Geek Squad staff 'paid by FBI' to flag illegal imagery | Hacker News Reader

Geek Squad staff 'paid by FBI' to flag illegal imagery

bbc.co.uk

180 pointsalexcroox103 comments

Recent discussion (different article, same topic):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16533403

I'd say the linked item actually has the better article as it discusses some of the issues with this.

I think people are missing the issue here. Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy. The issue is that they were getting paid to report crime.

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.

Isn't flagging pictures making a suggestion so that a real law enforcement officer can check a reduced number of pictures instead of all pictures in existence? Starting from the real officer making a decision the process is normal law enforcement isn't it?

I had the same thought, but then realized the tech could plant images on the computer himself.

I'm not as worried about techs planting the images because even among people willing to break the law to make money, this is an area often considered too immoral to touch and the consequences are massive if caught. I'm more worried about people over reporting images and people having lives ruined over the mere allegations and investigations. Photos of your own kids running around a water sprinkler on a hot summer day can be enough for some busy body to call inappropriate. Even fully clothed images fall on the copine (spelling?) scale. Or maybe there is some films of people who specialize in looking young, but who are of age (I remember a court case where a court expert testified than someone was clearly underage, until that person showed up and proved they were of age and were a professional in the industry; imagine what could've happened if she hadn't shown up).

It goes beyond that. My father once tried to print some photographs through Wal-Mart. They refused to do so without a copyright waiver from the photographer--which was him. They looked at the images, decided they were "too professional", and proceeded to enforce the copyrights of the imaginary professional photographer.

Not only is this troubling from a law enforcement perspective, but it also provided him with a true story he could use to backhandedly brag about how great his photos are, and also an excuse to purchase expensive, top-of-the-line photo printers until the end of time. ~Thanks, Wal-Mart.~

There is good reason to avoid empowering busybodies to enforce laws on other people in public when they would have no standing to do so in a court. We simply can't trust random people to know the laws they purport to enforce, enforce them fairly and impartially, and preserve the rights of those they target for that enforcement. We can't even fully trust professional cops, judges, and lawyers with all that at once, which is why the legal system is set up to be adversarial.

If you witness a crime, you can certainly report it if you feel that's necessary, but paid informants and vigilante enforcers are a few steps too many down a very dark path.

That is definitely the idea. But, the point here concerns the opportunity for crime-making by the incentivized Best Buy employee. Nothing in that process raises the barrier to that happening.

Yeah, but I'm sure there was a case of someone flagged in this exact way for possession of child pornography, and obviously the guy was branded a pedophile by local news, fired from his job, spent months in jail....and in that time, literally no one thought to look at those pictures and make a common sense decision. When he finally managed to get them in front of the judge, it was obvious the only pictures found were of his own kids playing in the kiddie pool outside in the summer.

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.

Bingo.

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?

As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. Of course, digital images cost nothing, so there isn't a right price to set. I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.

Or, you know, you could have law enforcement maybe not turn the rest of society in to paid snitches. Not everyone wishes to live in a reimplementation of East Germany.

I realize that for many people 'pedophile' is the root password to the Constitution (not my line), but the existence of horrible people should not be an excuse to elevate authoritarians.

> I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.

You're still missing an important implication of this, now a real child pornographer's lawyer can get him off by creating enough doubt in Jury's mind that Geek Squad's employees planted the evidence, especially since they are getting paid for it.

In other words, not only there is a risk of innocent people getting arrested and possibly going to jail, there is a risk of guilty people going free.

> As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none.

A dime bag by definition retails for $10. $500 < $10. (The cost is reduced by buying in bulk, if you wanted to scale up this scheme.)

Or better yet. You get a bag of clothes in, "Hey, I know this guy, he's an a$$hole, I'm going to plant something in his clothes and report him, ha!"

That can always happen, it's just that now one would also get a compensation.

I don't think it is just that. In the dry cleaning example, the evidence would be extremely slight, it would turn into a he-said/she-said case, and either no one would get convicted or there would be enough evidence to convict the dry cleaner. And the dry cleaner can do this at most once before the police became suspicious. The cops will probably be suspicious right away: either the drugs are valuable and no one would actually leave them behind, or it is something like weed and the consequences will not be severe enough for the cops to bother.

In the case of the images, the evidence might be just as slight, but the police have essentially communicated to the employees that they won't be looking too deeply at the evidence and juries are ignorant when it come to technology and punitive when it comes to 'illegal images'.

The argument here as the defending attorney is ridiculously obvious: the employee has both motive and incentive; but I'd still give high odds of conviction (or worse, a plea bargain) and even if acquitted the accused will be marked for as long as people remember.

A good lawyer can bring this up; that there is no chain of custody .. but you need to afford a lawyer. If someone in a low paid job is incentivised to find this evidence, they could occasionally just plant it, get their few extra $$ a few times a year, and some other low paid worker could get screwed over because they can't afford anything other than a public defender.

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.

I haven't had my coffee yet and missed the perverse-incentive / fraud aspect... thanks for pointing that out.

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.

The plumber wouldn't get to keep the weed. The police would take that as evidence. This is why the reward would need to be higher than the price of the weed.

I think they are making an equivalence to digital files. With digital files, you can copy it over and keep the original. In his example, essentially the plumber only took a picture of the weed, handed the cops the picture, and took the weed home with him. At least that's how I interpreted it.

Close, but no dice. 100 EUR worth of weed (street value) is only worth 100 EUR if the person wants to keep it (ie. is a regular smoker) or wants to sell it (ie. is an aspirant dealer). Assuming an employee of Geek Squad is either is a rough stretch. For people who are neither (such as myself), weed can be worth 0 EUR (to me, weed is completely worthless as I don't want to put effort into selling it, and don't want to smoke it). An irregular smoker wouldn't smoke enough to finish 100 EUR of weed. They might rather prefer say 90 EUR cash instead. And even a regular smoker could possibly be able to know cheaper sources than street value.

If a plumber wanted to plant weed in your house (to get a reward like that proposed above), they would need to acquire the weed. It only makes sense to acquire the weed if the price to acquire is less than the reward. It doesn't matter whether the plumber smokes or not.

Good point, but Cableshaft had the right idea of it. I mean, at no point in the plumber scenario does the plumber have to actually part ways with his weed: "Sorry officers, I guess the guy must have moved his stash after he realized I must have seen it!" He didn't take custody of the drugs he's reporting, he just took a picture / called it in.

In the dry-cleaner scenario they obviously wouldn't have a great excuse for missing dime bags since they'd have custody of it.

REGARDLESS, I think the point isn't about "setting the right price" or comparing scenarios in which planting evidence is easier / harder, it's that ANY price is going to enable perverse-incentives for bad actors in at least some situations.

Yea, I get the analogy they were making, I just was pointing out that it's not totally correct. The police are not going to give you an award if you show a picture of weed in the house. They would need to see the weed in the house and collect it as evidence. If anything, showing a picture of weed in the house and then having the police find no weed there may give them probable cause to search the plumber for the weed...

Same with digital files, if the same Geek Squad member keeps "finding" evidence they plant on peoples computers, the Geek Squad person is opening themselves up to a ton of risk. In order to plant the digital files you are by definition in possession of the banned files and are breaking the law. Any good law enforcement agent would realize that the same person is unlikely to find illicit files and that it is more likely that they are planting evidence.

The point is that there is not an easy payday. To get paid you must break the law by possessing the files. Plus, just copying the files to the persons computer would leave an obvious trace considering they know when the Geek Squad was there and know when the files were copied.

Even if the fraud if being committed poorly, it will drag the accused through the mud before the truth comes out.

Even though the doctor in the article was not convicted (and I guess we'll never know the whole truth of the matter) you can bet his colleagues and friends aren't looking at him quite the same way.

Yeah, in general I agree here. I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment?

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.

> I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment?

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.

So, paid just to report anything? Yeah, that's a terrible idea.

I'd imagine this leads to a ton of false alarms.

"Kids running around in the sprinker, their wet swimsuits clinging a little too tenaciously? Report it to the FBI, dude! You could get paid and the feds would be your friends."

> Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy

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

> 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.

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.

I seriously doubt that. Just looking at the metadata of the files should be enough to clarify what happened.

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.

It is worth noting that we can also see this at the police level, where a cop plants evidence, turns on the bodycam recorder, then "discovers" the evidence, getting caught at it only because he didn't fully understand what the record button did.

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.

>there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.

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.

It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar.

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.

> It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar.

Yes, people do bad things without monetary incentive. It could just as easily be that some employee didn't like some 'jerk' customer. Well, maybe I will let the FBI harass them.

>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.

False alarm or not, paid or not, the Best Buy guy only identified and turned the pictures over to authorities. He did not file the criminal charge and had no influence on that process. There are many more safe guards in place, the FBI and the prosecutor and the prosecutors boss. They made the decision based on the pictures, and yet another safe guard was the judge.

Your point is taken and well received about the damage being done, but that has nothing to do with the Best Buy guy/payments. The FBI/prosecutor could each have independently made the decision the photos were not child porn.

Prior to digital cameras, drug stores that used to develop film (maybe still do) were notorious for identifying pictures of crimes (child porn included) and turning them over to authorities. In law school there was a pretty well known case of one such defendant who was the grandfather and the photos were of the grandkids running through the sprinklers in the yard naked. I won’t mention the outcome, but charges were filed and either way the damage was done, but is it the fault of the film developer? Does it really matter if the developer was paid or not?

There are some valid cases for compensating whistleblowers in services fraud, for example, clinics that engage in scamming Medicaid.

These are called Qui Tam (on behalf of the king) cases and some of the largest judgments in all of litigation with quite a few in the billions.

Fake evidence? Maybe, but I think the primary worry is the incentive to lower the bar to the point they ruin lives.

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.

This is a classic example of the cobra effect where Geek Squad employees are incentivized to plant child pornography on customers computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

This is something that would be beneficial to blast across social media. Best Buy would have to get on top of this if a simple explanation of "why the techs at Best Buy are incentivized to put child porn on your computer and report you" started going viral.

The cost of being caught is incredibly high for the employee - they have to illegally download and store, and distribute, the illegal imagery! and commit fraud, and probably commit contempt of court, and be prepared for the fallout from the falsely accused and their family.

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.

This seems a trivial crime to commit. Use an unmonitored public computer to download your illegal imagery to a USB drive, write a little autorun script to copy it half-randomly around and change some names, and boom - done.

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.

A >>former-friend<< was running an illegal FTP full of software on Macs at CompUSA for years through their firewall even. Don't think it doesn't happen.

Its like weed growers on state-federal owned land. Worst thing that happens is they loose their job, in most cases. Woop .. flip burgers.

If you discover child porn in the course of repairing someone’s computer, you should report it. The problem is getting paid to actively search for it. That sets up some perverse incentives. While it’s unlikely that an enterprising Geek Squader would want to run afoul of the FBI, it’s a very bad idea to create a profit motive for someone to plant this sort of evidence.

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.

I am pretty sure they are alienating a lot of their customers by having their employees snoop on their customers' computers. The argument you are making is "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" which is ridiculous.

There's a lot of freedoms being taken when it concerns child porn or terrorism though.

Its also different whenever you physically hand it over to someone.

I doubt the average Geek Squad customer pays any attention to this. The average customer also knows that they don’t have child porn on their computer and thus, in their minds, have nothing to fear.

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?

It's not about child porn. It's about Geek Squad looking for "crime" on people's computers. I think that would be concerning to many more people than you think.

The FBI is essentially fishing for crimes indirectly through another entity, so it can stay "within the law" itself. Not that this is the only way they fish for crimes these days.

FISA now allows them to do exactly that, and only ask for a warrant after they found the crime so they can use the info in Court. In other words, the warrant is completely pointless now, because the warrant was supposed to stop the government from abusing its surveillance powers.

This is kind of like that, too.

"They aren’t exactly alienating the non-pedophile public"

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.

I'd assume it would be running a hash check against all files and matching hashes of known illegal images. Not thorough, of course.

From WaPo, they were investigating by browsing through pornography. They went beyond just running hash checks.

"Meade also testified that when a technician found possible pornography, it was reported to him and he “would go beyond that and look and see are there things here worth reporting to the FBI…either find what’s on that page or scroll down and find more problematic images and make that available to the FBI.”

> The problem is getting paid to actively search for it. That sets up some perverse incentives.

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.

> it's a great way for the FBI to lose cases and have existing ones overturned now.

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.

There was a case of an old man who had pictures of his grandchildren on his computer. After a long and confusing investigation, trial and so forth, they finally showed the photos to a wildly confused judge.

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.

"The problem is getting paid to actively search for it"

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.

All that means is that official GS procedures do not instruct them to do it.

That's like saying their employees specifically do not use their personal phones while at work.

Of course, however after reading the comments many were claiming that the employees were paid to "search for" the content. This, according to the official statement is not correct.

I don't think they should be paid but I don't see it much different than seeing someone assault someone in the store. Again, not a full scan trying to find violations but witnessing a crime as part of your job. A law was broke so call the police. I personally think you lose your rights around search and privacy when you publicly give it to someone else. Even therapists and psychiatrists are allowed to break privacy when the patient is openly admitting to planning to assault/kill someone else. This is obviously a different seriousness but with a therapist there is an expectation of complete privacy.

It is completely different because the Geek Squad employee has a fiduciary responsibility to the customer who left their computer for repair.

They don’t have any responsibility to protect you from law enforcement.

They don’t have a fiduciary responsibility. But even if they did, reporting a crime isn’t a breach of that duty.

And that customer broke that responsibility first when giving the Geek Squad employee illegal materials.

I don't think you understand what a fiduciary responsibility is.

Spot on. At least the company should tell to the customers if there is fiduciary responsibility or otherwise have them sign a waiver to allow for file scan.

This is corporate surveillance as it finest. It also allow for planting evidence and even blackmailing innocent people.

It's about incentive. If you pay people underhand money for "finding" illegal imagery -- you will get more illegal imagery. It also gives massive amounts of power to a non officer. These charges are almost impossible to defend. With this type of charge hardcore prison... -- its probably better to commit suicide (guilty or not).

> It also gives massive amounts of power to a non officer.

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?

Parallel construction?

Certainly possible, but now that the cat's out of the bag it may be possible to determine that such techniques were used depending on the specific case. If you had your computer worked on by Geek Squad and some time later find yourself sitting in court you may have valid reason to get a subpoena against any employee who touched your computer to find evidence of rewards from the government and try to prove parallel construction. Employees may think twice about engaging in such activities if they risk being called away to court.

The FBI generally doesn't stoop to techniques such as this however, that's more of a DEA thing (scummy bastards they are).

In this case there is more to the issue. The people who work for the Geek Squad are already paid for changing the state of the computer. Therefore, they are not reliable witnesses for pointing out illegal content on the computer, especially since they are profiting for doing so.

What you’re missing is that now they have an incentive to go looking for imagery when they should simply be trying to fix your computer. And maybe even an incentive to plant evidence.

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.

I get it. When you're FBI and your life is having to look at child porn, you've got plenty of reasons to be super motivated to catch these people with whatever means necessary. And with something as awful as child exploitation, a reasonable person can come to genuinely believe that the ends justifies the means.

It's still manifestly wrong, but I get it.

My concerns are the other issues.

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?

The first three are policy / legislation issues. Rather than focus on the FBI / GeekSquad / See-something-say-something bits, take issue with what constitutes "illegal imagery".

Basically, all your concerns are about the scope of this, not the essence of it.

> Basically, all your concerns are about the scope of this, not the essence of it.

Congratulations, you've discovered the Slippery Slope argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

I think you replied to the wrong person.

Yes, the core problem is the law. But until the law is fixed, I'll take issue with something that extends the application of the law.

And I think it does get to the essence of it, because of just how we quantify something as illegal. The laws are very poorly written, where the worse images possible are treated just as no more illegal than images that are on the borderline of legal (not to mention that the border itself is very fluid, especially when considering artistic images that would be illegal if they weren't artistic but which is left up to a random jury to make a judgment call on).

How is it manifestly wrong? From the article:

"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.

I think the headline is kinda missing the point here; the issue is not the flagging of illegal images once found, the issue is snooping around people's computers that were left for repairs deliberately looking for illegal images and the violation of trust there.

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.

I think most commenters are over-analyzing. Deliberately looking for evidence of crime is high effort with low probability of being rewarded. Planting evidence of a crime is very high risk relative to the reward.

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.

define "illegal" imagery .. two steps to avoid 1337 h@x0rs is to not send in a personal hard drive in the first place. Ethics at the $10/h counter is about as transparent as this glass of water I'm drinking. Morality, especially when a smart 18 year old, sees cash -> a few bits of planted evidence -> huge pay day (relative to what they know as such) can be a lot easier to overcome thanks to money.

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.

It should cost Best Buy a $100 processing fee to report child porn. That's a small price to pay to catch a criminal but too high to go actively snooping through hard drives.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16533403

Before I started programming in College, I worked as a Geek Squad "Counter Intelligence Agent" and this is something that definitely came up in conversations with veteran employees. State police were contacted and arrests were made.

Dear FBI, I'm happy to join the effort in my spare time. You probably have my Whatsapp and bank account already, so let's just make it happen.

As if I needed another reason not to shop as Best buy.

Would you hire geek squad if you knew they were paid to look through your photos for the FBI?

I wouldn't hire Geek Squad even if I didn't know that. (And even if I didn't know about the stories of their staff trolling through private data long before the FBI started paying them to.)

When my son was circumcised the pediatric urologist said if we had any concerns we could text a picture of it to him. I thought that sounded weird, but could see how this is totally legitimate doctor trying to save himself time and save ourselves an appointment, and money for an office visit.

Genital mutalation of a child is fine (assuming here it wasn‘t a medical necessity. Maybe it was in this case, hence why I didn‘t downvote), but taking a completely non-sexual photograph of a healing wound is considered weird. Sums up modern America pretty well.

If I'm an electrician on call-out to someone's home and, totally by accident, I discover someone tied up in their basement, should I report it to the police?

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.

> totally by accident

not an accident if you're paid to do it

The article does not clarify the nature of the payment.

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.

The "totally by accident" excuse is not valid when people are paid bounties to conduct vigilante surveillance. How much money would it take for someone in need to plant evidence?

Anybody dumb enough to go source a bunch of kiddie porn to plant on computers to collect bounties probably doesn't have the smarts to actually pull it off correctly.

For sure you should - but if you're incentivized to find such a thing, what's to say you won't leave some drugs hidden in their basement yourself? If the pay off was high enough, especially with young, generally low wage employees it might be quite tempting.

That's a fair point.

These people weren't being paid to find things "by accident" (or at least they weren't when this was first reported a year or two ago). They were being paid to look for what they suspected were crimes. This is more akin to an electrician being called in to rewire the kitchen, seeing a locked basement door, picking the lock, and rifling through the boxes in the basement to find illicit materials.

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.

> This is more akin to an electrician being called in to rewire the kitchen, seeing a locked basement door, picking the lock, and rifling through the boxes in the basement to find illicit materials.

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.

It really depends. I can imagine this incentive was started because either employees came across images and didn't think much of it, or dismissed it because they didn't want to deal with the hassle. The article mentions a picture of a naked child; didn't mention any abuse or sexual acts, so it could be the owner's own, I mean just look at how many naked baby pictures are out there. It's a gray area then. With this incentive, it was reported; without it, the employee may have shrugged it off. I think they're incentivising "better be safe than sorry" with some monies.

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