have been publicly revealed. And the feds will have a geek squad to investigate as well.

logfromblammo 9y ago

It is worth noting that we can also see this at the police level, where a cop plants evidence, turns on the bodycam recorder, then "discovers" the evidence, getting caught at it only because he didn't fully understand what the record button did. With retail store employees, there isn't even an expectation of trustworthiness when it comes to handling evidence. They are not officers of the court, and have no duty to act in the interests of justice. They likely do have a duty to the customer to keep their private affairs private. There are few reasons for any repair technician to ever open files containing customer data, and zero reasons for them to do it outside of a well-sandboxed, auditable environment, with specialized applications rather than the default OS tools. Rather than opening as a rectangular array of pixels, an image would display its bytes in a hex editor, with decoder plug-ins displaying the header information and metadata for that file type, and the results of a file integrity and malware scan. It seems likely that Geek Squad is not set up for that kind of work. It's just too expensive to sell to consumers in a retail store. So if Joe Employee loads a suspicious image onto the customer's machine, then "discovers" it by opening it, and reports the discovery to the cops for monetary reward, that is indistinguishable from Joe Employee accidentally discovering genuine criminality, because it was not done in an auditable environment.

will_brown 9y ago

>there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in. Well witnesses and victims are generally compensated by the courts and/or victims-witness advocate programs (which go by different names in different states). I don’t think many people argue those programs or payments incentive crime in order to cash in. And in this case I’m not so sure it’s an opportunity to “cash in” as what the article references are one time payments of $500-$1,000, and while maybe comparatively a lot of money for these individuals, it’s a hell of a lot of risk to plant evidence only to turn it over to the FBI for inspection by their experts, with a very real possibility of implicating yourself, for a comparably small amount of money. And if one of these employees identifies more than one suspect, better believe that employee is going to come under FBI scrutiny. I have seen witnesses in federal cases paid 6 figures, and even then knowing the facts and the risks, I don’t think anyone would suggest it’s an opportunity to cash in.

GarrisonPrime 9y ago
It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar. The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Where they just baby photos? The article doesn't say. The judge threw out the case as a non-issue. But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. Would the Best Buy employee have reported the innocent image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. The bottom line is that paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused. I find it hard to believe computer techs encountering real child open need to be incentivised to report it.
- 13years 9y ago
  > It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar. Yes, people do bad things without monetary incentive. It could just as easily be that some employee didn't like some 'jerk' customer. Well, maybe I will let the FBI harass them.
- will_brown 9y ago

lr4444lr 9y ago

There are some valid cases for compensating whistleblowers in services fraud, for example, clinics that engage in scamming Medicaid.

will_brown 9y ago
These are called Qui Tam (on behalf of the king) cases and some of the largest judgments in all of litigation with quite a few in the billions.

GarrisonPrime 9y ago

Fake evidence? Maybe, but I think the primary worry is the incentive to lower the bar to the point they ruin lives. The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Was it just baby photos? The classic "naked baby on a fur rug" pose? Grandkids in the pool? The article doesn't say. All we know is the judge threw out the case as a non-issue. But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. No matter how clear his innocence is announced, he'll always be stained. Would the Best Buy employee have reported the image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. Many innocent photos of children can make us uncomfortable depending on the circumstances; it's human nature to be a bit oversensitive about any situation involving kids. Some false alarms will be inevitable. But if I was most likely a young, ignorant low level tech and someone offered me $500 (and the praise of a high authority), I could see myself pushing the button on every photo of a kid in a wet swimming suit. Paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused. I find it hard to believe a computer tech encountering real child porn needs to be incentivised to report it.