The FBI Paid Geek Squad Employees as Informants
The FBI has been in cahoots with All-time Buy'due south Geek Team for at least the past decade, new documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) via a Liberty of Data Human action (FOIA) lawsuit reveal.
An FBI memo obtained by the nonprofit digital rights group reveals that All-time Buy in September 2008 hosted a coming together of the constabulary enforcement agency's Cyber Working Group at a Geek Squad repair facility in Kentucky. The memo indicates that the local FBI division "has maintained close liaison with the Geek Team's management in an effort to glean instance initiations and to back up the partitioning's Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs."
Revelations virtually the FBI's relationship with All-time Purchase first surfaced last year during the prosecution of Marker Rettenmaier, a California doctor who was charged with possession of child porn after bringing his computer to Geek Squad for a repair. The human relationship, according to the EFF, "potentially circumvents figurer owners' Fourth Amendment rights."
In a Wednesday statement to PCMag, All-time Buy said that four of its Geek Squad employees "may accept" received payment by the FBI after turning over alleged child porn to the bureau.
"Whatever conclusion to accept payment was in very poor sentence and inconsistent with our training and policies," Best Buy wrote. "Three of these employees are no longer with the visitor and the quaternary has been reprimanded and reassigned."
The FBI declined to comment when contacted by PCMag.
All-time Buy said its Geek Squad repair employees don't specifically search for child porn on people'south machines, simply "inadvertently find it" nearly 100 times a year.
"Nosotros have a moral and, in more than 20 states, a legal obligation to report these findings to police force enforcement," the company wrote. "We share this policy with our customers in writing before we begin any repair."
Best Buy went on to say that information technology has "non sought or received training from police force enforcement in how to search for kid pornography."
"Our policies prohibit employees from doing annihilation other than what is necessary to solve the customer'south problem," the company wrote. "In the wake of these allegations, nosotros have redoubled our efforts to railroad train employees on what to do — and not do — in these circumstances."
Documents obtained by the EFF, however, indicate that "Geek Squad employees did brand an affirmative effort to place illegal cloth," the EFF wrote in a blog post.
"For example, the image constitute on Rettenmaier's hard bulldoze was in an unallocated space, which typically requires forensic software to notice," the EFF wrote. "Geek Squad employees were financially rewarded for finding child pornography. Such a bounty would probable encourage Geek Squad employees to actively sweep for suspicious content."
The EFF is currently seeking additional documents from the FBI to discover out whether the agency has like relationships with other computer repair businesses.
About Angela Moscaritolo
Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/news/19970/the-fbi-paid-geek-squad-employees-as-informants
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