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FBI agents paid employees in Best Buy's Geek Squad unit to act as informants, documents published Tuesday reveal.
Agents paid managers in the retailer's device repair unit to pass along information about illegal content discovered on customers' devices, according to documents posted online by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The digital rights group sued the FBI for the documents last year after the bureau denied a Freedom of Information Act request.
The EFF filed the lawsuit to learn the extent to which the agency trains and directs Best Buy Geek Squad employees to conduct warrantless searches of customers' devices during maintenance. The EFF said it was concerned that use of repair technicians to root out evidence of criminal behavior circumvents people's constitutional rights.
[...] Another document shows the FBI approved a $500 payment to a "confidential human source" whose name was redacted. The EFF said the payment appears to be one of many connected to the prosecution of Mark Rettenmaier, a Southern California doctor accused of possessing child pornography after he sent in his computer to Best Buy for repairs.
The EFF said the documents detail investigation procedures in which Geek Squad employees would contact the FBI after finding what they believed to be child pornography on a customer's device.
The EFF said an FBI agent would examine the device to determine whether there was illegal content present, and if so, seize the device and send it to the FBI field office closest to where the customer lived. Agents would then investigate further, and in some cases try to obtain a warrant to search the device.
Best Buy said last year that three of the four employees who may have received payment from the FBI are no longer employed by the company. The fourth was reprimanded and reassigned.
Previously: Cooperation Alleged Between Best Buy and the FBI
FBI Used Best Buy's Geek Squad To Increase Secret Public Surveillance
EFF Sues FBI to Obtain Records About Geek Squad/Best Buy Surveillance
Related: How Best Buy's Computer-Wiping Error Turned Me into an Amateur Blackhat
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday March 08 2018, @09:12PM
No. Warrants protect an individual from the government discovering evidence without due process. Warrants do not protect someone else from informing the government they've discovered illegal activity going on, and the government using that as immediate probable cause to investigate without a warrant. So get "legal" out of your head - you are asking if such behavior is moral or not, not legal.
If you're going to complain about the use of paid informants you are several decades, if not centuries, late. All police, everywhere, have been using informants for about as long as there has been policing. And the use of informants is constitutional. Might as well rage about how loud the ocean is.
You have no idea how the images were discovered - it may be perfectly legitimate for a technician to open your pictures folder to discover if your filesystem is working, or open a folder with an unknown, obscure label to see if the contents are legitimate or a virus. But if there's any breach of ethics here, it is on the part of Best Buy technicians looking where they shouldn't. Not because they reported what they found.
Godwinizing this does not win your argument at all because what the Nazis were doing was morally wrong. Prosecuting child pornography is not. Next.
Generally, yes, if you are engaging in illegal behavior of ANY type, a third party has every right (if not a moral obligation) to report that activity.
If you don't want your computer store technician snooping on your system, protect it such that they cannot do that. Or select a place that promises they won't look, I suppose.
Do I like that government officials paid them? No. I'd much prefer they do so out of a sense of civil obligation. And yes, I am concerned that this could be on a slippery slope. But not enough so to agree with you.
Or let's take another tack: You see a pervy 60 year old sodomizing a child in public. Do you just go on your way, "Oh, I don't want to be a narc so I'll just look the other way!" Or do you call the cops? If you do not call them you are morally bankrupt. If you did call, why is that any different from what the technician did?
Now, if the police offered a reward for reporting, does that change things? It might for you. It gives me pause. But your way drags us to hell more quickly IMVHO.
This sig for rent.