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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

"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.”

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.

"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.

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