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Why You Shouldn't Trust Geek Squad (networkworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: The Orange County Weekly reports that Best Buy's "Geek Squad" repair technicians routinely search devices brought in for repair for files that could earn them $500 reward as FBI informants. This revelation came out in a court case, United States of America v. Mark A. Rettenmaier. Rettenmaier is a prominent Orange County physician and surgeon who took his laptop to the Mission Viejo Best Buy in November 2011 after he was unable to start it. According to court records, Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal found an image of "a fully nude, white prepubescent female on her hands and knees on a bed, with a brown choker-type collar around her neck." Westphal notified his boss, who was also an FBI informant, who alerted another FBI informant -- as well as the FBI itself. The FBI has pretty much guaranteed the case will be thrown out by its behavior, this illegal search aside. According to Rettenmaier's defense attorney, agents conducted two additional searches of the computer without obtaining necessary warrants, lied to trick a federal magistrate judge into authorizing a search warrant for his home, then tried to cover up their misdeeds by initially hiding records. Plus, the file was found in the unallocated "trash" space, meaning it could only be retrieved by "carving" with sophisticated forensics tools. Carving (or file carving) is defined as searching for files or other kinds of objects based on content, rather than on metadata. It's used to recover old files that have been deleted or damaged. To prove child pornography, you have to prove the possessor knew what he had was indeed child porn. There has been a court case where files found on unallocated space did not constitute knowing possession because it's impossible to determine who put the file there and how, since it's not accessible to the user under normal circumstances.
than their warrantless searches
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
GeekSquad is full of shit. Was away on a working vacation (being a remote employee who travels the country and logs in from wherever I happen to be at the time). My laptop died on a trip. Needed it replaced ASAP. Picked up a netbook from BestBuy locally, since shipping one would take too long. They were the only option in town where I happened to be at the time. The power supply on this netbook died in under a week. Took it in to BestBuy to replace the power supply. GeekSquad demanded a $40 "fee" to remove the hard drive from the netbook, and place the hard drive into a new netbook... Again, for a failed power supply, which is external to the netbook to begin with! They simply wouldn't replace the power supply, they claimed they could only replace the entire unit, and had to swap the hard drive. Fucking scammers. So much for the BestBuy "Warranty"
Ok so when you need some plumbing work at home, why shouldn't you trust the guy and have him visit all rooms, open all cabinets, and let him check your pending invoices to be sure you paid everything on time?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The problem is that if the device is not fully working (to wipe the disk), most people don't know how to remove the disk and backup + wipe clean.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Kiddie porn on a computer doesn't imply guilt for the owner. He could have been the subject of a rick-roll type thing, via email or web, and quickly deleted the offending image, which he may have had no intention of downloading/viewing. It's not even close.
And, the individuals involved should be sued into homelessness for invasion of privacy, etc. Best Buy, too, to the extent they were aware and didn't prevent it.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This one was a possible paedophile. Since it was only one photo, it was probably something sent to him, or from a popup on some random website.
What else do they look for? Credit card numbers? Tax records? Other identity theft info? Anything embarrassing they can ransom?
The other problem is they used a tool to scan unallocated space for deleted files. That takes time. Are they charging customers for that extra time?
...and with a few moments of searching the web, they could have a nice handy thumb drive full of images they would "detect" on some guy's computer, and get a nice little bonus from the FBI...
"Yeeeah, I found another one this week. Yup, it's surprising how many of these weirdos have computer problems and show up at my store. How soon does my check get here?"
"Illegally searched his computer, get paid to find illegal material and HEY SURPRISE I FOUND ILLEGAL MATERIAL WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Lie to a judge to obtain a search warrant, etc. etc."
There's a reason we demand a certain level of ethics from our law enforcement professionals, mainly so that the cases they put together have even a slim chance of making it through a trial without being tossed out by even a barely competent judge. Did this guy have child porn on his computer? Who knows, the Geek Squad guys have so completely muddled the issue to line their own pockets with the FBI's help we'll never find out.
I often wonder if you "by any means" types would be so cavalier about situations like this if it were you under the FBI's lens.
No, I don't mind. Because I don't have any illegal drugs or child pornography for the plumber to find.
What about the illegal drugs and child pornography that the previous occupant left hidden in the wall, next to the water pipes? You know, the ones you now have to prove aren't yours?
Because the legal eagles at Best Buy's geek squad are so careful not to report non-crimes and raise a massive shit storm over nothing. Certainly, they would never grab a copy of anything else interesting they might find while rifling through your file system.
Certainly they would never look at any private but legal images hoping to find something to report.
And how do you do that with a computer with solder-in SSD (e.g, MBAir)?
It makes me wonder how much Tumblr porn came from Best Buy uploaders.
Perhaps none.
Maybe they're all great people.
But they vacuum machines for reward money, or at least a few of them have, says the article. Most of them are probably great. But a few of them have sullied the reputation of the Geek Squad, perhaps beyond repair.
The big problem: a lot of good people at Geek Squad get besmirched for the actions of some greedy fellow employees. It would seem that management likely knew about this. What protections do they provide their customers? They should spell it out and enforce it. Data is money, assets, and pretty private stuff.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Well, you didn't. But for $500 some kid at Best Buy might put some on your computer for you.
You sick pedo fuck.
I have a second concern along the same lines . . . let us assume that the Geek Squad isn't engaging in shenanigans for profit. How are they inspecting my hard drive, and can they assure me that they won't cause a data loss?
What about the illegal drugs and child pornography that the previous occupant left hidden in the wall, next to the water pipes?
Something like that happened to a friend of mine. He bought a warehouse and found a big stash of dvd players and car stereos in a walled-off closet when he gutted the office area. The warehouse had been owned by a bank (foreclosure) for a while, and if he hadn't needed a different office configuration the stuff could have stayed in the walls for a long time.
lucm, indeed.
Why the heck would he need to login?!
Do you have a hot wife, or do you look rich enough to have one?
lucm, indeed.
Do you have a hot wife, or do you look rich enough to have one?
Having a Macbook sums it up!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
what about that home video recorder i left behind the drywall behind the fridge 20 years ago? i just woke up from my comma yesterday
Well you had better put your parentheses on. You're scaring the kids.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
A 3/8" drill, duh! :)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
What about the two millions dollars in gold left by the occupant a few hundred years ago?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Similar thing happened to a family member of mine as well when he bought his first house. He is a police officer and had a bunch of his cop friends visit. One stopped by at the start of his shift to drop of a present and brought in his canine partner. Well, the dog alerted in the middle of the living room and they discovered a stash hidden there. So they took the dog around the property and found a bunch of stuff in multiple rooms, including those bales like you see on TV. I can only imagine the kind of response that he would have gotten if the cops weren't his friends and knew he'd just bought the house.
You trust strangers every time you hand someone your credit card or read the # over the phone (...)
You trust the professionals to whom you request a specific service (and usually you pay) to perform that specific service. You don't ask them to look for interesting files, have the illegal ones reported, and some other legal files not reported but used illegally by them.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Where is your name? Are you trying to hide something?
Which is why if you do accidentally download something like that, you must clear your cache, empty the recycle bin and repeatedly overwrite all the free space on your disk.
Emphatically YES! Smarts in one narrow field doesn't guarantee smarts in every field: John Podesta is a Smart Guy, but he was stupid enough to fall for a phishing attack.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If you're then given a check by an FBI agent in return for a report on what you found while breaking and entering, are you still just an arbitrary citizen or a de facto agent of the government?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Because four times last year, I repaired systems they said were unrepairable and had attempted to sell a replacement system.
They used to be tech, now they are systems salesmen
Since you ask:
US Constitution, Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home
or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has
the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Anything else you'd like me to Google for you?
Exactly. The bigger issue is that they are looking through all your files. The number of people who have nude pictures of themselves or other people legally far outweighs the number of people with illegal pictures. This means that the guys at Geek Squad will definitely lookat the nude pics of their customers. Even the ones that were intentionally deleted by people before they take their computers in for service to prevent such a thing.
If this is not a violation of privacy then what is? Why are they looking in the first place if they usually only find legal stuff? What do they do with the legal nudes they typically find? Do they also shows those to the other FBI informants/repair monkeys they work with? Or maybe make personal copies?
Shouldn't TFH be "Why someone who engages in criminal behavior shouldn't trust Geek Squad?"
What about if you have legal adult naked videos/pictures of yourself having sex with your wife? Do you want the teenage geek squad employee to look through those videos/pictures too? After all, he would need to look inside those videos/pictures if he wants to ascertain what they contain.
Not only that, but he's looking at the deleted files too. So even if you or your wife deleted that content, he will be able to find it. The same goes for your phone. I assume the FBI has the same deal with cell phone repair technicians. Do they also look scan/watch all your pictures/videos including your deleted ones too?
And at Best Buy during work, how does it work if a manager catches an employee going through the private videos/pictures of customers? Does the manager give the employee a free pass if the employee offers to split the FBI reward with him? Or does the employee need to make a copy of the hard drive to bring home to review at home at his leisure? How does that work exactly?
journalism majors can BS people into upsells and that is why the tech people where just stockboys.
The Geek Squad techs were, according to the article, "active informants" for the FBI, which is to say, they agreed to be beforehand. That means they are agents of the government, which means they are under the same restrictions as the cops. So if you think it's OK for Geek Squad to search your computer without a warrant, you believe it's OK for the cops to do the same thing, because it is the same thing.
Aside from that, the FBI did additional searches without warrants, like to get warrants, and apparently continues to hide evidence. They claimed the informants told them they (the informants, that is) had "accidentally" run the carving software that was, in no way, involved in repairing the computer, and found the image. So either the informants (at least one, and likely all three) lied to the FBI under penalty of perjury, or the FBI agent getting the warrant perjured himself to the judge. Or both.
There isn't an FBI agent involved in this case that doesn't belong in prison for corruption. Same for the prosecutor, at this point, because it is long since possible for him to not be aware of the FBI's corruption.
Best Buy is the least guilty of anything, and apparently, according to the update at the bottom, actually have policies prohibiting their employees from accepting any kind of reward for reporting this stuff. Whether or not they'll fire the employees named (there are three) for doing so remains to be seen. They are correct, though, that once they become aware of child porn on a computer, they're required to report it.
For at least 250 years, it's been known that, "common sense is not so common."
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You have all rights. The Bill of Rights lists the rights Congress is explicitly never to infringe upon.
"The right there specified is that of "bearing arms for a lawful purpose." This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed, but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress. This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow citizens of the rights it recognizes, to what is called, in The City of New York v. Miln, 11 Pet. 139, the "powers which relate to merely municipal legislation, or what was, perhaps, more properly called internal police," "not surrendered or restrained" by the Constitution of the United States."
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Hippie Logger Jock
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You trust strangers every time you hand someone your credit card or read the # over the phone. You trust your bank with the history of all your credit purchases. You trust other strangers when you hand over your car keys to the garage or a valet. You trust them when you give them your house keys so they can inspect something while you're at work. You trust, not just one doctor or one nurse, but an entire health care organization with your medical history and details when you go into a hospital to get a checkup or sick care.
People have to live their lives.
But my doctor isn't paid $500 by the FBI if he "finds" a balloon full of cocaine up my ass.
Not really...
A single file was found in deleted space on this guy's machine, was he truly a criminal who intentionally sought out illegal material or did he have this single file on his machine through no fault or intention of his own? (eg browser cache, malware, spam etc)
At the very least, i'd expect someone who was actively looking for such material to have a lot more of it than just a single deleted file.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I worked at best buy both in computer and geek squad.
I can say with certainty that everyone's computers were searched for music, videos, jpg, etc (so they could be backed up allegedly)
These "backups" were definitely shared with other techs in the event of anything interesting was found which most often was the case.
Customers usually had tons of photos, music, etc. Most of the time it didn't include illegal stuff so though. I know one of the stores I worked at had a huge library of pilfered mp3.
I would never ever have over my desktop or notebook with a live hard drive in it. I would send it in with it removed.
You can analyse validity of warrants and question the admissibility of evidence all you want, but that overlooks a fact: Most prosecutions don't go to trial. They end in plea bargains. Sure, that particular evidence might be unusable - but the fact that the FBI knows about it may well be enough to get the suspect to confess anyway. The particular example in the article did lawyer up and fight it, but how many times has a similar story happened that didn't become interesting and public enough to get noticed?
I went to a LAN once and as usual there is a bunch of file copying going on at the start, so I grabbed a bunch of stuff, games, movies and yes some pron. Months later I was running out of space and started clearing stuff out. Buried deep in the dump folder was a whole bunch of bestiality pron, shift deleted that, but to this day I cannot remember which friend I copied it from, always wondered if they were also unaware of it, or if they had a darker side I was not aware of.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I'm always suspicious of single parenthesis. Why'd the other leave?
There was just too much between them.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
This is Best Buy we're talking about. I'd already be surprised if they didn't take a cut of those 500 bucks.
Why, you think they only rip off their customers?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Anything else you'd like me to Google for you?
I'm struggling to find out the speed of light - can you help me please.
Great. It should only require a few years of dealing with tough-on-crime prosecutors and judges to make use of that, whilst your name is being publically dragged through the mud.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
c, you're welcome.
When you need a plumber, you call a plumber. And you are there to greet him, and watch him work, ask questions about what he's doing, and pay attention to what he's doing so your bill doesnt show that he replaced your water heater when in fact he changed a couple of sink knobs.
Also, when you need a plumber you dont call the homeless that hangs out downtown who likes to smack copper pipes together to make "music". Doing so would be comparable to calling Geek Squad when you need a computer technician.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
If you think that's bad don't even think of having your PC repaired in Texas http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
So THAT's why the answer is always c.
No, I don't mind. Because I don't have any illegal drugs or child pornography for the plumber to find.
Exactly what are you afraid of them finding?
There are currently over 10,000 federal statutes. Can you say, categorically, that you are not currently breaking any of them?
Ignorance of the law is not a defense. It is entirely possible to be breaking a law and have no idea you are doing so. Still want to let people, who are looking for wrongdoing, nose through all your stuff?
Anyone arguing that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear really needs to reexamine their assumptions.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Great. It should only require a few years of dealing with tough-on-crime prosecutors and judges to make use of that, whilst your name is being publically dragged through the mud.
Yes, exactly. Only people who have little first-hand experience with law enforcement or the courts would think that being innocent will make things easier. An innocent person can easily be bankrupted and have their lives altered by having to defend themselves against the criminal justice system.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If you know how to do any of that, you're not taking your computer to Best Buy to be fixed.
Child pron is NOT illegal because it supposedly leads to rape. Child porn is illegal (in the U.S.) because children have to be sexually abused in order to create it. At least, that is the justification which the Courts have given for allowing this suspension of the First Amendment. I actually support that logic.The problem is that things which do NOT involve the sexual abuse of children are labeled as child porn and are thus illegal. While I consider all child porn to be disgusting, any publication which did not require sexual abuse of minors to create should not fall under the legal categorization as child porn.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
There are currently over 10,000 federal statutes. Can you say, categorically, that you are not currently breaking any of them?
Have any copyrighted pictures or videos that you don't have a receipt for? Rip a copyrighted tune from Youtube? Have a friend send any of those? Have a normal photo of your female child in a bathing suit at the shore? Some minimum wage geeksquad drone figuring that 500 dollars is 500 dollars, and "better safe than sorry", welcome to the legal system.
We have to set limits on accessibility, and the old "nothing to hide" is a bad slippery slope.
Finally, anyone claiming to know exactly what is or isn't on their computer better be saying that about a computer that has never been connected to the internetz.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes, exactly. Only people who have little first-hand experience with law enforcement or the courts would think that being innocent will make things easier.
Or that being innocent even matters.
Many prosecutors couldn't care less about your guilt or innocence- what guides them is if they think they have a winnable case or not.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
There are currently over 10,000 federal statutes. Can you say, categorically, that you are not currently breaking any of them?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Why do people believe your rights come from a document?
Your rights come from some group of people, somewhere, some time, maybe even you, right now, standing up and saying no. If a lot of us believe random other people (state actors or not) should not go pawing through our lives without just cause, then that's how society should work because we ARE society.
And absolutely no, I do not believe Best Buy has any business going through their customers' property in any way beyond that needed to perform the services they've been contracted for.
One day when they create a relativity drive that is able to travel faster than the speed of light I really hope they call it C++
Buddy, if I have to check up your ass for anything, somebody better pay me $500 AND take me out to dinner