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The OC Weekly reports on the case United States of America v. Mark A. Rettenmaier in which a California doctor is charged with knowingly possessing child pornography. The defendant came under investigation after he brought his computer to Best Buy's Geek Squad for service. A technician there discovered an image of an unclothed girl (which the defence asserts is not child pornography) in unallocated space of the computer's hard drive.
According to the defence attorney,
[...] records show "FBI and Best Buy made sure that during the period from 2007 to the present, there was always at least one supervisor who was an active informant."
The OC Weekly story says that:
[...] the company's repair technicians routinely searched customers' devices for files that could earn them $500 windfalls as FBI informants.
Best Buy has issued a statement which says:
"Best Buy and Geek Squad have no relationship with the FBI. From time to time, our repair agents discover material that may be child pornography, and we have a legal and moral obligation to turn that material over to law enforcement. We are proud of our policy and share it with our customers before we begin any repair.
"Any circumstances in which an employee received payment from the FBI is the result of extremely poor individual judgment, is not something we tolerate and is certainly not a part of our normal business behavior.
"To be clear, our agents unintentionally find child pornography as they try to make the repairs the customer is paying for. They are not looking for it. Our policies prohibit agents from doing anything other than what is necessary to solve the customer's problem so that we can maintain their privacy and keep up with the volume of repairs."
Additional coverage:
- later OC Weekly story
- BBC News
- Engadget
- Washington Post
- Washington Post
- ZDnet
- Network World
- RTTNews.com via NASDAQ
- SFgate
Related: How Best Buy's Computer-Wiping Error Turned Me into an Amateur Blackhat
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @03:29PM
Without either the drive wiped or pulled for exactly this reason.
A zero wipe is enough for casual observation. If you had concerns about criminal indictment or spook level interest in your digital footprint, then you would want the drives physically destroyed (as is supposedly standard for government hard disks, although may only happen in practice for the more secretive branches.)
Point being: We are about two decades out from when you should trust a corporation with repairing your computers without nosing through your hard disk, and if you don't know how to wipe/remove it yourself, then you should probably have a computer tech on retainer (just like you should have a lawyer!) for handling exactly these situations without having it warrantied with either private information or incriminating information on it. Because either may be used against you in the future unless you follow paranoid enough practices to ensure they are not.