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I am including a link and some comments I made on another forum regarding the revelation that the Best Buy computer repair men are actively going through people's files searching for child pornograpy. If they find any image or video that is questionable, they call the FBI, who pays them.
I just want everyone to be aware that anytime you take a computer in for repair at Best Buy, they are looking at your personal information, including your family's pictures.
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We have discussed this before, but some new information gained by the FOIA recently surfaced to make Best Buy and the Geek Squad more culpable in this situation. The relationship between the FBI and Best Buy is deeper and has been going on longer than previously known.
This is most likely a violation of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizures.
Best Buy are not law officers, and they certainly do not have a warrant to be examining all the files on a person’s computer. True, the customer signs a waiver, but he does not sign an agreement that the computer repair men can “search” and access all his files in an attempt to find something illegal. The searching without a warrant while being reimbursed by the FBI is the problem here.
Even if Best Buy could conjure up some legal argument to justify their actions, any argument that they only "accidentally" came across an illicit file is destroyed when there have been cases in which they found files that were not even visible via the operating system and could not be seen by a person without specialized software.
“Seeking to calm fears, a Best Buy spokesperson told HuffPost in an emailed statement that their technicians do not actively search for such content and only discover it inadvertently. But in at least one instance, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“Per the EFF, an illicit image found on the hard drive of Mark Rettenmaier, a California doctor who dropped off his computer at a Best Buy in 2011, was stored on unallocated space on the disk that “typically requires forensic software to find.”
As you may know, when a file is deleted on the computer, it is still there and will never be truly deleted until the file is overwritten by another file or some data. Deleted files that have not been scrubbed can be recovered with forensic software.
In the example of the California doctor, an image was stored in the unallocated space which would not have been visible if the Geek Squad was not actively hunting for illicit images and was not using special software to recover the file.
It is rather apparent that the FBI was actively paying some of these Geek Squad repair people to find and report suspicious files which might be illicit. Only a fool would believe that since money is involved, the Geek Squad did not go from “repair mode” to “search mode” regarding these files. Money as an incentive will cause people to do strange things.
I never bought anything from Best Buy, but I certainly will never enter their store again.
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