Geek Squad - The FBI & Your 4th Amendment

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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This is an article over at the EFF's site that is certainly worth a read if you are concerned about yours, and others' privacy. The gist of the read is very simple. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has records that confirm that the FBI has paid Best Buy Geek Squad employees to inform on the people it is repairing or servicing computers for over the last decade. The information gathered by the EFF all points to kiddie porn being the target of Geek Squad and FBI's relationship. It goes as far as to suggest that some hard drives were subject to forensic tools in order to search for illegal pornography that were not on allocated hard drive spaces. Certainly it is hard to argue hunting down this sort of activity, but its legality is certainly suspect. The FBI has a long history of paying confidential informants and getting prosecutions based using that information to start full investigations.


But some evidence in the case appears to show Geek Squad employees did make an affirmative effort to identify illegal material. For example, the image found on Rettenmaier’s hard drive was in an unallocated space, which typically requires forensic software to find. Other evidence showed that Geek Squad employees were financially rewarded for finding child pornography. Such a bounty would likely encourage Geek Squad employees to actively sweep for suspicious content.
 
That pesky 4th Amendment always getting in the way of protecting the children. If you've got nothing to hide and so on.

I'd sooner nuke my drives and start over than give my PC to a third party to diagnose and fix.
 
I think this is a lot of nothing. If you are paying someone to service your computer, then you are subject to what befalls you. Having something in unallocated space doesn't save you, especially if they are searching for possible viruses and problems, in which you would expect them to look for abnormalities. I know I have found things on people's systems before when trying to repair them. Nothing really that incriminating, but definitely stuff they didn't think would be found and didn't want anyone to know about.

EDIT: Just to clarify though, I think EFFs point was the paid relationship between Geek Squad and the FBI, not necessarily the finding of the materials. Why the FBI needs to pay them, I am not sure, if a Geek Squad employee finds illegal material, they are responsible for reporting it immediately anyway. Perhaps some of them weren't reporting stuff they found.

I have also seen cases where Geek Squad employees were holding information ransom that they found on people's systems. Moral of the story, don't use Geek Squad.
 
As adamant as I am about protecting privacy and can see that this could be pushed to far maybe it is a good thing. If one had reasonable cause to suspect child porn and performs a sweep then number one they are putting themselves in a dangerous position and second secondly I hope they nail the person to the floor by the balls until the cops show up. However this does open up a giant can of worms. If anyone suspects child porn then it is ones duty to humanity to do all you can do to get this exposed and brought to swift justice.
 
NoOther said:
I think this is a lot of nothing. If you are paying someone to service your computer, then you are subject to what befalls you. Having something in unallocated space doesn't save you, especially if they are searching for possible viruses and problems, in which you would expect them to look for abnormalities. I know I have found things on people's systems before when trying to repair them. Nothing really that incriminating, but definitely stuff they didn't think would be found and didn't want anyone to know about.

EDIT: Just to clarify though, I think EFFs point was the paid relationship between Geek Squad and the FBI, not necessarily the finding of the materials. Why the FBI needs to pay them, I am not sure, if a Geek Squad employee finds illegal material, they are responsible for reporting it immediately anyway. Perhaps some of them weren't reporting stuff they found.

I have also seen cases where Geek Squad employees were holding information ransom that they found on people's systems. Moral of the story, don't use Geek Squad.
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Honestly don't use any 3rd party repair shop if you have questionable content on you computer. A local repair shop could turn you in also.
 
They're "paid informants" that are rewarded for finding kiddie porn content. That is enough already to suspect the veracity of any claim. That's not even getting into any sort of chain of evidence discussion about counter claims that the Geek Squad was planting the evidence to begin with.
 
NoOther said:
I think this is a lot of nothing. If you are paying someone to service your computer, then you are subject to what befalls you. Having something in unallocated space doesn't save you, especially if they are searching for possible viruses and problems, in which you would expect them to look for abnormalities. I know I have found things on people's systems before when trying to repair them. Nothing really that incriminating, but definitely stuff they didn't think would be found and didn't want anyone to know about.

EDIT: Just to clarify though, I think EFFs point was the paid relationship between Geek Squad and the FBI, not necessarily the finding of the materials. Why the FBI needs to pay them, I am not sure, if a Geek Squad employee finds illegal material, they are responsible for reporting it immediately anyway. Perhaps some of them weren't reporting stuff they found.

I have also seen cases where Geek Squad employees were holding information ransom that they found on people's systems. Moral of the story, don't use Geek Squad.
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I mostly agree. If you come across illegal material while performing a service you were paid to do then you have a responsibility to report it. At that point the responsible agencies can go through the legal process of confiscating the devices and building a case.

However, doing a blind search in the hopes of finding something illegal to report is when it becomes an issue, especially with the FBI paying people to do it. The monetary incentive could give unscrupulous types reason to plant evidence.
 
Showbiz said:
They're "paid informants" that are rewarded for finding kiddie porn content. That is enough already to suspect the veracity of any claim. That's not even getting into any sort of chain of evidence discussion about counter claims that the Geek Squad was planting the evidence to begin with.
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There is nothing about being a paid informant to suspect the veracity of a claim. It is a stretch to suspect them of planting child porn. Honestly that would be the dumbest thing someone could do. That means they would have to be guilty of having child porn themselves, and not just them, but it would incriminate Best Buy as well.
 
I thought we covered this in depth before and found that the in the one kiddie porn case where they referenced forensic tools and unallocated space, that the owner had a problem with his computer and asked Geek Squad to try and recover his files, that while recovering the man's files they found a file with the name of a well known image that was normally associated with kiddie porn, and they did what's right, they reported it.

Now I don't think it's a good idea for the FBI to offer payment, that it "muddies the waters" and can make perfectly legitimate activities look suspect.

EDITED: I wrote a book, NoOther was so eloquent and beat me to it, I'll just say he and I see this almost exactly the same.
 
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Ok, starting the post off saying I find kiddie porn disgusting and have no sympathy for people that have it. Let's suppose someone takes their computer in to have memory added. BB installs it. Does BB scan the hard drive looking for files? I don't see where they would have the right to rifle through the file system when they could run a mem tester. (And let's be honest, I bet BB does not spend a lot of time testing the quality of their work...)
 
If they are paid informants, then it would seem that they are employed by law enforcement and subject to proper search and seizure protocols. If the porn files are found as part of normal customer authorized activities, then game on. In OK, state law states that if IT folks find child porn as part of their normal IT job duties, they are required to report to law enforcement or face possible charges themselves. But that law doesn't require or authorize an active search for child porn. Amazing how many folks don't clear browser or recent file histories before asking for IT help.
 
Someone who finds child porn on a computer has the ethical obligation to report that person to authorities.

But I do have a problem with going out of their way to scan computers to look for things for financial gain. That goes outside of scope of what the original repair order. If you do not ask them to backup your files before reloading an OS (very typical repair), then why are you scanning their hard drive? That's where rights are violated. Sure, no one is going to feel bad for the person caught with child porn, but what about the other 99.99% of people who are not sick creeps? They have rights and doing stuff like this violates those rights. Being OK with doing this means you're OK with the police making random sweeps of you and your neighbors homes.
 
Dead Parrot said:
If they are paid informants, then it would seem that they are employed by law enforcement and subject to proper search and seizure protocols. If the porn files are found as part of normal customer authorized activities, then game on. In OK, state law states that if IT folks find child porn as part of their normal IT job duties, they are required to report to law enforcement or face possible charges themselves. But that law doesn't require or authorize an active search for child porn. Amazing how many folks don't clear browser or recent file histories before asking for IT help.
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You are correct under current 4th Amendment law, as regularly paid informants any information obtained without a warrant is tainted, and anything found based upon it is "fruit of the poisonous tree" and absent unusual circumstances cannot be used.

That said, even as an attorney I'd give the FBI a pass on using Geek Squad to find child porn.

Besides, anyone dumb enough to use Geek Squad for anything should probably go to jail for stupid.
 
Showbiz said:
They're "paid informants" that are rewarded for finding kiddie porn content. That is enough already to suspect the veracity of any claim. That's not even getting into any sort of chain of evidence discussion about counter claims that the Geek Squad was planting the evidence to begin with.
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Anyone who reports something is going to be called a confidential informant even if they do it for the first time if they get paid to do it. You could work for some Mom and Pop shop, find illegal content on a customer's computer, call the FBI. And if they offer you a reward, which they do for kiddie porn, and you accept it, you are a paid informant in the same manner some druggie stooly is that finks on street dealers for cash.
 
Showbiz said:
They're "paid informants" that are rewarded for finding kiddie porn content. That is enough already to suspect the veracity of any claim. That's not even getting into any sort of chain of evidence discussion about counter claims that the Geek Squad was planting the evidence to begin with.
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How are you going to plant evidence on a computer in away that would stand up to forensic analysis?

You would have to doctor the date time stamps, no files could have dates referenced after the last date of modification, log files, everything would have to match up or it would be discovered.

You could try, but you'd probably get caught.

EDITED, and besides that, even the employee's workstations they are using to perform the work would also have logged activity that their own IA people should be checking on. Just because they are reasonably decent repair techs doesn't mean they aren't on a full Enterprise Domain with all the standard business controls and processes that any decent IT department would have in place.
 
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I've been here (sort of). About 15 years ago, I was working in a computer store as head tech, and we had this skeezy couple drop off an old Pavillion desktop that was running poorly. Ended up being some bad ram and a full HDD, but the HDD was full because of massive TIFF scans of canadian currency. These folks were actually counterfeitters and I had to call the cops, then stall on giving their machine back so the cops could arrest them. That was a horribly tense 30 minutes.
 
My question is how do these people figure out how to get kiddie porn but can't fix their own computers? I'm no expert but aren't you navigating the dark web at this point? If you googled your way into that then you should be able to google your way into basic PC repairs.

When I worked at a mom and pop pc repair store we ran into cheese pizza twice while scanning for infections and turned them over. The cops were waiting for them on PC pickup. It's awkward but I never felt bad about it.
 
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Armenius said:
I mostly agree. If you come across illegal material while performing a service you were paid to do then you have a responsibility to report it. At that point the responsible agencies can go through the legal process of confiscating the devices and building a case.

However, doing a blind search in the hopes of finding something illegal to report is when it becomes an issue, especially with the FBI paying people to do it. The monetary incentive could give unscrupulous types reason to plant evidence.
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The issue here though is that this author is very specific about who in Geek Squad is mostly under the spot light, and that is the employees at the Geek Squad Kentucky facility where they do the more serious repair work. Nobody is sending them a computer that needs a new power supply, that kind of work is done at the local stores. One of my daughters used to work for them in Tucson. So if the computer or the drive is sent to Kentucky, then it's there because they need more serious work done, normally involving the hard drive and data recovery is a common part of that work.

Besides, these guys have supervisors and work on the table that needs doing. If they were doing a full-monty on every computer randomly looking for kiddie-porn, I'd fire them in a heart beat.
 
I never claim warranties on hard drives, I just buy a new one, I never throw old drives out in whole, I remove the platters, throw out the rest, then melt the platters.
 
PantherBlitz said:
So you would have no problem with car mechanics dismantling your car to fish for illegal material to turn over to the police for cash?
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There is no proof at all that this is what is happening. It's all circumstantial supposition by the EFF.
 
PantherBlitz said:
So you would have no problem with car mechanics dismantling your car to fish for illegal material to turn over to the police for cash?
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thats 2 different things. If in the course of doing the work asked they uncovered drugs or that dead hooker i stashed in the trunk, then of course i should have no expectation of privacy. Now if they did what you said, dismantling the car, that would be destruction of property, and they then would be liable for that.

for your example to match here, one would drop off their computer and when they returned it was completely taken apart and the pieces in a box when you picked it up.
 
katanaD said:
i dont see the issue here. the moment you hand over something to someone else, you have given up on your rights to privacy as the item is no longer in your possession
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sorry but thats retarded, if I bring my car to the shop for an oil change that doesn't give them the right to dismantle my car in hopes of finding a compartment full of drugs they hope I have been smuggling so they can get a reward, even if they put it all back togwether afterwords its still not right. As already stated if they run into something during NORMAL work procedures thats fine, but saying they have a right to snoop through everything on your hard drive in the hopes of finding something is totally different and opens the door to huge problems. Unless they have a court order and warrant saying they are allowed to do a full sweep of your entire hard drive they can fuck right off and I hope someone gets them with a nice lawsuit over it.
 
I think geek squad should really disclose this.
There have been cases in which people have been jailed for taking naked pics of their own kids bathing when they're taken the pictures to be developed. Suddenly they've got charges for kiddie porn.
I can only assume that similar things have happened with geek squad and someone going to a website and having an image download to the browser's cache that they're not aware of until the geek squad forwards it over to the fbi and you're under arrest.

The only good thing that should come out of this is people avoiding geek squad and having best buy take a hit in general. There's a certain level of trust when you give something as sensitive as a computer over to someone who's paid to repair it, not to scrounge for evidence and get paid by a different party to do that.
 
Well they do display their outfits more like law enforcement than computer geeks...

geeksquadforce.jpg
 
I did that too. That is what inspired me to pursue digital forensics. The big difference between me and them though is that my discovery of child porn was because the guy had his screensaver set to show a slideshow of child porn. I did not search his system.
 
Not to condone kiddie porn or the rights of individuals to indulge in it but there is a thin line that separates liberty and safety.
How much violation of your guaranteed freedom is society willing to sacrifice in the name of its safety? Should this kind of thing happen? Only you can decide what your rights and freedoms are worth and only you can stand up for those rights.
 
Azphira said:
I never claim warranties on hard drives, I just buy a new one, I never throw old drives out in whole, I remove the platters, throw out the rest, then melt the platters.
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You should probably grind the melted platters into a fine dust and mix it into moist catfood. Then spread the catfood around town for feral cat's to ingest. Then track down the cat scat and burn it. Capture the smoke and save the ashes. It's the only way to be sure.

If you take your computer to Best Buy for service, you deserve what you get.
 
Jim Kim said:
You should probably grind the melted platters into a fine dust and mix it into moist catfood. Then spread the catfood around town for feral cat's to ingest. Then track down the cat scat and burn it. Capture the smoke and save the ashes. It's the only way to be sure.
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That never occured to me.
 
bigdogchris said:
Someone who finds child porn on a computer has the ethical obligation to report that person to authorities.

But I do have a problem with going out of their way to scan computers to look for things for financial gain. That goes outside of scope of what the original repair order. If you do not ask them to backup your files before reloading an OS (very typical repair), then why are you scanning their hard drive? That's where rights are violated. Sure, no one is going to feel bad for the person caught with child porn, but what about the other 99.99% of people who are not sick creeps? They have rights and doing stuff like this violates those rights. Being OK with doing this means you're OK with the police making random sweeps of you and your neighbors homes.
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What rights are violated? When you take your computer into Best Buy or have Geek Squad come take a look at it, you sign away your privacy rights on it. That is the same for almost any third party company. They do that on purpose because they never know what they will be asked to do in the process of fixing the system.

This is a very important note as I have had to work on lawyer's systems before and they try to say all kinda of shit and then accuse of of shit just to get out of paying the bill. However, they can't say anything when have a signed agreement saying they waive any privacy rights for the purpose of fixing the computer.

Also saying you are okay with that is not at all equivalent to saying you are okay with the police making random sweeps of your home or your neighbors home. That is a false correlation.
 
Jim Kim said:
You should probably grind the melted platters into a fine dust and mix it into moist catfood. Then spread the catfood around town for feral cat's to ingest. Then track down the cat scat and burn it. Capture the smoke and save the ashes. It's the only way to be sure.

If you take your computer to Best Buy for service, you deserve what you get.
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Just shoot the damn thing and be done with it. Back in the old days I used to use 'em as shinny decorations ;).
 
This is a bit of a grey area.

Certainly I would expect anyone fixing a computer and stumbling upon kiddie porn to report it.

Using forensic tools in a massive dragnet to search for kiddie porn on hidden or overwritten partitions on all client machines, whether an individual is under suspicion or not - however - is something different all together.
 
You know I did my time on the bench behind the screen at Best Buy before they had a Geek Squad. We did all kinds of crazy shit. Hijacked the conference room phone line to have a dedicated internet connection for the two of us. Brought in our own music collections to play in that small room behind the blinds. Charged an inspection fee to install ram as opposed to the inspection and installation fee. All sorts of things like that. Stuff that I'm sure the increased oversight on the Geek Squad prevents them from doing.

Geek Squad today isn't given the freedom to freely solve problems. The tools they use I am betting are developed in collaboration with entities such as the FBI. (You would be surprised the fingers they have in different software due to partnered development.)

As far as Geek Squad employees getting a check for helping out. You can bet bottom dollar that check is going to someone higher up to Best Buy itself.
 
Armenius said:
I mostly agree. If you come across illegal material while performing a service you were paid to do then you have a responsibility to report it. At that point the responsible agencies can go through the legal process of confiscating the devices and building a case.

However, doing a blind search in the hopes of finding something illegal to report is when it becomes an issue, especially with the FBI paying people to do it. The monetary incentive could give unscrupulous types reason to plant evidence.
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Exactly. When I did PC repair work, I never went looking for anything. I did my job. If I came across something questionable, I'd notify someone. I like to have people trust me. If they have me look at their PC and it's filled with odd, but legal, fetish porn, I'm not going to tell anyone. It's confidential. Sure, I'll say that I found some before, but no identifying information. That shit should be confidential.

If you come across something while doing your work and it's illegal, sure. Tell someone. My job wasn't to go looking for shit. Even now, I'm not a security policeman. If we have an alert that someone has that on their PC, then we will take action. But, we are not going to go looking for it.
 
katanaD said:
thats 2 different things. If in the course of doing the work asked they uncovered drugs or that dead hooker i stashed in the trunk, then of course i should have no expectation of privacy. Now if they did what you said, dismantling the car, that would be destruction of property, and they then would be liable for that.

for your example to match here, one would drop off their computer and when they returned it was completely taken apart and the pieces in a box when you picked it up.
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Crazy scenario you are imagining. Nobody is saying that the property is being destroyed or returned in pieces.
 
You'd think if someone is smart enough to put that crap in unallocated space, they'd know how to repair their own computer.

But - not everyone who knows some things knows everything I suppose.

I have no issues with them doing this. It's probably in their t&c's somewhere, loosely worded.

My only issue, is, what if someone bought a computer from craig's list, took it in, and then they find the stuff on the drive?

Eventually they'd find out it wasn't the current customer, but it'd put them under a REALLY uncomfortable magnifying glass until then.
 
Question! Would a picture of a naked baby or potentially a toddler in diaper trigger these forensic systems? The kind of stuff that parents take pictures of like "first bath time" or something like that?

Because in my mind, i could see a legit dad bringing in his wifes computer(though maybe he doesnt disclose any story about having a wife) and he gets flagged for having questionable content. Anyone deal with this?
 
So what happens if the suspect had no idea the unallocated space was tainted with something illegal? He could have bought the drive used, or remanufactured, or someone else could have used the computer and tainted it. I seen warranty returns on WD drives that were just refurbs or other people's dead units. Are they properly scrubbed? Hell if I know. And tons of "end of lease" refurb computers/drives that end up on ebay/newegg contain sensitive company records. There's been reports about this.
 
As a business, geek squad should have it written and made known to you what they will do with any illegal data they find and stipulate what the data will be. That they have to inform their customers that they are working on the FBI's behalf. This secrecy thing is is a dangerous road to go down. The Constitution defines what those rights are. Even the FBI has guidelines that need to be followed. As a hypothetical, if I was an arsonist that loves burning houses down, would that qualify geek squad to now report everyone that has a picture of a house. This is all about turning Geek Squad into a Rat Squad little by little. It takes yrs and yrs to change the mind set of society and its happening under our noses.
 
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