years
Nearly 200 pages of documents released Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that Best Buy’s top officials have “enjoyed a particularly close relationship” with the FBI for at least a decade, if not longer.
The filings were obtained by the advocacy organization as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in an attempt to better understand how the retail chain sometimes uses its “Geek Squad” tech support service to aid law enforcement. In a document from 2008, the FBI’s Louisville, Kentucky, division is described as having a “close liaison with the Geek Squad’s management.” In some instances, the agency even paid Best Buy employees directly.
The FOIA suit was filed last year in the wake of a federal prosecution of a California doctor, Mark Rettenmaier, who was charged with possession of child pornography in 2014. In court filings from 2015, Rettenmaier claimed that when he took his computer in for repair, Best Buy technicians, at the behest of the government, searched his hard drive without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Eventually, as the EFF summarized, after a May 2017 hearing the judge ruled that it wasn’t a search, as Rettenmaier had consented to letting Best Buy access his computer. “The court, however, threw out other evidence against Rettenmaier after ruling that FBI agents misstated key facts in the application for a warrant to search his home and smartphone,” the group wrote in its Tuesday blog post. The Rettenmaier case was finally dismissed in November 2017.
They wear blue shirts. That should be a tip-off right there.
Seriously, I can’t think of a more permanent and thorough way to ruin your life than to be caught with this stuff.
And what happens when a Geek squad dude “finds” cp on a computer, inserts the time stamps that forensically makes it indistinguishable from cp that was already on the computer in the first place? A quick 500 bucks…