FBI paid Best Buy’s Geek Squad employees as undercover informants
Documents recently released after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit show that the FBI and Best Buy’s Geek Squad have been working closely together, perhaps too closely together, to support the FBI’s Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime division. In the case that’s now hitting the news, one Geek Squad customer who brought his PC into Best Buy for repairs, claims that repairmen violated his constitutional rights after a Geek Squad member found child porn on the customer’s laptop and informed the authorities.
According to a March 7 report from PC Magazine, the EFF obtained a memo that detailed the relationship between the FBI and the Geek Squad. According to that memo, available here, the EFF was able to share that, “Best Buy in September 2008 hosted a meeting of the law enforcement agency’s Cyber Working Group at a Geek Squad repair facility in Kentucky. The memo indicates that the local FBI division ‘has maintained close liaison with the Geek Squad’s management in an effort to glean case initiations and to support the division’s Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs.’”
It was Dr. Mark Albert Rettenmaier, a 62-year-old gynecological oncologist, who was charged with possession of child pornography after a Geek Squad employee found a picture of a young naked girl in a section of Rettenmaier’s hard-drive reserved for storing deleted files. According to the EFF, Geek Squad employees would share with the FBI any Best Buy customer data suspected of saving any illegal data, like child porn, found on customers’ devices’ storage areas.
In November 2017, The OC Register reported that the child pornography charges against Rettenmaier were dismissed “after throwing out much of the evidence collected by investigators because of ‘false and misleading statements’ made by an FBI agent.”
But it wasn’t just that Geek Squad members just happened to inadvertently discover illegal data on customers’ machines; they were purposefully searching customer hard drives for illegal data. “They would mine data from personal devices by manually searching them with forensic software, to flag illegal content based on what they discovered,” according to PC Magazine.
“For example, the image found on Rettenmaier’s hard drive was in an unallocated space, which typically requires forensic software to find,” the EFF wrote. “Geek Squad employees were financially rewarded for finding child pornography. Such a bounty would likely encourage Geek Squad employees to actively sweep for suspicious content.”
Fox News shared Best Buy as saying that only four Geek Squad members “may have” received payment by the FBI after turning over alleged child porn to the agency. “Any decision to accept payment was in very poor judgement and inconsistent with our training and policies,” Best Buy wrote. “Three of these employees are no longer with the company and the fourth has been reprimanded and reassigned.”
The newly released documents uncovered by the EFF shows that the lucrative relationship between Best Buy and the FBI has been going on for about 10 years. When Geek Squad employees would inform the FBI about alleged illegal data found on customer devices, they’d contact the FBI who would confiscate the machine. Documents show one Geek Squad employee as being paid $500 for “services.”
The FOIA lawsuit states that, “at no point did the FBI get warrants based on probable cause before Geek Squad informants conducted these searches. Nor are these cases the result of Best Buy employees happening across potential illegal content on a device and alerting authorities.”
And the EFF isn’t done yet. According to Fox News, the digital rights group is “currently seeking additional documents from the FBI to find out whether the agency has similar relationships with other computer repair businesses.” For more on the story, see the video accompanying this article.
~ Written by: Richard Webster, Ace News Today / Connect with Richard on Facebook and Twitter
