No offence but if the Washington Post wants to convince people that computer technicians should not be able to report to the FBI whatever they find in their costumer's computers, they should use examples other than a doctor having child porn in his drive.
Did you miss the part where the FBI is paying this technician to specifically look for any potentially questionable material?
No-one is arguing that reporting something that you stumble upon while doing your job is wrong. This isn't what happened here. This tech was paid to go out of his way to search the computer for the potential of incriminating data.
Aka, this is a search without a warrant.
Also, of course the media is going to use and abuse "think of the children". This is how politicians convince the public to accept more surveillance and give up their freedoms.
I don't agree with the "search without a warrant" part, because it sounds like they specifically were going after this doctor, when they were just looking for whatever they could find in any consumer drive to report it.
There is also no proof that this technician was looking into unallocated sectors of the drive just to find something to incriminate customers, since looking into unallocated sectors is standard practice to recover missing files.
In the absence of proof of exactly how they are searching, the troubling aspect to me is the financial incentives being offered to low paid employees to somehow find criminal material. I have no trouble imagining unethical workers even going as far as planting material because "baby needs a new pair of shoes" or the FBI will pay extra to bust some juicy target.
> because it sounds like they specifically were going after this doctor, when they were just looking for whatever they could find in any consumer drive to report it.
Walking into every house on a street or in a city and searching it for drugs is still a highly illegal search. Whether or not a specific person was targeted is entirely beside the point.
Well, IIUC, he didn't go out of his way. He was asked by the customer to recover deleted files, so he stumbled where otherwise he would not have looked at all.
Which makes me wonder why he was paid at all.
Normal people don't need an offer of money to call the cops when they come across CP.
What I mean is that these opinion pieces are usually written to change the mind of the readers, but saying "if we let the FBI do this, we will catch more pedophiles" will only make people side with the FBI, I think.
Even without the FBI discussion this is an open question; the content in this case was recovered from an unaddressed location, and there's some court precedent saying that material located their is inherently dubious since its origins are so unclear.
'Chain of custody' only starts on seizure. There are no 'chain of custody' issues either when a drug lab is dismantled - sure, some guy in a ski mask might have broken into that garage the night before and put all that stuff there, doesn't make it a chain of custody issue. More similar to the OP, when an electrician finds a mj plantation when doing routine network maintenance (replace a meter, maybe), there is no chain of custody problem either.
So then it is on the FBI to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the files were placed on the computer by the owner. Not by the technician.
Which in court will effectively end up being computer forensic expert vs computer forensic expert lecturing a jury of people who don't understand computers.
Sure, but (unless I'm misreading your undertone) what's the problem then? When the police find a bloody knife on somebody's kitchen table and the blood matches that of the victim that bled out outside, they also have to prove that it's the owner's. Everybody in this thread is up in arms how there is no way to 'prove' the files were the owner's, like it's some sort of special case that no lawyer or judge ever had to consider before. There's nothing special about the 'evidence' angle of this issue.
The main issue is things get pretty harry around computers. Primarily because you can modify the state of a computer without physical entry.
For example if I plant murder evidence in your home either myself, or an associate of mine must of physically entered your residence. We likely came into contact with the physical item, handling it, etc. Furthermore the associate if caught is very likely to roll on me.
For computers none of these are true.
I could automate placing child-porn on THOUSANDS of computers. If done properly there would be little to no evidence the owner did not do this themselves.
I could plant child porn in your computer _while_ I'm pretending to be somebody else (IP + MAC + login location + OS + credentials, etc.) so even if the CP was proven to be planted it is traced to somebody else and they prosecuted.
There is no parallel to this in the real world. The game theory of bribing somebody to do your dirty work is far far messier then a bot. Computers offer ways of hiding that make the physical world laughable.
Yeah, no. I know that us 'computer people' like to think that it's different but it's not. Anything you do digitally leaves traces. Sure, 'if done properly' (like if you're some sort of Mission Impossible or CSI: Cyber style 'hack god'), anything is possible. But that's the same for physical break ins - if you do it 'properly' you can frame someone else, too. No sure why you think the 'associate' scenario would be different between digital and physical either; why would a computer tech not 'roll on you'?
This discussion is in the context of evidence. People are insinuation that somehow digital crime is different because you can't 'prove' one thing or the other, because anything could be faked (that's the gist of the argument). My point is that this is vastly ignorant of the hundreds of years of experience dealing with such uncertainty in the judicial system. Sure, it's not statistics and it's not 'logic' the same way 'we' (i.e., quantitatively, closed-system oriented people) interpret those terms, but that doesn't mean we're now somehow in a completely different world. Put differently, the STEM mindset doesn't have a monopoly on 'the truth', as much as we like to think we do.
This article isn't about searches; it's about the technicians reporting something they happen to see in the course of their business relationship with the customer. I don't see how this is any different than a CI reporting information to LEOs on crimes "in the street".
In other words, a warrant is still required before LEOs can look for information themselves to persue charges.
If the FBI were really asking Best Buy to search everything they work on for illegal/contraband items, that would be entirely different.
In the long run there's likely not much difference. Except there are usually rules and procedures involving a CI. As long as they are following the same rules then I would imagine the practice would be allowed.
It'll just as likely kill the business model if it becomes common knowledge that they search for stuff through your hard drive you thought you deleted and possibly make it public.
After all, there are personal security problems with all this. Identity theft being a simple one, having your personal stuff made public is another.
Never mind the fact that there have been CIs that just made stuff up to get paid.
> This article isn't about searches; it's about the technicians reporting something they happen to see in the course of their business relationship with the customer.
If I witness a hit-and-run, will the local police department pay me for it? If I wave a traffic cop over to an illegally parked car, do I get a cut of the fine the driver pays?
I've heard of local PD paying for tips/information on things like petty crimes and misdemeanors (though, maybe not parking). I have no proof of such a thing, but I can't see why they would not do it if circumstances allow.
> If I witness a hit-and-run
IANAL, but I suspect that's the important distinction. You witnessed something, you didn't search for it. Just like these Best Buy technicians witnessed the illegal/contraband items.
I think that the issue comes in when people have the option of both plain sight and searching. For example if an electrician is paid by the local PD to report drug paraphernalia they now have an incentive on future calls to poke around where they don't strictly need to be. How do you know whether they conducted an illegal search (as an agent of the government since they are paid if they find something) vs. saw it in the regular course of their duties? To me that is the key. The person is already in a somewhat privileged position, not just standing on a street corner with their eyes open. The payment creates a conflict of interest, thereby making anything they find suspect.
I agree with you... What I'm saying is even with someone reporting information from a "privileged position", the Police _still_ need a search warrant to gain that knowledge in a way they could charge someone with a crime.
If Police want to move forward with charges based on information from a paid CI alone, they are certainly able to do so. However, I doubt it happens very often because they know they need evidence collected via the correct legal process.
"in the street" is public. And the implication is, the technicians aren't just seeing things "in the course of business", but actively looking for them.
Something I'm sure is missing from this discussion is that there is a specific legal duty to report anything that constitutes child pornography to the authorities.
The NCMEC is the clearinghouse for this sort of information and my former employer had regular training on what our legal responsibilities were with respect to this.
I can't be certain about this case, but I'd suspect that this was somehow wrapped up in the reporting requirement and things went off the rails after that.
The initial reporting suggests that abandoning this reporting requirement is basically the problem here.
Specifically: the (good) reporting requirement holds that discovered content must be reported. The new setup effectively pays bounties for anything discovered, and there's a lot of concern that it will prompt fishing expeditions without cause. It also blurs the lines of private search since it's possible to put bounties on other content without a reporting requirement.
And, of course, the FBIs initial filings in the case appear to have systematically tried to hide that this was anything other than normal reporting.
It also taints the evidence- how can the prosecution prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the files weren't planted their by the technician in order to collect the bounty?
Only one I could find quickly. Also, don't mistake statutory law for case law. There may be relevant case law that significantly expands the concepts contained in a statute.
It would be extraordinary case law indeed that could override that specific enumeration of the class subject to the statue. If you're interested in this subject, you might be interested in the canons of statutory interpretation, in particular one called Expressio unius est exclusio alterius ("the express mention of one thing excludes all others").
Or to plant it. It's not a stretch to believe a man willing to lie under oath about collecting payments from the FBI might plant evidence as well. I doubt that's what actually happened, but reasonable doubt...
That's definitely one of the concerns, since the case at hand is about content discovered in unaddressed space. There's already some court precedent saying that such images can't be prosecuted for mere possession since it's unclear how they arrived there.
In the past, that's meant "malware or remote access", but it does create concern about "the person doing the search, who put the image somewhere that there would be no record of how it arrived there".
As another poster has used the CI model as a comparison, there have been cases where the CI made up accusations to get paid. Which, of course, didn't go well for the target of the inaccurate allegation.
> The search of Rettenmaier’s hard drive has a further wrinkle. The image was located on “unallocated space,” which is where deleted items reside on a computer until they are overwritten when the space is needed. Unallocated space is not easily accessed — it requires special forensic software.
> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored. Riddet argued that the technician was going beyond the regular search to deleted material to find evidence the FBI might want.
It's not difficult to recreate files that have been deleted but not fully wiped from the disk. But it's also not trivial. If the Best Buy techs are finding things in those regions of the disk then that means they're explicitly looking at what's there. It's not just a matter of, "Hey the desktop wallpaper of this guy's laptop is kiddie porn, I should report this!", these guys are actively searching people's computers on behalf of the Feds.
> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored
Depends on what was asked to be recovered, but I'm guessing it's just a brute-force 'undelete' type program that was run, which usually lists all scourable/recoverable nodes from the "free" space.
In this scenario, there is no difference between what was asked to be restored, and was found.. since the undelete types of programs always list all found files, and ask you to pick which to restore. So if some file-names there were suspicious, that's not different from the "I saw a CP wallpaper".
Conjecture, of course. We do not know the exact communication.
This was my thought originally, but then I read the article. I no longer believe this is what happened.
Official Best Buy policy is exactly as you state -- we don't perform an invasive search for illegal content, but if we find it in the course of normal operations, we will report it.
Official Best Buy policy is that individual employees will not accept payments from the FBI.
But, one supervisor did accept payments from the FBI. That same supervisor remained in contact with the FBI for years. And that same supervisor lied under oath about receiving those payments. He was in regular contact with the FBI, accepted regular payments from the FBI, and -- what's more -- felt the need to lie about that relationship. I think it's extremely likely that he was having those he supervised perform searches that would not otherwise have been performed has he not received payment from the FBI.
That's probably the factual question that this case will boil down to -- would this material have been uncovered if a different supervisor, following all of Best Buy's policies, had been in charge that day?
And now that the supervisor's paid service to the FBI has been revealed, will all past convictions based on his efforts (and the court and defense costs of those found not guilty) be subject to overturn/redress as unlawful violations of search? They should be, but I doubt it'll happen.
Shouldn't it boil down to fruit of the poisonous tree, and the illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible regardless of how it could have been parallel constructed?
My suggestion is that this question boils down to the one that I identified.
If the search was executed only because the supervisor was effectively acting on behalf of the FBI, then the evidence was probably illegally obtained.
Prosecution will argue that the search would've happened and been reported regardless of the supervisor's relationship to the FBI. So that the relationship, while perhaps shady, actually had zero bearing on the events that took place.
The judge will have to decide which of those is more likely to be true. The conduct of the supervisor and the FBI is probably going to be a huge PITA for the prosecutor to explain away.
He sent his hard drive in to recover data, it's entirely plausible that they ran a scan of unallocated space, got a bunch of files, then looked at them to check if they were corrupted (very often recovered files only have a tiny bit of the original file), and found they were corrupted in a very different way.
This still sounds like stumbling upon to me. Have you ever used that kind of recovery software? Typically it ignores filesystem indexes and searches the whole disk for content. If the customer was asking for data to be restored the tech was inherently having to search the while disk.
They are actively searching people's computers because that's exactly what the customer is asking them to do. This is how 'undelete' software works - you scan all sectors, take everything that looks like it might at some point have been part of an operational filesystem, then re-assemble sectors back into files. You then have to check if those files are actually what the algorithm thought they were. I can somewhat understand that a defense lawyer tries to muddle the waters to get his client off (as is done in the OP), but the comments on here claiming that this is somehow unusual or going beyond normal data recovery work leave me slapping my forehead.
Statistically, and with $500 as a reward, it seems plausible that a technician from time to time might plant something to collect the bounty. I would wonder what the 'chain of custody' is and/or the specific techniques used that would prove this was not possible. After all from what I read they aren't even looking for corroborating evidence just parts of files w/o knowledge of how they even got there.
If the hard drive is corrupt and FAT tables/inodes are screwed up you would just try to recover as many files as you can in which case you would look at the raw data for files instead of where the files where.
Not only that but there can remnants of hundreds of thousands if not millions of deleted temp, cache and other files on the typical computer, quite a few which is stuff like temporarily downloaded cache files from sections of web pages a user didn't scroll to, didn't see, and wasn't aware of.
These technicians obviously didn't review all the unallocated space and determine what was there. It's pretty clear they had a set of patterns they were looking for representing known illegal content, and some kind of automated software that scans the unallocated space looking for that content.
There is also the fact that a lot of junk can end up in unallocated space.
For instance images and resources cached by Firefox while in use tend to end up on the HDD. If you browse around porn sites you know sometime some of the thumbnails etc do look like CP from time to time.
Now should that cached resource from a random website be considered evidence of CP?
Or what if it's a photo of your own family and it is intimate but not in a CP kind of way. I've hard of many cases where a random family photo was reported as CP.
As far as what sort of steps would be usual for recovery, a lot of it would depend on the nature of the drive failure.
If the drive is damaged enough that directory information and the MFT are missing, there are certainly situations in which it would make sense to run TestDisk and PhotoRec, which are freely available and widely included in data recovery builds. It's been a long time since I needed to use PhotoRec (and I've learned a lot more since), but my recollection from the time is that it basically goes chugging through the disk looking for sectors that contain the beginning of a recognized file format, then starts pulling that off until it reaches an end or another file beginning operating on the hope that at least some files will have been stored contiguously on the drive. By the time you get to PhotoRec there's a good chance you've given up on just being able to get back to regular filesystem access.
As a side note for anyone contemplating drive recovery without pro tools, the ABSOLUTE FIRST thing to do is image the drive into a file (probably with ddrescue). NEVER use these tools on the original drive if there's data on there that you value, and if there's data that you REALLY value, consider sending it to a professional that's also able to do a clean-room evaluation (which usually won't be required). Some places are absurdly expensive, but a lot of recoveries will only cost a few hundred dollars.
"Yep, all your data's still in the drive. After your freezing/spinning/whacking recovery efforts, most of it's in that fine grey dust in the filter."
As a political independent, one very concerned with personal privacy, yet also with conduct in society as a whole according to rules / laws / expectations, I think here's the crux of the argument:
>The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches?
This would be a good piece for the legal eagles on here to mull over I think. In my view, a business transaction should be defined; in the way First Amendment doesn't mean diddly on Twitter, Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in a private party exchange that is open ended.
>Best Buy searching a computer is legal — the customer authorized it, and the law does not prohibit private searches. But if Best Buy serves as an arm of the government, then a warrant or specific consent is needed.
Well how about that! Pretty clear cut, except for the interjected of OOOOH BUT WHAT IF GOVERNMENT angle. If an Electrician stumbles upon a drug lab after being hired by a private party, then reports the crime and is potentially compensated, do I have a problem with that? The Electrician was functioning as an Electrician, not as a government agent. I'm actually kind of okay with private citizens having concerns about inheriting illegal activity knowledge and being, well, powerless. That leads to vigilantism maybe?
I'd like to think, hard as it might be from time to time, that the justice system will function as intended, and this is a Defense Attorney holding a deck of cards that pretty much all allude to guilt, so attacking the source is a reasonable move. Get the evidence thrown out, right? Except I don't think it's so easy in this case. Maybe when somebody starts going door-to-door offering computer repair services but really are just on the payroll by an LEO, yeah, a line has been crossed. Hm.
I think it comes down to whether these people are acting on their own initiative or whether they're being told to do this stuff beforehand.
To take your electrician example, I have no problem with the scenario you present. Where I'd have a problem is if the police set up a program to recruit electricians and ask them to keep an eye out for illegal activities, and promised them payment if they find stuff.
Protections against illegal searches can't be this easy to work around, otherwise what would be the point of having them? If this was sufficient to satisfy the 4th Amendment, then any time the police wanted to search a house, all they'd have to do is, say, contact a local utility and have one of their employees pretend to check the property and report back all the illegal stuff they saw. (And I'm sure someone will post a link to a story about police doing exactly that.)
> And I'm sure someone will post a link to a story about police doing exactly that.
I'm pretty sure it's been done, yes (though I don't have a case that I can cite). What's more interesting to me, though, is that it's not done all the time.
Why isn't it? I suspect because the courts take a dim view of this kind of stunt (again, I don't have a case to cite). But in the current climate, if this would pass muster with the courts, wouldn't the police do it frequently? Frequently enough that we'd hear about it somewhat regularly?
> The Electrician was functioning as an Electrician, not as a government agent.
I don't think your example vindicates Best Buy, but rather, simply repeats the central question of the case: was the Geek Squad employee simply functioning as a Geek Squad employee?
The prosecution has argued that an employee who happens to stumble on images of child pornography (analogous to your electrician stumbling on a drug lab) is not acting as an agent of the government. I'm inclined to agree with that judgement.
On the other hand, if the employee was conducting extra thorough searches, scrutinizing the files on any customer storage media, or otherwise performing surveillance tasks that had nothing to do with his job, then it seems apparent that the employee was acting as an agent of the law in accordance with a financial incentive from the FBI. It doesn't help, in this case, that the employee lied about having been compensated by the FBI.
Ultimately, this particular case will come down to the details of how and why the employee stumbled across these images. As a general principle, however, it seems wrong to me that any computer in for miscellaneous repairs (touchpad/screen replacement, battery refurbish, etc) should be subject to a search for illegal data pursuant to an FBI incentives program.
Like many things in the law it comes down to intent. If the electrician is acting on their own initiative it is legal. If the electrician is acting because they were induced by the government then they are a government agent and the search is illegal.
Forgive the petty distraction, but did anyone notice the outdated dress code in the picture at the top of the story? They've got people doing manual labor in a repair shop far from customers, and making them wear white shirts and ties.
They try to compensate for the inappropriate dress code by wearing loose and short-sleeved clothing (they probably have to do something to hold their ties too), but that only makes it look more awkward.
Is this common in computer repair? Is it common in the eastern US?
I had hoped we had moved past that era. Or perhaps I've become too prima donna since I've become a developer. But the oppressive dress code hurts my soul as much as the FBI using geeks to search for child porn.
It may have to do with the "geek squad" name and image. Historically, a short sleeve dress shirt, necktie, and polyester pants, were considered to be the uniform of an engineer or service tech. There was no corresponding stereotype for women, but I remember during my summer internship in a computer facility 30+ years ago, that pretty much everybody held to a similar aesthetic.
I can understand why they might want to project an image, even an outdated image if, for example, their customers are older.
But who are they projecting that image to? There's no customers around and I don't think that projected image holds the same meaning to the millenials in the picture. To them, it sends the message that they work at a company like Initech.
This is pretty clear cut and I hope it gets decided the right way. The 4th amendment doesn't apply to private actors acting of their own accord, but does apply to private actors acting as agents of the government. The payments make this a slam dunk--the Best Buy employees were working as agents of the FBI and any searches they did require a warrant.
I'm not sure it is as clear cut. If those payments were upon conviction or something then they would be similar to rewards, if they were paid a monthly stipend then it is very clear they are government agents.
What that means is those guys have an incentive to conduct a search for interesting material on every computer they work on.
Think about it. Considering how much those guys are paid, an extra $500 per report is a good incentive for looking at every hard drive outside the scope of normal repair activities.
So now your local electronics repair man is spying for the govt. You airline and bus employee is doing the same. The police state, it seems, is upon us already.
We're still too busy on social media to notice.
By the time most people realize what's going on, it will be too late.
But where does that put 'mandatory reporters'? Many folks in a position to observe children are required to report signs of abuse. Are they 'agents of the government'? I imagine this complicates their job e.g. health care where they ask very personal questions.
Also, no warrant would be required to perform a search when requested by the citizen, right? "Please, officer, look in my trunk!"
Also, no warrant would be required to perform a search when requested by the citizen, right? "Please, officer, look in my trunk!"
No, of course not. (Actually, I believe that accepted doctrine has changed since "99 Problems" was written and a locked trunk is no longer safe from warrentless search.)
Some are searching, actually. "How did you get those bruises on your leg, Jimmy?" Its confusing when the professional is paid to do a search as part of their job.
Even more so if, simultaneously, the FBI is paying them to report search results. That's probably the monkey wrench in this whole deal. Most mandatory reporters are not being paid for it.
Medical exams are voluntarily (sometimes not in the cause of a trauma, or where a patient is psychotic or something and a consent override has been obtained, but we already have legal protection for these cases) - if a person refuses to let a MD look at their legs because their spouse was beating them with a bat then they can do that.
Asking questions, however, doesn't require a warrant - even for a government employee. Once a MD sees bruises they are free to probe (and it's partially so they can treat other damage that may not be visible on the surface) into how they got there.
At least the last time I was searched (11 years ago), it was still "requested" by the officer, so I'm assuming I could have said no and he would have had to get a warrant, etc, but he let me know that he could either search my truck or ticket me for my tire hitting the white line (which may be illegal, or may not be, I don't know).
Had I been smarter, I would have taken the ticket and fought it in court, but as a scared 18 year old, I allowed myself to be cuffed, placed in the backseat of a cop car while he tossed my truck. He had ever opportunity to plant anything he wanted, and thankfully he wasn't too corrupt of an officer - other than coercing an illegal search.
That is why I have a slight anti-police bias. I have family in the force, so I try to be respectful of police, and I know plenty of amazing police officers, but there are a lot of bad apples that spoil the bunch.
Your case is considered consent by law, but the jurisprudence is wrong. You are ruled to have "consent" even though you know you could be shot and killed for not consenting.
This. I decided at a young age that the answer to "can I search" is "no". If I end up in custody as a result, so be it. If they get a warrant and slap me with everything they can, so be it. I cannot take the chance that they will either plant something or find something that I use regularly that might be used illegally and leave me fighting about it for the next few years.
I once built model rocket engines with my son (see sugar rockets online). I kept legal amounts of the mixed chemical as well as the individual components for that in my trunk at various times (going to a launch site, coming home from the hardware store, etc).
In a case like that it's not the officers job to decide if you did anything wrong or not. It's their job to report that you had "bomb making supplies" or some "white powder substance" in your trunk and let the court system sort it out.
I was "asked" to exit my vehicle by no less than 6 officers pointing their service pistol directly at me and yelling at me...
I was walked backwards, hands on head to a police car and cuffed, thrown down on the hood and very physically frisked (ever had someone literally pull your balls down ... yeah)
I stood with my hands behind my back for 10 minutes sitting on them, very painfully (i am a big dude, but i was larger then, over 420lbs (this plays into the story later)
I was talked to like i was trash while officers begin looking through my truck, throwing everything out of place...
...
Want to know why this happened? Because 10 minutes earlier someone robbed the store i was driving behind. His description was a SKINNY male (the word "skinny" was specifically used) with dark hair and a beard. Even through the window of my truck, if you could tell i had a beard, you could tell i wasnt skinny. I was of course let go... but basically my truck was ransacked, left completely a mess, and I was left feeling rather victimized (its not a good feeling knowing 6 guns are loaded and pointed at you with no safety on... its a lot more impactful than you think before it happens to you) ...
At the end of the day, any one with common sense isnt going to think the person who (on foot) robbed a store is going to drive right by the store, surrounded by police officers, 10 minutes later... and i didnt even match the description... yet somehow their warrantless search of my vehicle and self were totally legal and fine...
These were just assholes who wanted to get all hopped up on being the hero that day...
Oh, and at the end... the whole thing ended with the last words of the cop being "you're lucky we arent citing you for your license plate light being out" ... thats how cold cops are, thats what law enforcement is in America... its a bunch of losers who get handed power (because what kind of person seeks out power through a badge and a gun) and in turn, look for every opportunity to use said power in extreme ways to get their kicks...
Warrants are just peices of paper... intimidation is the way of the police now. That's their preferred method of getting what they want
You know what always left me the most pissed about the whole thing. My truck being left a complete trashed mess. It took me 15-20 minutes to get it back to 90% organized.
I had tapes and CDs (remember those) thrown out of their cases, my clipboard for work was broken, my flashlight was opened and the batteries thrown about.
Had he been respectful of my things, it would have just been a laughing matter about how I used a "drug dealer's" driveway to turn around, but instead he ripped apart my truck looking for god only knows what, just to drive off without helping put anything back in its place.
For a lot of stuff there is some form of client privilege.
In that case it is nit officer look in my trunk
It is a mechanic that needs to pull up a spare tire from it and is on a payroll by the officer.
Mandatory reporters are stupid idea. I doubt it can help a lot. I also think that the false positives will be disturbingly high if people take the job seriously.
As someone who's former significant other was a Teacher, you'd be shocked at how frequent legitimate physical and sexual abuse is in the lower income areas...
Especially visible to those who have suffered it before... You can see it - Mandatory reporters can make a huge difference.
'report signs of abuse' means exactly that. It doesn't mean go to extra lengths to uncover abuse.
For example if a day care worker was able to (just hypothetically) attach a microphone to a childs bag and from that uncovered sounds of abuse at home my guess is that would not be legal or be able to be used as evidence. Not because the recording was illegal but because it didn't fit the definition of reporting signs of abuse.
That's why mandatory reporting is very specifically legislated for, with requirements as to who it applies to, the context in which it applies, and to what 'signs' it might apply, to do whatever is possible to safeguard everyone's rights (the practical application, effect and adherence to this is of course subjective).
I think it's not quite that simple. Your analysis seems correct, as far as it goes, but overlooks the argument that the owner of the computer may have consented to give that Best Buy employee access to his files. That aspect could make this more akin to, e.g., a roommate consenting to a search of your shared apartment, and it is well established that such a search is permissible under the 4th amendment (unless you are physically present and object).
Edit: Put another way, the following is not necessarily true:
> Best Buy employees were working as agents of the FBI and any searches they did require a warrant.
Agents of the FBI do not need a warrant to search premises or possessions that you have voluntarily given them access to.
What if the FBI bribed your roommate to allow access to your shared apartment? What if, further, the FBI sent out a public notice saying that anyone who allows them to search a roommate's apartment where they find drugs gets $500? How many drugs do you think they would find?
The first question here really is The Question, I think. Does the fact that the employee is being paid to share the information with the FBI change anything? But note that we don't have a situation here where the employee gains access to your computer under false pretenses because the FBI paid him to do so. Instead, he has access in the normal course of business, with your consent. He is only being paid to share data that he rightfully has access to. (There may also be an issue lurking in that last part. What, exactly, is the scope of the consent you give a Best Buy employee? Do you consent to have him look at everything on your hard drive? I suspect that the answer to this will prove to be 'yes,' but it may require more thought.)
I think the second issue, though, is largely a red herring, at least when it comes to 4th Amendment law. It may be that such considerations should affect the probative value of the evidence that is 'recovered,' but it's not clear to me how that relates to the 4th Amendment. The structure of the 4th Amendment analysis relates to what rights you have to keep other people out of your stuff, and when those right have been violated, and therefore doesn't really engage with the question of whether the evidence was planted.
It probably would! But as far as I know, we don't have cases addressing that situation, so it's not a very useful analogue. (That doesn't mean they aren't out there. I just don't know of any.)
The FBI is acting in bad faith. If this is found to be permitted, then search warrants are no longer necessary in many situations since the police can simply hire anyone who is not a LEO to conduct a warrantless search on their behalf.
Given that the file in question was in the deleted free space, the technician didn't just stumble into it accidentally and then report it. He went looking for it to begin with. And he was searching for such files because he was paid to do so.
Chain of custody should play a big factor here. Between the accused and the technician how many people had access to that system? Further, since the technician is paid when something is found, what is the motivation for the technician to not plant evidence? It's trivial to plant evidence on a hard-drive to the point that if done properly it's impossible for a forensics investigator to come in after the fact and determine the tampering.
This is all before even getting into the topic of potential malware infections, running as a TOR exit node, being used for torrent hosting unbeknownst to the user, etc. There was a case many years ago and I wish I could find the reference to it in which the defense called in an expert witness who convinced the judge to have his machine inspected by a forensic analyst who found it clear of pictures of kittens. The expert witness then had the judge visit an 'innocuous' looking website which didn't have pictures of kittens visible, but loaded them in hidden iFrames. The system was then inspected again by the forensics analyst who then found pictures of kittens, the point being that when your computer is connected to the Internet it really isn't your computer anymore.
The whole repair process is fraught with liability whether the customer is the target of a criminal investigation or not. In either case, you'd probably need to image the drive as a first step, and then date stamp, hash, and then sign the date and hash. Or use something like dm-verity.
Maybe the physical handling of drive removal and putting it on a docking station for imaging is video'd and that video is also verifiable (mainly you'd want a system that ensures whole frames aren't deleted..i.e. oh hey I see 5 seconds were yanked here and over here, so conceivably the drive was removed and returned to the docking station and altered prior to imaging).
Also, as COW filesystems become more common (ReFS, AFS, ZFS, Btrfs) there will be a lot of stale metadata that is non-trivial to fake. Basically snapshots are constantly being taken, even if they are not preserved for very long. On an SSD ostensibly these unused blocks get trimmed and should immediately return zeros, but there might be modes were they return stale data instead if it's before erase block GC/erasure happens.
Edit: And now you have this copy of the customer's drive... itself a liablity for it to exist for very long, or deleted too soon. dm-verity at least does produce a read-only encrypted image so the liability is both access to the image and the security of that image's passphrase.
Ultimately the Geek Squad does not follow any forensics process & that's why using them or anyone else in the computer repair space is dubious when it comes to collecting any evidence of a crime. They may be able to provide leads, but anything they uncover should not be usable in a court or alone be grounds for arrest.
I worked in forensics until I lost all faith and humanity, and pivoted for sanity's sake.
The least flaw in the forensic process, which was always discussed in-court by lawyers who I suspect could barely use Outlook always resulted in the evidence being turfed.
That due process doesn't seem to be followed here, and if a search is to be used as evidence, it better damn well follow some decent practices!
Honestly, even with the best computer forensics in the world I still have a hard time trusting anything found mostly because I find 0-days every week that the forensics community won't know about for years. It's pretty hard if not possible to say if something got a computer because of the user or because of the Internet.
If it's a CP case, then, generally speaking, it's 500GB+. Usually enough so that the user has repeatedly deleted old files because their hard drive was getting full.
The files are rarely encrypted, and gathered over years from sources like FTP, SMTP and the like - and those logs are the main evidence.
A user is unlikely to not notice that 50GB of data is appearing once a week, and unlikely to not notice that the person they are conversing with has also been given similar charges, because their email has them talking about it, and when it comes to court, you find out that they were regularly seen with the other person.
Still looking for something with that same problem solving appeal. I do a little embedded work now.
But forensics, at least when you're working with the justice system, teaches you that people are capable of anything.
The money was awesome, and gave me a great start, but now I value everything else more. Good workplace, time for my family and clients who don't make me feel like a saint.
Security research is where it's at from a problem solving perspective. With your background in forensics and web design it shouldn't be much of a jump.
Also off topic but if you don't mind sharing, how did you come to work in this field, particularly at such a young age? And were you working for the government/law enforcement or are there private firms doing this sort of work?
And most importantly, was there some kind of support system in place to help you deal with the sort of things you were being exposed to?
Forensics fascinated me all through high school. The IT guy got sick of me bypassing his security, and so tasked me with finding the holes, basically making a destructive bored student into an asset.
When I hit university, they were looking for a entry level security jack-of-all-trades. Thanks to prior and doing well when interviewed by the sysadmin, which partially involved breaking in to a VM, they hired me.
The uni was a subcontractor for the police, and i got pushed to the forensics team by consistently bypassing encryption and recovering data faster than the team, with more information. Like three files were deleted at the same time, because they shared fragmentation with this page file. My age was constantly questioned in-court, but a good track record, and the ability to make a jury laugh were usually enough to get the lawyer to review my skill instead.
It isn't unusual for university's to be employed by government in Australia, and my university also had a partnership with IBM.
Support-wise, I had a team of business psychs at IBM and the uni, which was useless, and a trauma team through Victoria Police, and they were amazing.
Wouldn't have made two years without the trauma team. Many coffees, tears and angry rants.
Having someone you can talk to about an active case was always nice.
I was never meant to know who the defendant might be, but a profile photo, and video of the same person hitting a child who called them daddy... And I'd be ranting in the office.
The police team had the training and experience to get the anger down, and focus me on the task of ensuring that I scoured the machine for every tiny piece of information.
Let's end on a happy note: A man was accused of murdering his daughter. Instead, I found her emails about running away and framing him, and Missing Persons used that to find her. The guy got aquitted. That was a good day.
Wow, thanks for sharing your story. I'm happy you're doing something that you personally enjoy more as your job now, but I'm also glad you were able to devote a few years of your youth to such a worthy cause. I'm sure there are many victims who are very appreciate of your efforts as well.
I'm under the assumption that certain professions require what they call a 'thick skin' while actually the people who can work there for long time have a lack of empathy (because else they wouldn't be able to cope with the reality of their work). Since you've been a professional in this field I am curious about your viewpoint on this matter.
Why has law enforcement suddenly become allergic to warrants? Warrants used to be a rather boring, but important, process that police had to fulfil to show that they had even a very flimsy case.
Now it seems like law enforcement and politicians who serve their whims are outright pushing to remove the warrant requirements from as much as possible. But why now? Warrants aren't new and the landscape hasn't changed that much, why are law enforcement suddenly pushing so hard on this?
Is this just a general theme on the broader problem of police oversight (or lack thereof)? This is one of the few areas of actual oversight left (judicial) so they're trying to remove that too.
The landscape has changed hugely since 50 years ago. Individuals now have a lot more power than ever before thanks to the proliferation of technology, and individuals who want to subvert the aims of the state have a greater chance of doing so than ever.
The state is beginning to recognise this and is taking steps to try to claw back some power.
The state is beginning to recognise this and is taking steps to try to claw back some power.
My perception is opposite. Over the last 20 years we have gone from a fairly free country to what feels like a police state with the most effective surveillance in history.
Are you actually familiar with, for example, the extent of Snowden's revelations? What an erosion of liberty the Patriot act is? Or how unusual it used to be to see armed security guards in random office buildings?
Yes. These measures are being taken because individuals are getting more powerful. In the long run, I don't think the state is going to succeed, but it will be an arms race for a while.
My theory is that the state took advantage of the combination of panic over terrorism and falling costs of data storage to put their dreams into action. The threat that they purport to be protecting against isn't real. The threat that the state poses, sadly, is.
As evidence I can point to the fact that dramatic increases of power increased after 9/11. Much of which was spent in security theater and clear power grabs with proven ineffectiveness. (cough TSA *cough) Anyone who was around in tech knows about the dramatic drop in costs for data storage, and knows how it has driven big data in general.
- Individuals can communicate in secrecy, thanks to encryption and the internet, much more easily than before. This means that wiretapping as we used to know it is nearly impossible for some categories of conversations.
- Surveillance is nearly omnipresent, partly as a way to combat the above.
I don't like the erosions of liberty that you mention, or the militarization of police, but I can see why some of the things we take for granted (instant secret communications, encrypted volumes, thumb drives that can be hidden) and consider to be valuable can also frustrate law enforcement doing what we have told them is their mandate (catch bad actors).
Can you expand on your comment that individuals have a lot more power?
My admittedly anecdotal evidence shows that individuals are feeling more impotent with voices washed out in a wave a noise and an inability to affect anything.
Try to explain what "voice" your parents or grandparents had in an age where media consisted of a handful of radio/TV/newspaper establishments controlled by powerful vested interests. Not only was your voice non-existent, but you had no tools available to magnify your voice.
Add in the fact that information with which you might build a coherent argument was siloed and generally unavailable, that you had limited resources to gain any sort of expertise outside of your job, and individual "power" in previous ages appears more like the mirage of nostalgia than anything else.
This, of course, is assuming that you are a white male. If not then you had no individual power at all and were severely limited just in terms of your individual autonomy.
> Try to explain what "voice" your parents or grandparents had in an age where media consisted of a handful of radio/TV/newspaper establishments controlled by powerful vested interests.
Back before there was social media and other online "new media" (which , together with the remaining "old media", is concentrated in fewer and larger vested interests than the media was a generation or two ago) people shared ideas person to person (the term "viral" that's been adopted in social media actually drew on a use that referred to non-media person-to-person information transmittal before the explosion of "new media").
People outside of the media establishment had voices before modern "new media".
Could you explain how you can no longer share ideas person to person? If anything, this has gotten easier. Where it ones required skills and access to tools and resources (or at least a willingness to use the office mimeograph late at night) to create an underground zine and where the 'phone tree' was charged on a per-minute basis you now have so many options for effective person to person persuasion that it can be overwhelming.
I think your point that there is so much noise (aka "other people trying to be persuasive") that voices find it hard to get an audience is fair, but I don't see any evidence that it is harder to speak widely now and all evidence seems to point in the other direction.
> Could you explain how you can no longer share ideas person to person?
Didn't say you couldn't, though for large segments of the population in-person direct communication has been to a significant extent replaced by communication mediated by (and potentially censored by) major centralized media firms.
I've forgotten the precise number, but something like 75% of 'convictions' currently arise from plea bargains and not trials. As such, these overreach practices usually escape judicial review, and especially so if the punishment is light (a fine but no jail time).
The only cure for this practice is for a civil rights defense resource like ACLU or EFF to invite those prosecuted to take the case to trial and then appeal verdicts until the practice receives the official rebuff it so richly deserves.
One of the times I was on jury duty, we sat in the pool room for about 3 hours during which each of the 7 trials scheduled on that day fell through and ended in a plea bargain. We were dismissed before noon after a brief explanation.
Of course, this is just a single data point, and take it as you will. It only happened once during my service, but it did happen. As such, I'd find your 75% figure believable.
This was a local district court, and I guarantee nearly all of those were drug-related charges.
I think a social network campaign, starting with the poorest people who are in-and-out of the judicial system frequently, would have a massive effect. There is strength in numbers, and if somehow everyone being prosecuted stood up and said "no, I demand a trial" (aside from the oft-debated hypothetical about fighting speeding tickets - I dont want to get into that), they couldn't prosecute everyone. They just dont have the resources. They'd have to let a sizeable amount of the accused walk.
True, but I think social network campaign is not enough. You'd need something stronger, that would connect the people to each other. An union of some kind, maybe.
Coordination is hard to create, especially when stakes are high and you have a first-mover disadvantage - before the system overloads, the first few people to stand up will likely have the book thrown at them.
Even homeless people are on facebook. All it would need is a popular slogan (and a rationale of why you follow the slogan, i.e. that poor people are being oppressed by the judicial system and the most effective way to fight it is to not plea bargain). Everyone knows the phrase "black lives matter" and I'd wager that their campaign spread on social media. [ let me be clear, I only mention blm due to the commonness of the phrase, and not the outrageous things that have been done under their auspices ].
I dont know much about marketing, but the notion of "I demand a trial" would need a very simple catch phrase outlining an entire campaign. A clear, concise idea that is implanted in someone's mind even during the stressful process of being booked into jail. It would need to be slogan or motto (I think) to work en-masse.
plea deals should just be outlawed. They only benefit the government and hurt the poor. If every felony had to be taken to trial the government would be quick to stop wasting their time arresting people for a single crack rock or other petty drug crimes. For people who plead guilty you can let the judge show leniency on them but most people would clearly fight things they were not guilty of if there was no incentive to plea to a lesser charge. It is the same with why most patent trolls are successful because it is easy to just pay them than to fight. If you make it so fighting and accepting it have the same risk than more people would fight
Partly because now everyone has strong incentives to put random people in jail.
1. Politicians can ensure voters are perpetually scared of "increasing crime" when in reality USA is safer than ever.
2. Narcissist DAs to feel good about themselves.
3. Cops to justify their existence and demand more resources
4. Prison Industrial Complex.
Minimum mandatory play a big role. Imagine your laptop which was given to repair miraculously had a porn clip where it may be argued that the model was 17 year old.
Would your rather spend 16 years in jail and in sex offenders registry or will you take the plea bargain where you spend 6 months in jail ?
BestBuy reports that they found child porn, but proceeds to give the computer back to the owner? Is that legal or are they trafficking?
Meanwhile the FBI goes and requests a warrant based upon what they heard from BestBuy? That seems almost more slippery to me, does the FBI just need to "hear something" from somebody to get a warrant to look around? Or is it even possible for them to get a warrant in a case like this, save for BestBuy involving them like they do?
This seems like the step that causes a warrant to be issued for more stuff. How I'd imagine it goes:
1) BestBuy worker finds child porn while doing normal work.
2) BestBuy worker does "extra work" to report child porn to FBI and does not return the machine, he files some paperwork, maybe makes a full backup, etc..
3) BestBuy employee signs a deposition, BestBuy hands machine over to FBI with owner's information
4) BestBuy or BestBuy employee gets some money (I'd think BestBuy would want their cut but that's a detail, maybe they're cool to their people in that way) for doing "extra work" and reporting crime.
5) FBI and federal prosecutors look at evidence, seek warrant for other evidence, start planning case. Perhaps said warrant makes a big case or identifies nothing else.
6) BestBuy worker may potentially be called to testify. Sadly at the end of the day $500 isn't going to pay much for a personal lawyer and I think it would be ill-advised to show up to court in any capacity in a federal case without one.
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No, he was not paid by the customer, he was paid by Best Buy. The customer paid Best Buy, but the tech would still get the same paycheck if that customer had chosen a different repair shop. The repair tech is not incentivized in any way to show loyalty towards the customer unless their manager enforces it somehow. But as the article discusses, the manager, Meade, has accepted money from the FBI (and then lied about it, of course in a way that does not expose him legally).
That made me think.... what if instead of finding a search warrant, the FBI shows up at your door and tells your roommate "we want to search this place, here's 50 dollars".
What if the police go a step further and start offering money to criminals to allow searches. Soon, you'll see people choosing to get busted in order to get an FBI payday, while the FBI can tout their high closed case rate.
Likewise, if a cable installer or plumber paid by the police enters your home, could they legally search it? Obviously not.
But there's still confusion in the courts about the difference between physical and virtual property and the peoples' rights to escape search (using radar through walls or taps on data feeds). This malign overreach of prosecutors relies on that.
But I think this practice clearly crosses the line since the property is physically in the hands of an untrusted party. It'd be trivial for Joe Schmo at Best Buy to plant evidence. Because that possibility is so plausible, this chain of evidence has been compromised. Any appeals court would toss this practice as unlawful, IMHO.
It goes even farther than Joe Schmo at Best Buy not being trusted. They are being paid to find "evidence." That direct conflict of interest should invalidate anything they find.
The chain of evidence thing really only applies if the government intends to present that evidence in court. Whether or not this constitutes an unlawful search is a separate question.
>That made me think.... what if instead of finding a search warrant, the FBI shows up at your door and tells your roommate "we want to search this place, here's 50 dollars".
That's actually legal. The catch is they can only search the areas of the home the roommate "controls", meaning anything they find in a shared space like the bathroom or kitchen is legal, but your roommate can't consent to a search of your bedroom if that's understood to be your space.
I think it gets dicey if you left the bedroom door open and they can see evidence of a crime from the hallway.
If your wife or live-in girlfriend consents to a search the entire place is fair game, though if your wife is willing to sell you out for fifty bucks you have more than one set of problems.
> Given that the file in question was in the deleted free space, the technician didn't just stumble into it accidentally and then report it
That's not necessarily true:
> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored.
So in this case it sounds like the reason Best Buy had the hard drive in the first place was to recover other (possibly deleted) files on the disk. In such a scenario it seems totally plausible that they might stumble across other, more incriminating deleted files as part of the recovery process.
> It's clearly illegal for private individual A to search the computer of private individual B without B's consent though
So what? If such illegally gained evidence is not excluded (and private illegality doesn't trigger the exclusionary rule), and the public prosecuting authority (who benefits from the illegality, as it serves the case they want to prosecute) declines to prosecute the illegality, it's at worst, for the perpetrator, a matter of civil tort liability.
> If this is found to be permitted, then search warrants are no longer necessary in many situations since the police can simply hire anyone who is not a LEO to conduct a warrantless search on their behalf.
There is a distinction to be made that a warrant often authorizes behavior that would otherwise be unlawful in the first place - which this doesn't really seem to be.
So the Best Buy employees were in possession of child abuse material and even used it to make profit? Sounds like they should be charged for abusing children. Merely viewing it or possessing it harms children, so no excuses. Even the FBI shouldn't be allowed to posses it.
>“There was no evidence of how the contraband got onto Dr. Rettenmaier’s hard drive,” Riddet wrote, “and it could have gotten there before he possessed the computer or against his will.”
Ha ha ha, no mention of his cell phone which contained ~800 images of (fully and partially) nude girls. [1]
Another article I saw on this was claiming it wasn't child pornography because it wasn't depicting a sexual act. While that is true on a technicality, you still have multiple devices with pictures of underage girls. The image found on his computer was of a prepubescent girl, which a choker on, on all fours. [2]
I am in computer security. If you allow someone else to access your computer (or your traffic, see: ISP) and they find something, and report it, I don't see how that constitutes an illegal search. I had some friends on FB freaking out about this case and the fourth amendment, I am totally fine with it. Good on the Best Buy tech and good on the FBI. This guy had pictures of under age girls on his devices and works in a position of power (gyno doctor). I'm glad this has come to light and I hope he goes to prison.
Is there any actual evidence of those phone pictures, besides "sources reported"?
Also, he had photos in his unallocated space. Which could happen to you, if someone sent you an email or link, you opened it, and immediately deleted them. Sure, you might be aware enough not do this. Should we jail someone because they aren't?
It's easy to forget the legal protections when it's someone we have prejudged. Hopefully they will still be around when they come for you.
Is there usually evidence provided to the public in ongoing court cases? There is just as much evidence that the Best Buy employee was paid by the FBI. We have what is reported in the news.
So, with the reported deleted photo, and the reported photos on his mobile, yes, I have prejudged him. He can be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the state, I am not the state though.
In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it?
He can be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the state
Why? That's just another of those legal protections, like the 4th Amendment, which you don't seem to care much about.
In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it?
If a fact is claimed by the cops when they are trying to convince someone based on nothing but a few deleted files, I sure as hell don't take it as a matter of faith. Cops and prosecutors lie all the time, especially to the press.
In fact, notice how they don't claim the girls in the phone pictures are underaged? For all we know, the guy simply likes to download perfectly legal pictures of nude 18+ girls for some file sharing sites, and happened to mistakenly also download a few illegal pictures, which he deleted.
But regardless of facts, his life is now ruined, because many people will have prejudge him based on almost nothing, and he'll probably never be able to practice again even if he's acquitted.
For the feds, that's just Monday, of course.
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In any case, my real point isn't whether you should think he's guilty, but that we shouldn't take away his legal protections just because we think he's guilty, because the whole point is that they must be universal. Cases against unsympathetic defendants are exactly what prosecutors use to further the erosion of legal rights. For everyone's sake, don't play their game.
Authorizing a third party to work on your device does not constitute an illegal search. I would expect the exact same legal protections as he got. If I authorize a third party service to work on my device I assume they will be viewing the files. If I have illegal material on my computer I respect their duty to report it.
Getting a 500 dollar payment from the government does not make you an agent of the state. At 15 dollars an hour that would buy ~33 hours of the employee's time. Two months later his coworker discovered the photo. Oh, and it lead to a search that discovered more child pornography. Should there be no reward system for crime tips?
>Authorities say they also found child pornography on a laptop, multiple hard drives and an iPhone belonging to Rettenmaier.
Maybe all those hard drives were just mailed to him though and he was in the process of deleting them. This is just someone trying to get out on a technicality.
You can email the author of that article if you have questions on the sources. Maybe he can point you to court documents.
So, would anyone care to comment on the analogous, "offline" scenario here for a better baseline? Consider the two scenarios. Do either (both?) have legal or moral standing?
1. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave a firearm in the pocket. The feds visit me to inquire about the firearm.
2. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave pictures of child porn in the pocket. The feds visit me about said porn.
the nuance is how big or small the "pocket" is. If your dry cleaner opens up your suit examining every nook and cranny, even areas between the fabric which you have no access to, then collects the dust particles and scans them in a chromatography machine and calls the cops when they find one particle of cocaine, they knew without a doubt came from your suit, and forward the chromatograph results to the FBI who prosecutes you for drug possession. Thats a closer offline scenario to whats going on here.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadNo-one is arguing that reporting something that you stumble upon while doing your job is wrong. This isn't what happened here. This tech was paid to go out of his way to search the computer for the potential of incriminating data.
Aka, this is a search without a warrant.
Also, of course the media is going to use and abuse "think of the children". This is how politicians convince the public to accept more surveillance and give up their freedoms.
There is also no proof that this technician was looking into unallocated sectors of the drive just to find something to incriminate customers, since looking into unallocated sectors is standard practice to recover missing files.
Walking into every house on a street or in a city and searching it for drugs is still a highly illegal search. Whether or not a specific person was targeted is entirely beside the point.
Which makes me wonder why he was paid at all.
Normal people don't need an offer of money to call the cops when they come across CP.
Perhaps you have more issue with the overly general title?
Which in court will effectively end up being computer forensic expert vs computer forensic expert lecturing a jury of people who don't understand computers.
For example if I plant murder evidence in your home either myself, or an associate of mine must of physically entered your residence. We likely came into contact with the physical item, handling it, etc. Furthermore the associate if caught is very likely to roll on me.
For computers none of these are true.
I could automate placing child-porn on THOUSANDS of computers. If done properly there would be little to no evidence the owner did not do this themselves.
I could plant child porn in your computer _while_ I'm pretending to be somebody else (IP + MAC + login location + OS + credentials, etc.) so even if the CP was proven to be planted it is traced to somebody else and they prosecuted.
There is no parallel to this in the real world. The game theory of bribing somebody to do your dirty work is far far messier then a bot. Computers offer ways of hiding that make the physical world laughable.
This discussion is in the context of evidence. People are insinuation that somehow digital crime is different because you can't 'prove' one thing or the other, because anything could be faked (that's the gist of the argument). My point is that this is vastly ignorant of the hundreds of years of experience dealing with such uncertainty in the judicial system. Sure, it's not statistics and it's not 'logic' the same way 'we' (i.e., quantitatively, closed-system oriented people) interpret those terms, but that doesn't mean we're now somehow in a completely different world. Put differently, the STEM mindset doesn't have a monopoly on 'the truth', as much as we like to think we do.
In other words, a warrant is still required before LEOs can look for information themselves to persue charges.
If the FBI were really asking Best Buy to search everything they work on for illegal/contraband items, that would be entirely different.
It'll just as likely kill the business model if it becomes common knowledge that they search for stuff through your hard drive you thought you deleted and possibly make it public.
After all, there are personal security problems with all this. Identity theft being a simple one, having your personal stuff made public is another.
Never mind the fact that there have been CIs that just made stuff up to get paid.
If I witness a hit-and-run, will the local police department pay me for it? If I wave a traffic cop over to an illegally parked car, do I get a cut of the fine the driver pays?
> If I witness a hit-and-run
IANAL, but I suspect that's the important distinction. You witnessed something, you didn't search for it. Just like these Best Buy technicians witnessed the illegal/contraband items.
If Police want to move forward with charges based on information from a paid CI alone, they are certainly able to do so. However, I doubt it happens very often because they know they need evidence collected via the correct legal process.
The NCMEC is the clearinghouse for this sort of information and my former employer had regular training on what our legal responsibilities were with respect to this.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
I can't be certain about this case, but I'd suspect that this was somehow wrapped up in the reporting requirement and things went off the rails after that.
Specifically: the (good) reporting requirement holds that discovered content must be reported. The new setup effectively pays bounties for anything discovered, and there's a lot of concern that it will prompt fishing expeditions without cause. It also blurs the lines of private search since it's possible to put bounties on other content without a reporting requirement.
And, of course, the FBIs initial filings in the case appear to have systematically tried to hide that this was anything other than normal reporting.
IN the past, I know that film developers were obliged to report child pornography to the police and I'm assuming that this applies here as well.
It doesn't make it okay for the FBI to make payments for these reports, thus incentivising techs to go trawling for it.
In the past, that's meant "malware or remote access", but it does create concern about "the person doing the search, who put the image somewhere that there would be no record of how it arrived there".
> The search of Rettenmaier’s hard drive has a further wrinkle. The image was located on “unallocated space,” which is where deleted items reside on a computer until they are overwritten when the space is needed. Unallocated space is not easily accessed — it requires special forensic software.
> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored. Riddet argued that the technician was going beyond the regular search to deleted material to find evidence the FBI might want.
It's not difficult to recreate files that have been deleted but not fully wiped from the disk. But it's also not trivial. If the Best Buy techs are finding things in those regions of the disk then that means they're explicitly looking at what's there. It's not just a matter of, "Hey the desktop wallpaper of this guy's laptop is kiddie porn, I should report this!", these guys are actively searching people's computers on behalf of the Feds.
Depends on what was asked to be recovered, but I'm guessing it's just a brute-force 'undelete' type program that was run, which usually lists all scourable/recoverable nodes from the "free" space.
In this scenario, there is no difference between what was asked to be restored, and was found.. since the undelete types of programs always list all found files, and ask you to pick which to restore. So if some file-names there were suspicious, that's not different from the "I saw a CP wallpaper".
Conjecture, of course. We do not know the exact communication.
Official Best Buy policy is exactly as you state -- we don't perform an invasive search for illegal content, but if we find it in the course of normal operations, we will report it.
Official Best Buy policy is that individual employees will not accept payments from the FBI.
But, one supervisor did accept payments from the FBI. That same supervisor remained in contact with the FBI for years. And that same supervisor lied under oath about receiving those payments. He was in regular contact with the FBI, accepted regular payments from the FBI, and -- what's more -- felt the need to lie about that relationship. I think it's extremely likely that he was having those he supervised perform searches that would not otherwise have been performed has he not received payment from the FBI.
That's probably the factual question that this case will boil down to -- would this material have been uncovered if a different supervisor, following all of Best Buy's policies, had been in charge that day?
If the search was executed only because the supervisor was effectively acting on behalf of the FBI, then the evidence was probably illegally obtained.
Prosecution will argue that the search would've happened and been reported regardless of the supervisor's relationship to the FBI. So that the relationship, while perhaps shady, actually had zero bearing on the events that took place.
The judge will have to decide which of those is more likely to be true. The conduct of the supervisor and the FBI is probably going to be a huge PITA for the prosecutor to explain away.
Seems so, and $500 is a good incentive for a Geek Squad worker.
But even a dead end investigation (from a mistaken or false pretenses) can be a large burden on the accused
These technicians obviously didn't review all the unallocated space and determine what was there. It's pretty clear they had a set of patterns they were looking for representing known illegal content, and some kind of automated software that scans the unallocated space looking for that content.
For instance images and resources cached by Firefox while in use tend to end up on the HDD. If you browse around porn sites you know sometime some of the thumbnails etc do look like CP from time to time.
Now should that cached resource from a random website be considered evidence of CP?
Or what if it's a photo of your own family and it is intimate but not in a CP kind of way. I've hard of many cases where a random family photo was reported as CP.
If the drive is damaged enough that directory information and the MFT are missing, there are certainly situations in which it would make sense to run TestDisk and PhotoRec, which are freely available and widely included in data recovery builds. It's been a long time since I needed to use PhotoRec (and I've learned a lot more since), but my recollection from the time is that it basically goes chugging through the disk looking for sectors that contain the beginning of a recognized file format, then starts pulling that off until it reaches an end or another file beginning operating on the hope that at least some files will have been stored contiguously on the drive. By the time you get to PhotoRec there's a good chance you've given up on just being able to get back to regular filesystem access.
As a side note for anyone contemplating drive recovery without pro tools, the ABSOLUTE FIRST thing to do is image the drive into a file (probably with ddrescue). NEVER use these tools on the original drive if there's data on there that you value, and if there's data that you REALLY value, consider sending it to a professional that's also able to do a clean-room evaluation (which usually won't be required). Some places are absurdly expensive, but a lot of recoveries will only cost a few hundred dollars.
"Yep, all your data's still in the drive. After your freezing/spinning/whacking recovery efforts, most of it's in that fine grey dust in the filter."
>The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches?
This would be a good piece for the legal eagles on here to mull over I think. In my view, a business transaction should be defined; in the way First Amendment doesn't mean diddly on Twitter, Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in a private party exchange that is open ended.
>Best Buy searching a computer is legal — the customer authorized it, and the law does not prohibit private searches. But if Best Buy serves as an arm of the government, then a warrant or specific consent is needed.
Well how about that! Pretty clear cut, except for the interjected of OOOOH BUT WHAT IF GOVERNMENT angle. If an Electrician stumbles upon a drug lab after being hired by a private party, then reports the crime and is potentially compensated, do I have a problem with that? The Electrician was functioning as an Electrician, not as a government agent. I'm actually kind of okay with private citizens having concerns about inheriting illegal activity knowledge and being, well, powerless. That leads to vigilantism maybe?
I'd like to think, hard as it might be from time to time, that the justice system will function as intended, and this is a Defense Attorney holding a deck of cards that pretty much all allude to guilt, so attacking the source is a reasonable move. Get the evidence thrown out, right? Except I don't think it's so easy in this case. Maybe when somebody starts going door-to-door offering computer repair services but really are just on the payroll by an LEO, yeah, a line has been crossed. Hm.
To take your electrician example, I have no problem with the scenario you present. Where I'd have a problem is if the police set up a program to recruit electricians and ask them to keep an eye out for illegal activities, and promised them payment if they find stuff.
Protections against illegal searches can't be this easy to work around, otherwise what would be the point of having them? If this was sufficient to satisfy the 4th Amendment, then any time the police wanted to search a house, all they'd have to do is, say, contact a local utility and have one of their employees pretend to check the property and report back all the illegal stuff they saw. (And I'm sure someone will post a link to a story about police doing exactly that.)
I'm pretty sure it's been done, yes (though I don't have a case that I can cite). What's more interesting to me, though, is that it's not done all the time.
Why isn't it? I suspect because the courts take a dim view of this kind of stunt (again, I don't have a case to cite). But in the current climate, if this would pass muster with the courts, wouldn't the police do it frequently? Frequently enough that we'd hear about it somewhat regularly?
I don't think your example vindicates Best Buy, but rather, simply repeats the central question of the case: was the Geek Squad employee simply functioning as a Geek Squad employee?
The prosecution has argued that an employee who happens to stumble on images of child pornography (analogous to your electrician stumbling on a drug lab) is not acting as an agent of the government. I'm inclined to agree with that judgement.
On the other hand, if the employee was conducting extra thorough searches, scrutinizing the files on any customer storage media, or otherwise performing surveillance tasks that had nothing to do with his job, then it seems apparent that the employee was acting as an agent of the law in accordance with a financial incentive from the FBI. It doesn't help, in this case, that the employee lied about having been compensated by the FBI.
Ultimately, this particular case will come down to the details of how and why the employee stumbled across these images. As a general principle, however, it seems wrong to me that any computer in for miscellaneous repairs (touchpad/screen replacement, battery refurbish, etc) should be subject to a search for illegal data pursuant to an FBI incentives program.
They try to compensate for the inappropriate dress code by wearing loose and short-sleeved clothing (they probably have to do something to hold their ties too), but that only makes it look more awkward.
Is this common in computer repair? Is it common in the eastern US?
I had hoped we had moved past that era. Or perhaps I've become too prima donna since I've become a developer. But the oppressive dress code hurts my soul as much as the FBI using geeks to search for child porn.
But who are they projecting that image to? There's no customers around and I don't think that projected image holds the same meaning to the millenials in the picture. To them, it sends the message that they work at a company like Initech.
What that means is those guys have an incentive to conduct a search for interesting material on every computer they work on.
Think about it. Considering how much those guys are paid, an extra $500 per report is a good incentive for looking at every hard drive outside the scope of normal repair activities.
So now your local electronics repair man is spying for the govt. You airline and bus employee is doing the same. The police state, it seems, is upon us already.
We're still too busy on social media to notice.
By the time most people realize what's going on, it will be too late.
Also, no warrant would be required to perform a search when requested by the citizen, right? "Please, officer, look in my trunk!"
Also, no warrant would be required to perform a search when requested by the citizen, right? "Please, officer, look in my trunk!"
No, of course not. (Actually, I believe that accepted doctrine has changed since "99 Problems" was written and a locked trunk is no longer safe from warrentless search.)
Even more so if, simultaneously, the FBI is paying them to report search results. That's probably the monkey wrench in this whole deal. Most mandatory reporters are not being paid for it.
Asking questions, however, doesn't require a warrant - even for a government employee. Once a MD sees bruises they are free to probe (and it's partially so they can treat other damage that may not be visible on the surface) into how they got there.
Had I been smarter, I would have taken the ticket and fought it in court, but as a scared 18 year old, I allowed myself to be cuffed, placed in the backseat of a cop car while he tossed my truck. He had ever opportunity to plant anything he wanted, and thankfully he wasn't too corrupt of an officer - other than coercing an illegal search.
That is why I have a slight anti-police bias. I have family in the force, so I try to be respectful of police, and I know plenty of amazing police officers, but there are a lot of bad apples that spoil the bunch.
I once built model rocket engines with my son (see sugar rockets online). I kept legal amounts of the mixed chemical as well as the individual components for that in my trunk at various times (going to a launch site, coming home from the hardware store, etc).
In a case like that it's not the officers job to decide if you did anything wrong or not. It's their job to report that you had "bomb making supplies" or some "white powder substance" in your trunk and let the court system sort it out.
I was walked backwards, hands on head to a police car and cuffed, thrown down on the hood and very physically frisked (ever had someone literally pull your balls down ... yeah)
I stood with my hands behind my back for 10 minutes sitting on them, very painfully (i am a big dude, but i was larger then, over 420lbs (this plays into the story later)
I was talked to like i was trash while officers begin looking through my truck, throwing everything out of place...
...
Want to know why this happened? Because 10 minutes earlier someone robbed the store i was driving behind. His description was a SKINNY male (the word "skinny" was specifically used) with dark hair and a beard. Even through the window of my truck, if you could tell i had a beard, you could tell i wasnt skinny. I was of course let go... but basically my truck was ransacked, left completely a mess, and I was left feeling rather victimized (its not a good feeling knowing 6 guns are loaded and pointed at you with no safety on... its a lot more impactful than you think before it happens to you) ...
At the end of the day, any one with common sense isnt going to think the person who (on foot) robbed a store is going to drive right by the store, surrounded by police officers, 10 minutes later... and i didnt even match the description... yet somehow their warrantless search of my vehicle and self were totally legal and fine...
These were just assholes who wanted to get all hopped up on being the hero that day...
Oh, and at the end... the whole thing ended with the last words of the cop being "you're lucky we arent citing you for your license plate light being out" ... thats how cold cops are, thats what law enforcement is in America... its a bunch of losers who get handed power (because what kind of person seeks out power through a badge and a gun) and in turn, look for every opportunity to use said power in extreme ways to get their kicks...
Warrants are just peices of paper... intimidation is the way of the police now. That's their preferred method of getting what they want
I had tapes and CDs (remember those) thrown out of their cases, my clipboard for work was broken, my flashlight was opened and the batteries thrown about.
Had he been respectful of my things, it would have just been a laughing matter about how I used a "drug dealer's" driveway to turn around, but instead he ripped apart my truck looking for god only knows what, just to drive off without helping put anything back in its place.
Even if those people were on-duty officers, it's not a search if the evidence is in "plain view."
In that case it is nit officer look in my trunk It is a mechanic that needs to pull up a spare tire from it and is on a payroll by the officer.
Mandatory reporters are stupid idea. I doubt it can help a lot. I also think that the false positives will be disturbingly high if people take the job seriously.
There was a teacher in high school that made a sport of reporting nearly any bruise to authorities. Completely ridiculous.
Mandatory reporting never helped me either, even though it should have.
Especially visible to those who have suffered it before... You can see it - Mandatory reporters can make a huge difference.
They are OK, as they are not being paid by the law enforcement agency.
The issue here is a search is not a "private search" once the searcher is a paid government actor.
For example if a day care worker was able to (just hypothetically) attach a microphone to a childs bag and from that uncovered sounds of abuse at home my guess is that would not be legal or be able to be used as evidence. Not because the recording was illegal but because it didn't fit the definition of reporting signs of abuse.
Edit: Put another way, the following is not necessarily true:
> Best Buy employees were working as agents of the FBI and any searches they did require a warrant.
Agents of the FBI do not need a warrant to search premises or possessions that you have voluntarily given them access to.
I think the second issue, though, is largely a red herring, at least when it comes to 4th Amendment law. It may be that such considerations should affect the probative value of the evidence that is 'recovered,' but it's not clear to me how that relates to the 4th Amendment. The structure of the 4th Amendment analysis relates to what rights you have to keep other people out of your stuff, and when those right have been violated, and therefore doesn't really engage with the question of whether the evidence was planted.
Given that the file in question was in the deleted free space, the technician didn't just stumble into it accidentally and then report it. He went looking for it to begin with. And he was searching for such files because he was paid to do so.
This is all before even getting into the topic of potential malware infections, running as a TOR exit node, being used for torrent hosting unbeknownst to the user, etc. There was a case many years ago and I wish I could find the reference to it in which the defense called in an expert witness who convinced the judge to have his machine inspected by a forensic analyst who found it clear of pictures of kittens. The expert witness then had the judge visit an 'innocuous' looking website which didn't have pictures of kittens visible, but loaded them in hidden iFrames. The system was then inspected again by the forensics analyst who then found pictures of kittens, the point being that when your computer is connected to the Internet it really isn't your computer anymore.
Maybe the physical handling of drive removal and putting it on a docking station for imaging is video'd and that video is also verifiable (mainly you'd want a system that ensures whole frames aren't deleted..i.e. oh hey I see 5 seconds were yanked here and over here, so conceivably the drive was removed and returned to the docking station and altered prior to imaging).
Also, as COW filesystems become more common (ReFS, AFS, ZFS, Btrfs) there will be a lot of stale metadata that is non-trivial to fake. Basically snapshots are constantly being taken, even if they are not preserved for very long. On an SSD ostensibly these unused blocks get trimmed and should immediately return zeros, but there might be modes were they return stale data instead if it's before erase block GC/erasure happens.
Edit: And now you have this copy of the customer's drive... itself a liablity for it to exist for very long, or deleted too soon. dm-verity at least does produce a read-only encrypted image so the liability is both access to the image and the security of that image's passphrase.
I worked in forensics until I lost all faith and humanity, and pivoted for sanity's sake.
The least flaw in the forensic process, which was always discussed in-court by lawyers who I suspect could barely use Outlook always resulted in the evidence being turfed.
That due process doesn't seem to be followed here, and if a search is to be used as evidence, it better damn well follow some decent practices!
If it's a CP case, then, generally speaking, it's 500GB+. Usually enough so that the user has repeatedly deleted old files because their hard drive was getting full.
The files are rarely encrypted, and gathered over years from sources like FTP, SMTP and the like - and those logs are the main evidence.
A user is unlikely to not notice that 50GB of data is appearing once a week, and unlikely to not notice that the person they are conversing with has also been given similar charges, because their email has them talking about it, and when it comes to court, you find out that they were regularly seen with the other person.
A little off-topic, but could you elaborate on that a bit?
73 were child pornography.
69 depicted rape.
65 also depicted some sort of effluence.
52 were depicting individuals I got to see in the court room.
Whereas, when I pivoted to web design, the worst I could say about someone was that they were annoying or didn't document things.
(For interest's sake, the other 3 cases were murder.)
I'm glad you were able to find something you like better.
But forensics, at least when you're working with the justice system, teaches you that people are capable of anything.
The money was awesome, and gave me a great start, but now I value everything else more. Good workplace, time for my family and clients who don't make me feel like a saint.
Less criminal forensics might be different.
And most importantly, was there some kind of support system in place to help you deal with the sort of things you were being exposed to?
When I hit university, they were looking for a entry level security jack-of-all-trades. Thanks to prior and doing well when interviewed by the sysadmin, which partially involved breaking in to a VM, they hired me.
The uni was a subcontractor for the police, and i got pushed to the forensics team by consistently bypassing encryption and recovering data faster than the team, with more information. Like three files were deleted at the same time, because they shared fragmentation with this page file. My age was constantly questioned in-court, but a good track record, and the ability to make a jury laugh were usually enough to get the lawyer to review my skill instead.
It isn't unusual for university's to be employed by government in Australia, and my university also had a partnership with IBM.
Support-wise, I had a team of business psychs at IBM and the uni, which was useless, and a trauma team through Victoria Police, and they were amazing.
Wouldn't have made two years without the trauma team. Many coffees, tears and angry rants.
Having someone you can talk to about an active case was always nice.
I was never meant to know who the defendant might be, but a profile photo, and video of the same person hitting a child who called them daddy... And I'd be ranting in the office.
The police team had the training and experience to get the anger down, and focus me on the task of ensuring that I scoured the machine for every tiny piece of information.
Let's end on a happy note: A man was accused of murdering his daughter. Instead, I found her emails about running away and framing him, and Missing Persons used that to find her. The guy got aquitted. That was a good day.
Yeah, I'm very surprised this didn't immediately get thrown out with a "They're FBI informants and they planted the information to get paid."
However, I suspect this is all a gambit to overturn the investigation results that followed so it probably isn't that clear cut.
Now it seems like law enforcement and politicians who serve their whims are outright pushing to remove the warrant requirements from as much as possible. But why now? Warrants aren't new and the landscape hasn't changed that much, why are law enforcement suddenly pushing so hard on this?
Is this just a general theme on the broader problem of police oversight (or lack thereof)? This is one of the few areas of actual oversight left (judicial) so they're trying to remove that too.
The state is beginning to recognise this and is taking steps to try to claw back some power.
My perception is opposite. Over the last 20 years we have gone from a fairly free country to what feels like a police state with the most effective surveillance in history.
Are you actually familiar with, for example, the extent of Snowden's revelations? What an erosion of liberty the Patriot act is? Or how unusual it used to be to see armed security guards in random office buildings?
My theory is that the state took advantage of the combination of panic over terrorism and falling costs of data storage to put their dreams into action. The threat that they purport to be protecting against isn't real. The threat that the state poses, sadly, is.
As evidence I can point to the fact that dramatic increases of power increased after 9/11. Much of which was spent in security theater and clear power grabs with proven ineffectiveness. (cough TSA *cough) Anyone who was around in tech knows about the dramatic drop in costs for data storage, and knows how it has driven big data in general.
- Individuals can communicate in secrecy, thanks to encryption and the internet, much more easily than before. This means that wiretapping as we used to know it is nearly impossible for some categories of conversations.
- Surveillance is nearly omnipresent, partly as a way to combat the above.
I don't like the erosions of liberty that you mention, or the militarization of police, but I can see why some of the things we take for granted (instant secret communications, encrypted volumes, thumb drives that can be hidden) and consider to be valuable can also frustrate law enforcement doing what we have told them is their mandate (catch bad actors).
My admittedly anecdotal evidence shows that individuals are feeling more impotent with voices washed out in a wave a noise and an inability to affect anything.
Add in the fact that information with which you might build a coherent argument was siloed and generally unavailable, that you had limited resources to gain any sort of expertise outside of your job, and individual "power" in previous ages appears more like the mirage of nostalgia than anything else.
This, of course, is assuming that you are a white male. If not then you had no individual power at all and were severely limited just in terms of your individual autonomy.
Back before there was social media and other online "new media" (which , together with the remaining "old media", is concentrated in fewer and larger vested interests than the media was a generation or two ago) people shared ideas person to person (the term "viral" that's been adopted in social media actually drew on a use that referred to non-media person-to-person information transmittal before the explosion of "new media").
People outside of the media establishment had voices before modern "new media".
I think your point that there is so much noise (aka "other people trying to be persuasive") that voices find it hard to get an audience is fair, but I don't see any evidence that it is harder to speak widely now and all evidence seems to point in the other direction.
Didn't say you couldn't, though for large segments of the population in-person direct communication has been to a significant extent replaced by communication mediated by (and potentially censored by) major centralized media firms.
The only cure for this practice is for a civil rights defense resource like ACLU or EFF to invite those prosecuted to take the case to trial and then appeal verdicts until the practice receives the official rebuff it so richly deserves.
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21679472-suspects-japa...
And the prisons are clean, well lit, dehumanizing psychological torture chambers.
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21679483-why-you-might-pr...
Of course, this is just a single data point, and take it as you will. It only happened once during my service, but it did happen. As such, I'd find your 75% figure believable.
This was a local district court, and I guarantee nearly all of those were drug-related charges.
Coordination is hard to create, especially when stakes are high and you have a first-mover disadvantage - before the system overloads, the first few people to stand up will likely have the book thrown at them.
I dont know much about marketing, but the notion of "I demand a trial" would need a very simple catch phrase outlining an entire campaign. A clear, concise idea that is implanted in someone's mind even during the stressful process of being booked into jail. It would need to be slogan or motto (I think) to work en-masse.
1. Politicians can ensure voters are perpetually scared of "increasing crime" when in reality USA is safer than ever.
2. Narcissist DAs to feel good about themselves.
3. Cops to justify their existence and demand more resources
4. Prison Industrial Complex.
Minimum mandatory play a big role. Imagine your laptop which was given to repair miraculously had a porn clip where it may be argued that the model was 17 year old.
Would your rather spend 16 years in jail and in sex offenders registry or will you take the plea bargain where you spend 6 months in jail ?
BestBuy reports that they found child porn, but proceeds to give the computer back to the owner? Is that legal or are they trafficking?
Meanwhile the FBI goes and requests a warrant based upon what they heard from BestBuy? That seems almost more slippery to me, does the FBI just need to "hear something" from somebody to get a warrant to look around? Or is it even possible for them to get a warrant in a case like this, save for BestBuy involving them like they do?
This seems like the step that causes a warrant to be issued for more stuff. How I'd imagine it goes: 1) BestBuy worker finds child porn while doing normal work. 2) BestBuy worker does "extra work" to report child porn to FBI and does not return the machine, he files some paperwork, maybe makes a full backup, etc.. 3) BestBuy employee signs a deposition, BestBuy hands machine over to FBI with owner's information 4) BestBuy or BestBuy employee gets some money (I'd think BestBuy would want their cut but that's a detail, maybe they're cool to their people in that way) for doing "extra work" and reporting crime. 5) FBI and federal prosecutors look at evidence, seek warrant for other evidence, start planning case. Perhaps said warrant makes a big case or identifies nothing else. 6) BestBuy worker may potentially be called to testify. Sadly at the end of the day $500 isn't going to pay much for a personal lawyer and I think it would be ill-advised to show up to court in any capacity in a federal case without one. ...
What if the police go a step further and start offering money to criminals to allow searches. Soon, you'll see people choosing to get busted in order to get an FBI payday, while the FBI can tout their high closed case rate.
But there's still confusion in the courts about the difference between physical and virtual property and the peoples' rights to escape search (using radar through walls or taps on data feeds). This malign overreach of prosecutors relies on that.
But I think this practice clearly crosses the line since the property is physically in the hands of an untrusted party. It'd be trivial for Joe Schmo at Best Buy to plant evidence. Because that possibility is so plausible, this chain of evidence has been compromised. Any appeals court would toss this practice as unlawful, IMHO.
That's actually legal. The catch is they can only search the areas of the home the roommate "controls", meaning anything they find in a shared space like the bathroom or kitchen is legal, but your roommate can't consent to a search of your bedroom if that's understood to be your space.
I think it gets dicey if you left the bedroom door open and they can see evidence of a crime from the hallway.
If your wife or live-in girlfriend consents to a search the entire place is fair game, though if your wife is willing to sell you out for fifty bucks you have more than one set of problems.
That's not necessarily true:
> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored.
So in this case it sounds like the reason Best Buy had the hard drive in the first place was to recover other (possibly deleted) files on the disk. In such a scenario it seems totally plausible that they might stumble across other, more incriminating deleted files as part of the recovery process.
It's clearly illegal for private individual A to search the computer of private individual B without B's consent though
So what? If such illegally gained evidence is not excluded (and private illegality doesn't trigger the exclusionary rule), and the public prosecuting authority (who benefits from the illegality, as it serves the case they want to prosecute) declines to prosecute the illegality, it's at worst, for the perpetrator, a matter of civil tort liability.
There is a distinction to be made that a warrant often authorizes behavior that would otherwise be unlawful in the first place - which this doesn't really seem to be.
That's not to say that I think this is okay.
Ha ha ha, no mention of his cell phone which contained ~800 images of (fully and partially) nude girls. [1]
Another article I saw on this was claiming it wasn't child pornography because it wasn't depicting a sexual act. While that is true on a technicality, you still have multiple devices with pictures of underage girls. The image found on his computer was of a prepubescent girl, which a choker on, on all fours. [2]
I am in computer security. If you allow someone else to access your computer (or your traffic, see: ISP) and they find something, and report it, I don't see how that constitutes an illegal search. I had some friends on FB freaking out about this case and the fourth amendment, I am totally fine with it. Good on the Best Buy tech and good on the FBI. This guy had pictures of under age girls on his devices and works in a position of power (gyno doctor). I'm glad this has come to light and I hope he goes to prison.
1. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/fbis-use-best-buy-geek-squad-inform...
2. http://www.ocweekly.com/news/best-buy-geek-squad-informant-u...
Also, he had photos in his unallocated space. Which could happen to you, if someone sent you an email or link, you opened it, and immediately deleted them. Sure, you might be aware enough not do this. Should we jail someone because they aren't?
It's easy to forget the legal protections when it's someone we have prejudged. Hopefully they will still be around when they come for you.
So, with the reported deleted photo, and the reported photos on his mobile, yes, I have prejudged him. He can be innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the state, I am not the state though.
In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it?
1. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-geek-squad-child...
Edit: Oh, but what if someone emailed him those 800 photos, he only opened them momentarily and then deleted them? Get your head out of the sand.
Why? That's just another of those legal protections, like the 4th Amendment, which you don't seem to care much about.
In this article [1] it says "prosecutors said", is that a good enough source? If a fact is not proven in a laboratory setting and peer reviewed do you disbelieve it?
If a fact is claimed by the cops when they are trying to convince someone based on nothing but a few deleted files, I sure as hell don't take it as a matter of faith. Cops and prosecutors lie all the time, especially to the press.
In fact, notice how they don't claim the girls in the phone pictures are underaged? For all we know, the guy simply likes to download perfectly legal pictures of nude 18+ girls for some file sharing sites, and happened to mistakenly also download a few illegal pictures, which he deleted.
But regardless of facts, his life is now ruined, because many people will have prejudge him based on almost nothing, and he'll probably never be able to practice again even if he's acquitted.
For the feds, that's just Monday, of course.
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In any case, my real point isn't whether you should think he's guilty, but that we shouldn't take away his legal protections just because we think he's guilty, because the whole point is that they must be universal. Cases against unsympathetic defendants are exactly what prosecutors use to further the erosion of legal rights. For everyone's sake, don't play their game.
Getting a 500 dollar payment from the government does not make you an agent of the state. At 15 dollars an hour that would buy ~33 hours of the employee's time. Two months later his coworker discovered the photo. Oh, and it lead to a search that discovered more child pornography. Should there be no reward system for crime tips?
>Authorities say they also found child pornography on a laptop, multiple hard drives and an iPhone belonging to Rettenmaier.
Maybe all those hard drives were just mailed to him though and he was in the process of deleting them. This is just someone trying to get out on a technicality.
You can email the author of that article if you have questions on the sources. Maybe he can point you to court documents.
1. http://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-dpt-me-0521...
1. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave a firearm in the pocket. The feds visit me to inquire about the firearm.
2. I bring a suit to the dry cleaners. I leave pictures of child porn in the pocket. The feds visit me about said porn.