I think people are missing the issue here. Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy. The issue is that they were getting paid to report crime.
Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.
Fake evidence? Maybe, but I think the primary worry is the incentive to lower the bar to the point they ruin lives.
The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Was it just baby photos? The classic "naked baby on a fur rug" pose? Grandkids in the pool?
The article doesn't say. All we know is the judge threw out the case as a non-issue.
But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. No matter how clear his innocence is announced, he'll always be stained.
Would the Best Buy employee have reported the image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. Many innocent photos of children can make us uncomfortable depending on the circumstances; it's human nature to be a bit oversensitive about any situation involving kids. Some false alarms will be inevitable.
But if I was most likely a young, ignorant low level tech and someone offered me $500 (and the praise of a high authority), I could see myself pushing the button on every photo of a kid in a wet swimming suit.
Paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.
I find it hard to believe a computer tech encountering real child porn needs to be incentivised to report it.
Digital evidence is really easy to fake, often leaves little if any evidence that it was planted, and the prosecutors don't have much incentive to look for evidence to determine whether the digital evidence was planted or not.
A good analogy is imagine if dry cleaners were paid by the FBI every time they found a dime bag accidentally left in someone's pocket. How many of those dime bags do you think would get planted by the employees to collect their $500 reward?
I haven't had my coffee yet and missed the perverse-incentive / fraud aspect... thanks for pointing that out.
It's definitely a problem. Imagine you hire a plumber to snake your drains and he places a bag of weed behind the pipes, snaps a picture, and reports you to the police for possession. He gets paid for the plumbing job, paid for the reporting of a crime, and keeps his weed.
Much easier with digital imagery. Just create a "new folder" in someone's "My Documents", plant some illicit imagery, and boom-- easy pay-day.
> Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy
How about until that leads to discovery of maybe some unfavorable political opinions. What is to say the limits to criteria and how they might be interpreted.
There is a reason people are concerned about privacy
It is worth noting that we can also see this at the police level, where a cop plants evidence, turns on the bodycam recorder, then "discovers" the evidence, getting caught at it only because he didn't fully understand what the record button did.
With retail store employees, there isn't even an expectation of trustworthiness when it comes to handling evidence. They are not officers of the court, and have no duty to act in the interests of justice. They likely do have a duty to the customer to keep their private affairs private.
There are few reasons for any repair technician to ever open files containing customer data, and zero reasons for them to do it outside of a well-sandboxed, auditable environment, with specialized applications rather than the default OS tools. Rather than opening as a rectangular array of pixels, an image would display its bytes in a hex editor, with decoder plug-ins displaying the header information and metadata for that file type, and the results of a file integrity and malware scan.
It seems likely that Geek Squad is not set up for that kind of work. It's just too expensive to sell to consumers in a retail store. So if Joe Employee loads a suspicious image onto the customer's machine, then "discovers" it by opening it, and reports the discovery to the cops for monetary reward, that is indistinguishable from Joe Employee accidentally discovering genuine criminality, because it was not done in an auditable environment.
Yeah, in general I agree here. I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment?
It would be quite easy to plant some pictures but another matter to build a case solely on the existence of them. That chain of custody issue would likely be an argument brought up by the defense. Also, not to mention the act of acquiring the images to plant is probably also a crime. It's a lot of really risky moves and effort for a very small payout (500 dollars? Much easier to steal small valuable parts for that)
So, yeah - paying for tips, I think it's a bad idea, but the abuse likelihood seems pretty small.
>there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.
Well witnesses and victims are generally compensated by the courts and/or victims-witness advocate programs (which go by different names in different states). I don’t think many people argue those programs or payments incentive crime in order to cash in.
And in this case I’m not so sure it’s an opportunity to “cash in” as what the article references are one time payments of $500-$1,000, and while maybe comparatively a lot of money for these individuals, it’s a hell of a lot of risk to plant evidence only to turn it over to the FBI for inspection by their experts, with a very real possibility of implicating yourself, for a comparably small amount of money. And if one of these employees identifies more than one suspect, better believe that employee is going to come under FBI scrutiny.
I have seen witnesses in federal cases paid 6 figures, and even then knowing the facts and the risks, I don’t think anyone would suggest it’s an opportunity to cash in.
> Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.
Even you're only looking at one aspect of things. Even if all the Geek squad employees are completely honest, now this gives an actual child pornographer's lawyer a way to cause enough reasonable doubt to get his client off.
Isn't flagging pictures making a suggestion so that a real law enforcement officer can check a reduced number of pictures instead of all pictures in existence? Starting from the real officer making a decision the process is normal law enforcement isn't it?
This is something that would be beneficial to blast across social media. Best Buy would have to get on top of this if a simple explanation of "why the techs at Best Buy are incentivized to put child porn on your computer and report you" started going viral.
The cost of being caught is incredibly high for the employee - they have to illegally download and store, and distribute, the illegal imagery! and commit fraud, and probably commit contempt of court, and be prepared for the fallout from the falsely accused and their family.
There's undoubtedly far easier ways for an corrupt employee to get extra cash that don't risk getting a conviction for sexual offences and for fraud/deception.
Moreover, your work colleagues have an incentive to report you too.
I'm not going to say no-one would ever, but the level of short-sighted stupidity needed is very very high.
If you discover child porn in the course of repairing someone’s computer, you should report it. The problem is getting paid to actively search for it. That sets up some perverse incentives. While it’s unlikely that an enterprising Geek Squader would want to run afoul of the FBI, it’s a very bad idea to create a profit motive for someone to plant this sort of evidence.
I wonder about Best Buy’s position in this? They aren’t exactly alienating the non-pedophile public with this activity and aren’t going to lose business over it. That said, deputizing your employees is sort of odd.
> The problem is getting paid to actively search for it. That sets up some perverse incentives.
It doesn't just setup perverse incentives, it's a great way for the FBI to lose cases and have existing ones overturned now. If Geek Squad employees are being paid to actively search for illegal contents on computers by the FBI they have become agents of the government and the fourth amendment starts coming into play - the FBI would need a search warrant for these systems BEFORE Geek Squad searched them or any evidence recovered will be inadmissible in court due to an unconstitutional search and fruit of the poison tree, it doesn't count as some anonymous tip from a citizen at that point.
Who thought this was a good idea? With this report ANYBODY who has had their computer searched by geek squad and charged with a crime now has a good argument to make to the court that their case should be thrown out.
There was a case of an old man who had pictures of his grandchildren on his computer. After a long and confusing investigation, trial and so forth, they finally showed the photos to a wildly confused judge.
It turns out that a handful of the photos were the kids taking a bath or running through the sprinkler. Charges were dropped but still.
Suppose you were a pediatrics student with various photos of children on your computer, or maybe you're a gymnastics teacher with a load of photos of your students.
If you have an overreactive computer person browsing all your photos, it may not matter if you have nothing to hide.
I'm sure people who get caught in these sorts of messes abandon Geek Squad and Best Buy.
"They aren’t exactly alienating the non-pedophile public"
We only know about the deep dive CP searches Geek Squad performs for the FBI, that doesn't necessarily exclude other criminal activity they may be looking for or reporting.
Besides, Geek Squad actively browses through photos found on the computer looking for CP. It would be unnerving to many to find out that their personal family photos, or "risque" photos, are all fair game for GS.
I am pretty sure they are alienating a lot of their customers by having their employees snoop on their customers' computers. The argument you are making is "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" which is ridiculous.
I don't think they should be paid but I don't see it much different than seeing someone assault someone in the store. Again, not a full scan trying to find violations but witnessing a crime as part of your job. A law was broke so call the police. I personally think you lose your rights around search and privacy when you publicly give it to someone else. Even therapists and psychiatrists are allowed to break privacy when the patient is openly admitting to planning to assault/kill someone else. This is obviously a different seriousness but with a therapist there is an expectation of complete privacy.
It's about incentive. If you pay people underhand money for "finding" illegal imagery -- you will get more illegal imagery. It also gives massive amounts of power to a non officer. These charges are almost impossible to defend. With this type of charge hardcore prison... -- its probably better to commit suicide (guilty or not).
What you’re missing is that now they have an incentive to go looking for imagery when they should simply be trying to fix your computer. And maybe even an incentive to plant evidence.
Moreover, I don’t see any reason Geek Squad would need to be in my images folder in the course of working on my computer, and I’m sure that, child porn or not, most people probably wouldn’t want their private collection of pictures being sifted through without permission.
I get it. When you're FBI and your life is having to look at child porn, you've got plenty of reasons to be super motivated to catch these people with whatever means necessary. And with something as awful as child exploitation, a reasonable person can come to genuinely believe that the ends justifies the means.
I think the headline is kinda missing the point here; the issue is not the flagging of illegal images once found, the issue is snooping around people's computers that were left for repairs deliberately looking for illegal images and the violation of trust there.
My computer doesn't have anything illegal on it, that doesn't mean I want a Geek Squad employee looking around at what is there. And if they know there's a payday from the FBI if they find something, you bet they are going to look around. Then what happens when they find something not illegal but that they like; pictures of my wife or friends and family at the beach or something.
I think most commenters are over-analyzing. Deliberately looking for evidence of crime is high effort with low probability of being rewarded. Planting evidence of a crime is very high risk relative to the reward.
People with access to someone else's computer snoop for their own entertainment, because they can. The reward is low but the probability of finding something entertaining is high and the risk is practically non-existent.
define "illegal" imagery .. two steps to avoid 1337 h@x0rs is to not send in a personal hard drive in the first place. Ethics at the $10/h counter is about as transparent as this glass of water I'm drinking. Morality, especially when a smart 18 year old, sees cash -> a few bits of planted evidence -> huge pay day (relative to what they know as such) can be a lot easier to overcome thanks to money.
I replace the storage device on my Apple laptops immediately, and store it in case a unit dies. Warranty services outside of the care of a local shop - mail in stuff - is also a big no-no. Nobody looking at my 4th Amendment rights.
Call me paranoid, but if you are remotely ignorant to the fact that snooping teenagers aren't looking through your stuff ... think again. It's just common sense to just replace the drive as a matter of privacy.
It should cost Best Buy a $100 processing fee to report child porn. That's a small price to pay to catch a criminal but too high to go actively snooping through hard drives.
Before I started programming in College, I worked as a Geek Squad "Counter Intelligence Agent" and this is something that definitely came up in conversations with veteran employees. State police were contacted and arrests were made.
When my son was circumcised the pediatric urologist said if we had any concerns we could text a picture of it to him. I thought that sounded weird, but could see how this is totally legitimate doctor trying to save himself time and save ourselves an appointment, and money for an office visit.
Genital mutalation of a child is fine (assuming here it wasn‘t a medical necessity. Maybe it was in this case, hence why I didn‘t downvote), but taking a completely non-sexual photograph of a healing wound is considered weird. Sums up modern America pretty well.
If I'm an electrician on call-out to someone's home and, totally by accident, I discover someone tied up in their basement, should I report it to the police?
If I'm repairing someone's computer at their request and, totally by accident, I discover illegal material on it, should I report it to the police?
It seems pretty straightforward to me that you can, and in fact you really ought to. Maybe you disagree with what counts as "illegal" (like if didn't report finding pot in someone's home in a country where it's illegal) but that's a different discussion from whether this is generally reasonable behaviour.
These people weren't being paid to find things "by accident" (or at least they weren't when this was first reported a year or two ago). They were being paid to look for what they suspected were crimes. This is more akin to an electrician being called in to rewire the kitchen, seeing a locked basement door, picking the lock, and rifling through the boxes in the basement to find illicit materials.
This was the FBI trying to skirt around the 4th amendment by having someone unrelated to the FBI do the seizure and search bit of investigating, so it could be done without a warrant. The problem is that the FBI both ordered and paid these people to do it, and I personally don't see a difference between that and having an FBI agent take your machine from you and perform the search themselves. There's also the ethical problems for Best Buy, plus the incentive (payment) to create a crime (copy illicit materials or visit sites that would make it look like the person was going to do something illegal) and report it.
The "totally by accident" excuse is not valid when people are paid bounties to conduct vigilante surveillance. How much money would it take for someone in need to plant evidence?
For sure you should - but if you're incentivized to find such a thing, what's to say you won't leave some drugs hidden in their basement yourself? If the pay off was high enough, especially with young, generally low wage employees it might be quite tempting.
It really depends. I can imagine this incentive was started because either employees came across images and didn't think much of it, or dismissed it because they didn't want to deal with the hassle. The article mentions a picture of a naked child; didn't mention any abuse or sexual acts, so it could be the owner's own, I mean just look at how many naked baby pictures are out there. It's a gray area then. With this incentive, it was reported; without it, the employee may have shrugged it off. I think they're incentivising "better be safe than sorry" with some monies.
[+] [-] jaclaz|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16533403
[+] [-] mfoy_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yanslookup|8 years ago|reply
Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.
[+] [-] GarrisonPrime|8 years ago|reply
The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Was it just baby photos? The classic "naked baby on a fur rug" pose? Grandkids in the pool? The article doesn't say. All we know is the judge threw out the case as a non-issue.
But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. No matter how clear his innocence is announced, he'll always be stained.
Would the Best Buy employee have reported the image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. Many innocent photos of children can make us uncomfortable depending on the circumstances; it's human nature to be a bit oversensitive about any situation involving kids. Some false alarms will be inevitable.
But if I was most likely a young, ignorant low level tech and someone offered me $500 (and the praise of a high authority), I could see myself pushing the button on every photo of a kid in a wet swimming suit.
Paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.
I find it hard to believe a computer tech encountering real child porn needs to be incentivised to report it.
[+] [-] petertodd|8 years ago|reply
Digital evidence is really easy to fake, often leaves little if any evidence that it was planted, and the prosecutors don't have much incentive to look for evidence to determine whether the digital evidence was planted or not.
A good analogy is imagine if dry cleaners were paid by the FBI every time they found a dime bag accidentally left in someone's pocket. How many of those dime bags do you think would get planted by the employees to collect their $500 reward?
[+] [-] mfoy_|8 years ago|reply
It's definitely a problem. Imagine you hire a plumber to snake your drains and he places a bag of weed behind the pipes, snaps a picture, and reports you to the police for possession. He gets paid for the plumbing job, paid for the reporting of a crime, and keeps his weed.
Much easier with digital imagery. Just create a "new folder" in someone's "My Documents", plant some illicit imagery, and boom-- easy pay-day.
[+] [-] 13years|8 years ago|reply
How about until that leads to discovery of maybe some unfavorable political opinions. What is to say the limits to criteria and how they might be interpreted.
There is a reason people are concerned about privacy
[+] [-] logfromblammo|8 years ago|reply
With retail store employees, there isn't even an expectation of trustworthiness when it comes to handling evidence. They are not officers of the court, and have no duty to act in the interests of justice. They likely do have a duty to the customer to keep their private affairs private.
There are few reasons for any repair technician to ever open files containing customer data, and zero reasons for them to do it outside of a well-sandboxed, auditable environment, with specialized applications rather than the default OS tools. Rather than opening as a rectangular array of pixels, an image would display its bytes in a hex editor, with decoder plug-ins displaying the header information and metadata for that file type, and the results of a file integrity and malware scan.
It seems likely that Geek Squad is not set up for that kind of work. It's just too expensive to sell to consumers in a retail store. So if Joe Employee loads a suspicious image onto the customer's machine, then "discovers" it by opening it, and reports the discovery to the cops for monetary reward, that is indistinguishable from Joe Employee accidentally discovering genuine criminality, because it was not done in an auditable environment.
[+] [-] bbarn|8 years ago|reply
It would be quite easy to plant some pictures but another matter to build a case solely on the existence of them. That chain of custody issue would likely be an argument brought up by the defense. Also, not to mention the act of acquiring the images to plant is probably also a crime. It's a lot of really risky moves and effort for a very small payout (500 dollars? Much easier to steal small valuable parts for that)
So, yeah - paying for tips, I think it's a bad idea, but the abuse likelihood seems pretty small.
[+] [-] will_brown|8 years ago|reply
Well witnesses and victims are generally compensated by the courts and/or victims-witness advocate programs (which go by different names in different states). I don’t think many people argue those programs or payments incentive crime in order to cash in.
And in this case I’m not so sure it’s an opportunity to “cash in” as what the article references are one time payments of $500-$1,000, and while maybe comparatively a lot of money for these individuals, it’s a hell of a lot of risk to plant evidence only to turn it over to the FBI for inspection by their experts, with a very real possibility of implicating yourself, for a comparably small amount of money. And if one of these employees identifies more than one suspect, better believe that employee is going to come under FBI scrutiny.
I have seen witnesses in federal cases paid 6 figures, and even then knowing the facts and the risks, I don’t think anyone would suggest it’s an opportunity to cash in.
[+] [-] splintercell|8 years ago|reply
Even you're only looking at one aspect of things. Even if all the Geek squad employees are completely honest, now this gives an actual child pornographer's lawyer a way to cause enough reasonable doubt to get his client off.
[+] [-] erikb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr4444lr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ataturk|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nsnick|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
[+] [-] jerf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|8 years ago|reply
There's undoubtedly far easier ways for an corrupt employee to get extra cash that don't risk getting a conviction for sexual offences and for fraud/deception.
Moreover, your work colleagues have an incentive to report you too.
I'm not going to say no-one would ever, but the level of short-sighted stupidity needed is very very high.
[+] [-] powvans|8 years ago|reply
I wonder about Best Buy’s position in this? They aren’t exactly alienating the non-pedophile public with this activity and aren’t going to lose business over it. That said, deputizing your employees is sort of odd.
[+] [-] snuxoll|8 years ago|reply
It doesn't just setup perverse incentives, it's a great way for the FBI to lose cases and have existing ones overturned now. If Geek Squad employees are being paid to actively search for illegal contents on computers by the FBI they have become agents of the government and the fourth amendment starts coming into play - the FBI would need a search warrant for these systems BEFORE Geek Squad searched them or any evidence recovered will be inadmissible in court due to an unconstitutional search and fruit of the poison tree, it doesn't count as some anonymous tip from a citizen at that point.
Who thought this was a good idea? With this report ANYBODY who has had their computer searched by geek squad and charged with a crime now has a good argument to make to the court that their case should be thrown out.
[+] [-] dizzystar|8 years ago|reply
It turns out that a handful of the photos were the kids taking a bath or running through the sprinkler. Charges were dropped but still.
Suppose you were a pediatrics student with various photos of children on your computer, or maybe you're a gymnastics teacher with a load of photos of your students.
If you have an overreactive computer person browsing all your photos, it may not matter if you have nothing to hide.
I'm sure people who get caught in these sorts of messes abandon Geek Squad and Best Buy.
[+] [-] dahdum|8 years ago|reply
We only know about the deep dive CP searches Geek Squad performs for the FBI, that doesn't necessarily exclude other criminal activity they may be looking for or reporting.
Besides, Geek Squad actively browses through photos found on the computer looking for CP. It would be unnerving to many to find out that their personal family photos, or "risque" photos, are all fair game for GS.
[+] [-] nsnick|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|8 years ago|reply
But, they aren't. According to the article, GS claims (you can believe this or not) that it's employees specifically do not search for it.
[+] [-] snarf21|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransom1538|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|8 years ago|reply
Moreover, I don’t see any reason Geek Squad would need to be in my images folder in the course of working on my computer, and I’m sure that, child porn or not, most people probably wouldn’t want their private collection of pictures being sifted through without permission.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|8 years ago|reply
It's still manifestly wrong, but I get it.
[+] [-] ebbv|8 years ago|reply
My computer doesn't have anything illegal on it, that doesn't mean I want a Geek Squad employee looking around at what is there. And if they know there's a payday from the FBI if they find something, you bet they are going to look around. Then what happens when they find something not illegal but that they like; pictures of my wife or friends and family at the beach or something.
This is really not acceptable on multiple levels.
[+] [-] tbyehl|8 years ago|reply
People with access to someone else's computer snoop for their own entertainment, because they can. The reward is low but the probability of finding something entertaining is high and the risk is practically non-existent.
[+] [-] ataturk|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JohnStudio|8 years ago|reply
I replace the storage device on my Apple laptops immediately, and store it in case a unit dies. Warranty services outside of the care of a local shop - mail in stuff - is also a big no-no. Nobody looking at my 4th Amendment rights.
Call me paranoid, but if you are remotely ignorant to the fact that snooping teenagers aren't looking through your stuff ... think again. It's just common sense to just replace the drive as a matter of privacy.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] quietbritishjim|8 years ago|reply
If I'm repairing someone's computer at their request and, totally by accident, I discover illegal material on it, should I report it to the police?
It seems pretty straightforward to me that you can, and in fact you really ought to. Maybe you disagree with what counts as "illegal" (like if didn't report finding pot in someone's home in a country where it's illegal) but that's a different discussion from whether this is generally reasonable behaviour.
[+] [-] apocalyptic0n3|8 years ago|reply
This was the FBI trying to skirt around the 4th amendment by having someone unrelated to the FBI do the seizure and search bit of investigating, so it could be done without a warrant. The problem is that the FBI both ordered and paid these people to do it, and I personally don't see a difference between that and having an FBI agent take your machine from you and perform the search themselves. There's also the ethical problems for Best Buy, plus the incentive (payment) to create a crime (copy illicit materials or visit sites that would make it look like the person was going to do something illegal) and report it.
[+] [-] manjushri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piracykills|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lewton|8 years ago|reply
not an accident if you're paid to do it
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madshiva|8 years ago|reply
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