Records show deep ties between FBI and Best Buy computer technicians looking for child porn
Technicians for Best Buy’s “Geek Squad City” computer repair
facility had a long, close relationship with the FBI in “a joint
venture to ferret out child porn,” according to claims in new federal
court documents, which also note that Best Buy’s management “was aware
that its supervisory personnel were being paid by the FBI” and that its
technicians were developing a program to find child pornography with the
FBI’s guidance.
The allegations are made by lawyers for
a California doctor charged with possessing child pornography, after
the doctor took his computer to a Best Buy store for repair. Computers
which require data recovery are typically sent from Best Buy stores
around the country to a central Geek Squad City facility in Brooks, Ky.,
and customers consent to having their computers searched — and turned
over to authorities if child porn is found.
While there
is no question that Geek Squad technicians have notified authorities
after finding child porn, the new court documents assert that there is a
deeper relationship than has previously been revealed between the
company and federal authorities. The court is now considering the extent
of that relationship and whether it is grounds to throw out a pending
child porn case, though it could also have ramifications for the dozens
of cases which originate from the Kentucky facility annually.
Defense
lawyers for the doctor argue that Geek Squad City’s technicians acted
as government agents by receiving payments from the FBI, regularly
speaking with and referring cases to the FBI, and creating a program to
search for child porn. If a government agent wants to search a computer,
they need a warrant, and the case has raised issues of privacy invasion
and violation of constitutional search and seizure rights.
Both
Best Buy and the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles deny any
violations in the search of surgeon Mark Rettenmaier’s hard drive, for
which the FBI obtained a warrant after being contacted by a Geek Squad
supervisor. That in turn led to a warrant and search of Rettenmaier’s
home, which led to the discovery of “thousands of images of child
pornography,” according to a reply brief by assistant U.S. attorneys
Anthony Brown and Gregory Scally.
“The Fourth Amendment
is offended by none of this,” the federal prosecutors wrote. “Nothing
unreasonable occurred here, and there was no arbitrary invasion of
anyone’s privacy by governmental officials…and there’s not a shred of
evidence that anyone at the FBI directed anyone at Geek Squad City to
detect and locate child pornography for the purpose of reporting it to
the FBI.”
Best
Buy issued a statement to The Post which said that Geek Squad employees
“inadvertently discover” child porn about 100 times a year while trying
to recover lost customer data. “As a company, we have not sought or
received training from law enforcement in how to search for child
pornography. Our policies prohibit employees from doing anything other
than what is necessary to solve the customer’s problem. In the wake of
these allegations, we have redoubled our efforts to train employees on
what to do — and not to do — in these circumstances.”
But
James Riddet, the lead attorney for Rettenmaier, contends documents
released by the FBI after an evidentiary hearing in January show years
of close cooperation between Geek Squad and the FBI field office in
Louisville, Ky., which would then launch federal investigations around
the country based on where the computer had come from. The actual
documents were ordered sealed in the case, but were described and often
quoted in briefs filed after the January hearing that were first
reported by R. Scott Moxley in the Orange County Weekly.
Riddet
declined to be interviewed. But in court filings he said that there
were “eight FBI informants at Geek Squad City” between 2007 and 2012,
and that the facility’s “data recovery system was designed to identify
and report child porn from all over the country.” A number of Geek Squad
employees received $500 or $1,000 payments from the FBI, documents and
testimony showed. Riddet cited an FBI letter to the U.S. attorney in
Kentucky which stated that, “Under the control and direction of the FBI,
the CW [confidential witness] agreed to notify the FBI when CW detects
the presence of child pornography during the regular course of CW’s
employment and is willing to testify in a court of law.”
One Geek Squad employee who received a $500 payment from the FBI filed
an affidavit saying he was “extremely reluctant and irritated that the
FBI gave me money, and tried to give it back…The FBI indicated to me
they could not take the money back because they had to spend it as part
of their budget.” But he then noted, “I contacted our legal department”
to tell them about the payment, which led Riddet to emphasize that Best
Buy management had been put on notice about the FBI payments.
Best Buy’s statement to The Post said, “We have learned that
four employees may have received payment after turning over alleged
child pornography to the FBI. Any decision to accept payment was in very
poor judgment and inconsistent with our training and policies. Three of
these employees are no longer with the company and the fourth has been
reprimanded and reassigned.”
Federal prosecutors wrote
that “It is true that a few payments to Geek Squad City supervisors by
the FBI unnecessarily muddied the waters here. But however ill-advised
those payments may have been…the money, more of an embarrassment than an
incentive, did nothing to turn Geek Squad City supervisors into
government agents or Geek Squad City itself into a secret FBI
surveillance machine.” Employees there are working on about 2,000
computers at any one time, the prosecutors said.
Riddet
also cited an internal FBI report announcing a meeting at Geek Squad
City, which noted, “The Louisville Division [of the FBI] has maintained
close liaison with the Geek Squad management in an effort to glean case
initiations and to support the division’s computer intrusion and cyber
crime programs.” The same agent wrote in a separate memo that agents
were “seeking training of the Geek Squad facility technicians designed
to help them identify what type of files and/or images would necessitate
a call to the FBI.”
The FBI only turned over informant
files on four of the eight Geek Squad employees it worked with, Riddet
wrote, but in one of the files, an employee told agents he “was in the
process of writing a software program [that] would help them identify
potential images of child pornography in their computer systems” and
that “FBI investigative information/techniques [were] revealed to source
for operational purposes.”
Federal prosecutors Brown and Scally responded that the software was
intended to identify child porn on employees’ work-issued computers, not
customers’ computers. They said that “Geek Squad City supervisors
reached out to the FBI, not the other way around,” and only did so when
they “stumble[d] across disturbing images of children being sexually
abused.” Best Buy said, “We have a moral and, in more than 20 states, a
legal obligation to report these findings to law enforcement. We share
this policy with our customers in writing before we begin any repair.”
But Riddet argued that the discoveries made by Geek Squad
technicians were more than accidental, such as the one made in
Rettenmaier’s case: a single photo of a nude girl, found in the
“unallocated space” of the hard drive where deleted items reside. The
Geek Squad supervisor who alerted the FBI to that photo, Justin Meade,
“sought out and scrolled through multiple images of suspected child porn
to prepare them for viewing by the FBI,” and that “dozens of emails”
showed “a very close working relationship between Meade” and an FBI
agent in Louisville, Riddet wrote.
During the January
hearing on the case, Meade denied receiving payment from the FBI, though
FBI agents and records confirmed he had been paid. 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.”
Riddet wrote that “Best Buy was an agent of the
FBI” because all data recovery jobs were sent to Geek Squad City “where
the vast majority of hard drives were searched for child pornography,”
possible criminal material “was then funneled to a paid FBI informant
(Meade)” and that Geek Squad City and the FBI “worked closely together”
to search out child porn.
Prosecutors responded that
“technicians never searched computers for child pornography,” that Best
Buy was not developing software to find customers’ child porn, and that
Meade never viewed himself as an informant, but simply Geek Squad’s
“liaison to the FBI for reporting the inadvertent discovery of child
pornography.” Riddet wrote that FBI records show that agents assigned
Meade a code name, that he operated for more than five years and that
one FBI report stated one of Meade’s co-workers “recovered erased data
on a customer’s computer which contained possible child pornography.”
Riddet
has asked U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney to suppress the searches
of Rettenmaier’s hard drive and home as illegal. A trial date is set
for June, so Carney must rule before then.
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