Best Buy defends practice of informing FBI about child porn it finds

[arstechnica.com]

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.

Read more

 

Related posts

Subscribe
Notify of

We welcome a lively discussion with all view points - keeping in mind...

 

  1. Submissions must be in English
  2. Your submission will be reviewed by one of our volunteer moderators. Moderating decisions may be subjective.
  3. Please keep the tone of your comment civil and courteous. This is a public forum.
  4. Swear words should be starred out such as f*k and s*t and a**
  5. Please avoid the use of derogatory labels.  Always use person-first language.
  6. Please stay on topic - both in terms of the organization in general and this post in particular.
  7. Please refrain from general political statements in (dis)favor of one of the major parties or their representatives.
  8. Please take personal conversations off this forum.
  9. We will not publish any comments advocating for violent or any illegal action.
  10. We cannot connect participants privately - feel free to leave your contact info here. You may want to create a new / free, readily available email address that are not personally identifiable.
  11. Please refrain from copying and pasting repetitive and lengthy amounts of text.
  12. Please do not post in all Caps.
  13. If you wish to link to a serious and relevant media article, legitimate advocacy group or other pertinent web site / document, please provide the full link. No abbreviated / obfuscated links. Posts that include a URL may take considerably longer to be approved.
  14. We suggest to compose lengthy comments in a desktop text editor and copy and paste them into the comment form
  15. We will not publish any posts containing any names not mentioned in the original article.
  16. Please choose a short user name that does not contain links to other web sites or identify real people.  Do not use your real name.
  17. Please do not solicit funds
  18. No discussions about weapons
  19. If you use any abbreviation such as Failure To Register (FTR), Person Forced to Register (PFR) or any others, the first time you use it in a thread, please expand it for new people to better understand.
  20. All commenters are required to provide a real email address where we can contact them.  It will not be displayed on the site.
  21. Please send any input regarding moderation or other website issues via email to moderator [at] all4consolaws [dot] org
  22. We no longer post articles about arrests or accusations, only selected convictions. If your comment contains a link to an arrest or accusation article we will not approve your comment.
  23. If addressing another commenter, please address them by exactly their full display name, do not modify their name. 
ACSOL, including but not limited to its board members and agents, does not provide legal advice on this website.  In addition, ACSOL warns that those who provide comments on this website may or may not be legal professionals on whose advice one can reasonably rely.  
 

4 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

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…