Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.
The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Was it just baby photos? The classic "naked baby on a fur rug" pose? Grandkids in the pool? The article doesn't say. All we know is the judge threw out the case as a non-issue.
But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. No matter how clear his innocence is announced, he'll always be stained.
Would the Best Buy employee have reported the image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. Many innocent photos of children can make us uncomfortable depending on the circumstances; it's human nature to be a bit oversensitive about any situation involving kids. Some false alarms will be inevitable.
But if I was most likely a young, ignorant low level tech and someone offered me $500 (and the praise of a high authority), I could see myself pushing the button on every photo of a kid in a wet swimming suit.
Paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.
I find it hard to believe a computer tech encountering real child porn needs to be incentivised to report it.
Digital evidence is really easy to fake, often leaves little if any evidence that it was planted, and the prosecutors don't have much incentive to look for evidence to determine whether the digital evidence was planted or not.
A good analogy is imagine if dry cleaners were paid by the FBI every time they found a dime bag accidentally left in someone's pocket. How many of those dime bags do you think would get planted by the employees to collect their $500 reward?
They then get a sex offense charge, can't get a job, are looked down upon by all their friends/family no matter how much they claim innocence and get even poorer.
I realize a Geek Squad member isn't quite as low income as you can go, but it's still low income people incentivied to hurt other low income people. .. Mortys killing mortys.
It's definitely a problem. Imagine you hire a plumber to snake your drains and he places a bag of weed behind the pipes, snaps a picture, and reports you to the police for possession. He gets paid for the plumbing job, paid for the reporting of a crime, and keeps his weed.
Much easier with digital imagery. Just create a "new folder" in someone's "My Documents", plant some illicit imagery, and boom-- easy pay-day.
How about until that leads to discovery of maybe some unfavorable political opinions. What is to say the limits to criteria and how they might be interpreted.
There is a reason people are concerned about privacy
With retail store employees, there isn't even an expectation of trustworthiness when it comes to handling evidence. They are not officers of the court, and have no duty to act in the interests of justice. They likely do have a duty to the customer to keep their private affairs private.
There are few reasons for any repair technician to ever open files containing customer data, and zero reasons for them to do it outside of a well-sandboxed, auditable environment, with specialized applications rather than the default OS tools. Rather than opening as a rectangular array of pixels, an image would display its bytes in a hex editor, with decoder plug-ins displaying the header information and metadata for that file type, and the results of a file integrity and malware scan.
It seems likely that Geek Squad is not set up for that kind of work. It's just too expensive to sell to consumers in a retail store. So if Joe Employee loads a suspicious image onto the customer's machine, then "discovers" it by opening it, and reports the discovery to the cops for monetary reward, that is indistinguishable from Joe Employee accidentally discovering genuine criminality, because it was not done in an auditable environment.
It would be quite easy to plant some pictures but another matter to build a case solely on the existence of them. That chain of custody issue would likely be an argument brought up by the defense. Also, not to mention the act of acquiring the images to plant is probably also a crime. It's a lot of really risky moves and effort for a very small payout (500 dollars? Much easier to steal small valuable parts for that)
So, yeah - paying for tips, I think it's a bad idea, but the abuse likelihood seems pretty small.
The article suggests the technician was paid even though the charges were dropped.
>It was previously reported that the technician had been paid $500 (£360) by the FBI.
> The charges were dropped in November 2017 when a federal judge ruled that the image flagged by the Geek Squad technician was not sufficient evidence for the FBI to request a search warrant. The judge also ruled that the photograph did not qualify as child abuse imagery.
Well witnesses and victims are generally compensated by the courts and/or victims-witness advocate programs (which go by different names in different states). I don’t think many people argue those programs or payments incentive crime in order to cash in.
And in this case I’m not so sure it’s an opportunity to “cash in” as what the article references are one time payments of $500-$1,000, and while maybe comparatively a lot of money for these individuals, it’s a hell of a lot of risk to plant evidence only to turn it over to the FBI for inspection by their experts, with a very real possibility of implicating yourself, for a comparably small amount of money. And if one of these employees identifies more than one suspect, better believe that employee is going to come under FBI scrutiny.
I have seen witnesses in federal cases paid 6 figures, and even then knowing the facts and the risks, I don’t think anyone would suggest it’s an opportunity to cash in.
The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Where they just baby photos? The article doesn't say. The judge threw out the case as a non-issue.
But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated.
Would the Best Buy employee have reported the innocent image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course.
The bottom line is that paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.
I find it hard to believe computer techs encountering real child open need to be incentivised to report it.
Even you're only looking at one aspect of things. Even if all the Geek squad employees are completely honest, now this gives an actual child pornographer's lawyer a way to cause enough reasonable doubt to get his client off.
And anything obtained in the raid of their home wouldn't be subject to such reasonable doubt.
The only way I could see things happening the way you suggest is if law enforcement doesn't examine the evidence digitally before raiding the home. If the evidence then turns out to be planted, any evidence found in the home might be thrown out due to it being an illegal search.
But in that case the prornographer will still have been publicly revealed. And the feds will have a geek squad to investigate as well.
I think what I want to say is that I have no trust in the process, it's incredibly easy to ruin someone's life permanently.
I wonder about Best Buy’s position in this? They aren’t exactly alienating the non-pedophile public with this activity and aren’t going to lose business over it. That said, deputizing your employees is sort of odd.
It doesn't just setup perverse incentives, it's a great way for the FBI to lose cases and have existing ones overturned now. If Geek Squad employees are being paid to actively search for illegal contents on computers by the FBI they have become agents of the government and the fourth amendment starts coming into play - the FBI would need a search warrant for these systems BEFORE Geek Squad searched them or any evidence recovered will be inadmissible in court due to an unconstitutional search and fruit of the poison tree, it doesn't count as some anonymous tip from a citizen at that point.
Who thought this was a good idea? With this report ANYBODY who has had their computer searched by geek squad and charged with a crime now has a good argument to make to the court that their case should be thrown out.
Only if it's ever found out. It went on for a decade until a privacy group (not a defense lawyer) decided to dig deeper.
It turns out that a handful of the photos were the kids taking a bath or running through the sprinkler. Charges were dropped but still.
Suppose you were a pediatrics student with various photos of children on your computer, or maybe you're a gymnastics teacher with a load of photos of your students.
If you have an overreactive computer person browsing all your photos, it may not matter if you have nothing to hide.
I'm sure people who get caught in these sorts of messes abandon Geek Squad and Best Buy.
We only know about the deep dive CP searches Geek Squad performs for the FBI, that doesn't necessarily exclude other criminal activity they may be looking for or reporting.
Besides, Geek Squad actively browses through photos found on the computer looking for CP. It would be unnerving to many to find out that their personal family photos, or "risque" photos, are all fair game for GS.
The example in the story sounds like the doctor had a picture of his grandkids in the bath tub, so of course there is a grey area and it’s terrible if someone is arrested for that. I think that falls under poor discretion and/or badly written laws. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t report real “you know it when you see it” porn involving children.
Also, how stupid do you have to be take a computer full of child porn to be repaired at Best Buy?
But, they aren't. According to the article, GS claims (you can believe this or not) that it's employees specifically do not search for it.
That's like saying their employees specifically do not use their personal phones while at work.
It actually doesn't, which is why this is an INCREDIBLY stupid move by the FBI.
Evidence submitted that was recovered by a private citizen of their own accord is admissible in court even if there was no search warrant issued or other illegal activity occurred to gain said evidence (breaking into somebodies house and finding CP on their computer doesn't give grounds for dismissal of the case, although the person who did the B&E could still be charged for said act). This is the private search doctrine, and it has well established case law.
However, just because you are not on government payroll you are not free from being considered a government agent. If a government employee actively encourages you or incentivizes you to perform a search you can (and likely will) be considered an agent of the government when evidence is submitted at trial - meaning the 4th amendment can be used to throw the case out since no search warrant was issued.
This case gives anybody who has been convicted and had evidence submitted by a Geek Squad employee grounds to appeal their case, or for active cases the charges dismissed. What was the FBI thinking?
Moreover, I don’t see any reason Geek Squad would need to be in my images folder in the course of working on my computer, and I’m sure that, child porn or not, most people probably wouldn’t want their private collection of pictures being sifted through without permission.
This is corporate surveillance as it finest. It also allow for planting evidence and even blackmailing innocent people.
If I'm repairing someone's computer at their request and, totally by accident, I discover illegal material on it, should I report it to the police?
It seems pretty straightforward to me that you can, and in fact you really ought to. Maybe you disagree with what counts as "illegal" (like if didn't report finding pot in someone's home in a country where it's illegal) but that's a different discussion from whether this is generally reasonable behaviour.
This was the FBI trying to skirt around the 4th amendment by having someone unrelated to the FBI do the seizure and search bit of investigating, so it could be done without a warrant. The problem is that the FBI both ordered and paid these people to do it, and I personally don't see a difference between that and having an FBI agent take your machine from you and perform the search themselves. There's also the ethical problems for Best Buy, plus the incentive (payment) to create a crime (copy illicit materials or visit sites that would make it look like the person was going to do something illegal) and report it.
Which still produces admissible evidence. Government agents are bound by the constitution when it comes to searches, private individuals are not. There can be other clauses in a state's constitution that enshrine an expectation of privacy that may be usable to dismiss such evidence, but as far as federal law and the US constitution is concerned a private individual can break a window into your house, find illicit materials, report them to the police and some time later you are sitting in court defending yourself.
> This was the FBI trying to skirt around the 4th amendment by having someone unrelated to the FBI do the seizure and search bit of investigating, so it could be done without a warrant.
Yup, and now that there's evidence such reports are being rewarded they screwed that up. If a government employee requests or incentivizes you to perform a search on their behalf you become an agent of the government for the purposes of that search, 4th amendment applies and if such activity is discovered the evidence is inadmissible. Incredibly stupid move of the FBI.
not an accident if you're paid to do it
It's not clear whether or not he knew he would get paid when he reported it.
It's not necessarily that the FBI has an arrangement with technicians to snoop around.
There's undoubtedly far easier ways for an corrupt employee to get extra cash that don't risk getting a conviction for sexual offences and for fraud/deception.
Moreover, your work colleagues have an incentive to report you too.
I'm not going to say no-one would ever, but the level of short-sighted stupidity needed is very very high.
Sure there's some chance of the employee being caught, but more than likely they won't be. Plus, why would your work colleagues report you (once, for $500) when they can make their own $500 repeatedly?
Remember, and this is the important part - criminals are not typically longterm thinkers. They don't think about retirement, medical expenses, or even next week. They're simply interested in obtaining the thing they want today and believe, reasonably or not, that they can get away with it.
Its like weed growers on state-federal owned land. Worst thing that happens is they loose their job, in most cases. Woop .. flip burgers.
It's still manifestly wrong, but I get it.
What happens when children are stripped from families for normal images?
What happens when teens are caught for normal behavior?
What happens when people are put in prison over drawings?
All three of these have already happened.
And what happens when this gets automated and large entities like the RIAA/MPAA get other illegal content added to these searches?
Basically, all your concerns are about the scope of this, not the essence of it.
"The documents also suggest that Geek Squad technicians report only material they happen to find while doing repairs, rather than actively searching for illegal content on customers' devices."
Oftentimes child abuse imagery isn't hidden at all, it's very likely that Geek Squad employees will come across it at some point purely by accident. It's no different from hitting the report button on a website if you see similar imagery.
My computer doesn't have anything illegal on it, that doesn't mean I want a Geek Squad employee looking around at what is there. And if they know there's a payday from the FBI if they find something, you bet they are going to look around. Then what happens when they find something not illegal but that they like; pictures of my wife or friends and family at the beach or something.
This is really not acceptable on multiple levels.
People with access to someone else's computer snoop for their own entertainment, because they can. The reward is low but the probability of finding something entertaining is high and the risk is practically non-existent.
I replace the storage device on my Apple laptops immediately, and store it in case a unit dies. Warranty services outside of the care of a local shop - mail in stuff - is also a big no-no. Nobody looking at my 4th Amendment rights.
Call me paranoid, but if you are remotely ignorant to the fact that snooping teenagers aren't looking through your stuff ... think again. It's just common sense to just replace the drive as a matter of privacy.
