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EFF Sues FBI For Records About Paid Best Buy Geek Squad Informants (eff.org)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FBI for records "about the extent to which it directs and trains Best Buy employees to conduct warrantless searches of people's devices." The lawsuit stems around an incident in 2011 where a gynecology doctor took his computer for repairs at Best Buy's Geek Squad. The repair technician was a paid FBI informant that found child pornography on the doctor's computer, ultimately resulting in the doctor being charged with possessing child pornography. From the EFF's report: A federal prosecution of a doctor in California revealed that the FBI has been working for several years to cultivate informants in Best Buy's national repair facility in Brooks, Kentucky, including reportedly paying eight Geek Squad employees as informants. According to court records in the prosecution of the doctor, Mark Rettenmaier, the scheme would work as follows: Customers with computer problems would take their devices to the Geek Squad for repair. Once Geek Squad employees had the devices, they would surreptitiously search the unallocated storage space on the devices for evidence of suspected child porn images and then report any hits to the FBI for criminal prosecution. Court records show that some Geek Squad employees received $500 or $1,000 payments from the FBI. At no point did the FBI get warrants based on probable cause before Geek Squad informants conducted these searches. Nor are these cases the result of Best Buy employees happening across potential illegal content on a device and alerting authorities. Rather, the FBI was apparently directing Geek Squad workers to conduct fishing expeditions on people's devices to find evidence of criminal activity. Prosecutors would later argue, as they did in Rettenmaier's case, that because private Geek Squad personnel conducted the searches, there was no Fourth Amendment violation. The judge in Rettenmaier's case appeared to agree with prosecutors, ruling earlier this month that because the doctor consented both orally and in writing to the Geek Squad's search of his device, their search did not amount to a Fourth Amendment violation. The court, however, threw out other evidence against Rettenmaier after ruling that FBI agents misstated key facts in the application for a warrant to search his home and smartphone. We disagree with the court's ruling that Rettenmaier consented to a de-facto government search of his devices when he sought Best Buy's help to repair his computer. But the court's ruling demonstrates that law enforcement agents are potentially exploiting legal ambiguity about when private searches become government action that appears intentionally designed to try to avoid the Fourth Amendment.
I think it's relevant to the customers that visit Best Buy, use their services, or have received hardware as a gift. If employees are doing warrant-less searches and being paid by the government to do it, this is foul play. Any information gathered under these false pretenses is inadmissable in court, according to law. If government won't respect its own laws, then it dilutes the value and even the threat that laws present to someone who might decide to start breaking law, and the state of order is weakened.
Without further details, we can't know whether the doctor is guilty or not. The hard drive could have been purchased refurbished, from a friend, found in the guts of an old computer at Goodwill... who knows? The important part is, if we're going to gather information, it should be through the proper channels. Bribing near-minimum-wage workers with a month's wages to violate the same laws that protect us all is closer to organized crime than any legitimate government. They know better, and the EFF is one of the few organizations that calls bullshit when they see it.
It's relevant to Slashdot because if it's happening with Best Buy, it could be happening with other companies and services, too. I should hope the average /.er would avoid BB, but there could be plenty of /.ers who've used the services and it could benefit the lives of people /.ers know, by urging their friends and family to reject Geek Squad service.
It's already had an effect: it got you to comment about it, didn't it? It's also creating some bad PR for Best Buy, and will call its name (and thus quality, trust, customer loyalty) into question as a technology retailer and service company. These injustices are important to expose and punish, to disincentivize criminal conduct, even when committed by a government that claims to protect its people.