Are Geek Squad agents FBI spies?
Yes, they carry badges and drive black-and-white vehicles. But some Geek Squad agents appear to have taken the “agent” part of their titles a bit too literally.
Best Buy, the consumer-electronics giant that owns the on-call computer-repair service, recently admitted that four employees took money from the FBI after the agency received information from the agents about customers suspected of possessing child pornography. As a result, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco is suing the Justice Department to disclose the extent of the FBI’s relationship with Best Buy.
The nonprofit foundation fears that the FBI is recruiting Geek Squad employees as confidential informants to spy on people through their devices — a violation, it argues, of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unlawful government search and seizure.
“If the government is co-opting tech repair people, they are laundering unconstitutional searches to private parties,” said Aaron Mackey, an attorney with the foundation.
The case raises important consumer privacy issues as concerns grow over government surveillance, especially through third parties. Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor turned whistle-blower, released documents showing that AT&T and Verizon had given the agency access to emails and other data that flow through its networks.
Turning to vendors that provide tech support offers the government a way to access information on hard drives or cloud servers without having to obtain a warrant.
“Any decision to accept payment was in very poor judgment and
“If the government is co-opting tech repair people, they are laundering unconstitutional searches to private parties.” Aaron Mackey, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney
inconsistent with our training and policies,” Matt Furman, chief communications and public affairs officer, said in an email. “Three of these employees are no longer with the company and the fourth has been reprimanded and reassigned.”
The employees were acting on their own in accepting payment, according to Furman, and the money did not go to the company.
“Nearly 100 times a year, our Geek Squad repair employees discover what appears to be child pornography on customers’ computers,” he said. “Our employees do not search for this material; they inadvertently discover it when attempting to confirm we have recovered lost customer data.”
Finding child porn is one thing; courts have typically deferred to law enforcement on such matters, said Scott Shackelford, an associate professor of business law and ethics who chairs the cybersecurity program at Indiana University in Bloomington.
But if the feds’ data snooping extends beyond illicit pictures, “it poses some prickly issues on (the) FBI’s engagement with (Best Buy) employees,” Shackelford said.
Much depends on what the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit turns up. Should the organizations uncover documents that show a close relationship between Best Buy and the FBI, it and other firms offering tech support risk losing the confidence and trust of customers. Amazon and Best Buy, for example, have been trying to expand tech services to homes and businesses.
“We need to see what comes out” of the foundation’s efforts, said Darren Hayes, an assistant professor at Pace University’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems in New York. If Best Buy and the FBI are shown to be working together, he said, it “raises legal and constitutional problems: Is Best Buy acting as an agent of the government?”
Best Buy’s top spokesman denies such a relationship.
“To be clear: Geek Squad does not work for the FBI and never has,” Furman said.
In surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of respondents said they are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about government surveillance of Americans’ data and communications. And 61 percent of people said they have little or no confidence that consumer data collected by retailers and other companies will remain secure or private.
The relationship between Geek Squad agents and the FBI came to light after a federal grand jury in 2014 indicted California physician Mark Rettenmaier in connection with possessing child pornography.
Three years earlier, Rettenmaier handed over his computer at a Geek Squad counter in a Best Buy for repair. An employee discovered what appeared to be a pornographic image on the hard drive and alerted the FBI. Based on that image, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Rettenmaier’s home, where agents found child pornography, according to court documents.
Best Buy requires anyone dropping off a computer for repair by its Geek Squad to sign a document acknowledging that the retailer will turn over any device containing child pornography to authorities. Geek Squad agents, however, can’t specifically look for the material; only if they happen to come across it while performing the requested service can they act.
“Our policies prohibit employees from doing anything other than what is necessary to solve the customer’s problem,” Furman said.
According to emails contained in court documents, FBI agents maintained close relationships with Geek Squad employees, even calling them “sources,” including the employee who found the image on Rettenmaier’s computer and a supervisor.
James Riddet, Rettenmaier’s attorney, challenged the warrant’s validity, arguing that the employee was specifically looking for illicit material on behalf of the FBI. Thus, the court should suppress the evidence at Rettenmaier’s home because the warrant was based on information on his hard drive obtained illegally by the government.
“We still think the search from the informants was illegal,” Riddet said in a brief interview. “I think it’s something people should know when they bring their equipment to Best Buy.”
But a federal judge ruled against Rettenmaier, reasoning that he had consented to the search by signing the Best Buy document. (The judge eventually did throw out most of the evidence but for a different reason: The image employees found on his computer wasn’t technically child porn. The judge also pushed back the trial to next year.)
“We are continuing to review the matter, so (there’s) no decision at this point on how the case might proceed,” Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, said in an email.
Someone accused of possessing child porn may not receive much public sympathy. But the case raises broader questions, experts said. Can third parties, motivated by money, hunt for other information on behalf of the government, asked Joshua Carlson, a Minneapolis attorney who specializes in privacy and cybersecurity. What about getting paid by other companies to look for examples of copyright violation or other intellectual-property issues?
Geek Squad has run into legal problems before. In 2013, Best Buy paid an undisclosed amount to settle a lawsuit from a college student who accused a Geek Squad agent of stealing naked photos from her computer and posting them online.
“It’s a massive slippery slope,” said Carlson, who previously worked on data security and information technology for Best Buy. Beyond child porn, “What else were they looking for? Where does it stop?”