Child porn is a most heinous exploitation and its publishers and consumers should be boiled in blood, then stabbed in the face, then fed to wolverines. The Geek Squad is helping feed those wolverines by reporting child porn they find on customer’s computers to the police, the St Louis Dispatch reports:
Vishal Sehjpal, 22, of the 1700 block of Stifel Lane Drive, brought his computer into the Chesterfield Best Buy store in 2004 for repair. A technician found a video file that appeared to contain child pornography and called police, who contacted Sehjpal and searched his computer and CDs.
Sehjpal pleaded guilty in February to two felony counts of possession of child pornography and admitted possessing both still pictures and videos that contained child porn that he’d downloaded from the Internet.
We’re not joking, child porn is really really bad, which is how Geek Squad techs must justify snooping through customer’s files. They’re stopping child pornographers. Every customer could be a child pornographer, so it’s necessary to look through every computer. And hell, why not save the non child porn while you’re at it, then share it on a common computer with the other techs. Just doing our job to protect the community, yessir. — BEN POPKEN
Chesterfield man gets 30 months for child porn [St. Louis Dispatch] (Thanks to Neil!)
PREVIOUSLY:
We’re Always Looking For Porn On Customer’s Computers, Techies Confirm
The 10 Page Geek Squad Confession – “Stealing Customers’ Nudie Pics Was An Easter Egg Hunt”
More From Consumerist
-
Man Ate In Restaurants, Refused To Pay: Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison
-
Add “Hijacking Customers’ Internet To File False Tax Claims” To List Of Cable Installation Worries
-
Prisoners Have Opinions Too, Turn To Yelp To Review Jail Conditions
-
Held In The Disney Movie Club’s Enchanted Prison
-
Court: Texas Roadhouse Doesn’t Owe Customer $150K For Hair-Stuffed Steak
I have a friend who started out his techie career as a Mac repair dude at a local computer shop in the late 80′s. The first thing they did when they got a computer in for repair was to back up the customer’s hard drive. Sometimes, they didn’t delete the backups (which became clear when he gave me an excess hard drive still full of some woman’s data).
In other words, this practice has been going on since forever.
Most of us don’t have anything illegal on our computers. But what about credit card numbers? Prescription information? Bank account data? Pictures of your nekkid…you get the idea. Do you want a stranger to have access to all that? I sure don’t.
Long story short: If you don’t want a stranger snooping through your data, don’t take your computer into a shop for repair. (Or encrypt your data. Or take the hard drive out. Or get a geeky friend to come over and fix it. Or…)
What afran303 is saying is correct. The Const is a limitation on .gov, not business. GS is not restrained by the Const.
You have freedom of speech yes? But try to come into my store an use that free speech talking about anything I do not agree with. You will be thrown out quickly and there is isn’t jack you can do about it.
Again, just to be clear, the Const does NOT limit what business can do, only what .gov can do.
@SOhp101: I dunno about so-and-so being a prosecutor, but the above comment that the GS “obtained” “evidence” would be inadmissible is wrong. The above comment that the 4th amendment only applies to government actions against you, not those of private citizens, is correct.
Think of it in these terms: the 1st amendment prevents the govt from abridging the right of assembly, and speech, and the press. It does not prevent a private citizen from doing those things:
- Hey you kids, get off of my lawn! (stop assembling on my property)
- No talking during the movie or we’ll escort you out (no free speech in a movie theater)
- No, you may not handout those flyers in this mall (no freedom of the press on private property)
However, courts have ruled many times that if the police actively seek to circumvent the protections of the Constitution by hiring a 3rd party to do their evidence gathering, the evidence is inadmissible.
Obviously evidence gathered by a 3rd party on their own and turned over to the police is a different matter, and at the least would likely serve as the basis for a warrant.
The issue of GS doing what is constitutionally right isn’t the issue, it’s if the evidence is actually admissible in court. No evidence that was obtained by unreasonable search, even if it was done by a private party, could be used as evidence in court, assuming that the person did not waive his rights.
Not that it matters, since he pleaded guilty anyway.
This is a matter of privacy.
I don’t have any child pornography on my computer, but I do have some things that I don’t want anyone to see. Things that would be pretty embarrassing to me (and to others) if they were seen.
There are people with child pornography on their computers, and they should be brought to justice. However, there are also many, many people who don’t have child pornography on their computers. For Geek Squad to take it upon themselves to search through every file on every computer that comes through their hands implies that every person who brings in a computer is a suspected pedophile. It’s a form of vigilante action. They violate everyone’s privacy to catch a few criminals.
People keep very private files on their computers, and searching through them for child pornography is like reading through somebody’s diary to see if they’re planning to assassinate any public figures.
@anon
You said:
Think about this… if there are indeed people with child pornography getting work done at Geek Squad (and I can vouch that there are from my own experiences working there), Geek Squad keeps backups for about 3 months on their server.
Why would you be keeping customer’s files on your server? That was expressly forbidden (I was a DCI until August ’06)! When you back-up data for a customer, it was never supposed to sit on a BBY owned computer.
As others have stated, the GS is not subject to the Constitution’s restrictions on searching the computer. Furthermore, once he turned his computer over to a repair service, he no longer had any reasonable expectation of privacy for the contents of that computer. No matter what service was being performed, at some point the computer would have to be accessed in order to determine if it was working. Many places also routinely perform virus scans and other maintenance that could easily lead to the accidental discovery of suspicious files.
Furthermore, the article states that based on the information provided by GS, the police obtained a warrant and searched the offender’s computer and CDs. If they found CDs with images or videos burned onto them, that would be all the evidence they needed to conclude that the images weren’t planted. In cases like this, you not only search for files, but also evidence of when they were downloaded, burned to CD, etc. You also look at things like the browser history. The goal is to not only find the child porn, but evidence of when and how it was obtained. Based on that evidence, it would be clear who was actually searching and downloading the child porn. For a solid case, you want more than just the files.
I’m reminded of this PBF comic.
yg17: I just want to make one point, because it seems that people, faced with a menace such as communism, terrorism, child porn, or whatever horror the future holds, always forget.
Freedom and liberty, are always more important than preventing potential criminal behavior, no matter what the behavior. Don’t you think that the founders of the country knew that some people would use the assumption of privacy to hide horrible, repugnant activities? Don’t you think they would have said something to address that situation? Oh wait, they did. I think they addressed the “taking the law into your own hands” thing, too.
Pelagius: LOL, Me too.
You know. I wait for the story on snuff films. Children exploited on film, or grown adults killed on camera? You decide the stronger of the two evils. I’ve yet to hear a story on snuff videos getting anyone procecuted.
But seriously.. I don’t think GS techs would complain this much to a 16 or 17 year old teenage girl changing on camera or nudie pictures of her. Get in their head. It would likely have taken some serious empathy towards a video of.. saaay, something of a very very young male or a very very young girl to get this sort of thing to happen with a tech? That is.. unless *gasp* the GS tech isn’t actually a 20-30 something year old and ~actually~ has morals towards pornography and the law!.. in which case, in all honesty it would likely have been someone with grey hair (the hair color being older than me). Or of the cloth? Heh, I tickle myself at the unlikliness.
But hey.. who am I to say what a GS member would report and what he/she wouldn’t report.. it’s not like i’m a tech myself…
@SOhp101
“No evidence that was obtained by unreasonable search, even if it was done by a private party, could be used as evidence in court …”
Wrong. Please, just stop writing these comments because there are some people out there who might think you are correct.
First, you’re misusing a term of art. There’s no such thing as an “unreasonable search” by a private party. The idea is wholly inapplicable.
“Unreasonable search” is used within the context of the 4th Amendment. This amendment is inapplicable to private parties and, specifically, GS.
Second, there may be criminal or civil liability stemming from, for example, breaking into somebody’s house. But if during the break-in, the burglar sees the homeowner killing somebody, that eyewitness testimony is fully admissible. You can try to impeach the witness, (Lawyer to the jury: “are you going to believe a burglar? He’s just trying to blame somebody else for the murder!”), but the evidence is still admissible despite the fact the burglar was breaking the law (it’s not clear if GS was breaking the law here).
If you don’t believe me, here’s a link to a discussion of the Fourth Amendment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_Unite…
The related doctrine of “fruit from the poisonous tree”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
Do a Google search for “unreasonable search”, and you will see that the hits all make reference to the 4th Amendment, which, as I said, doesn’t apply to private parties.
And the Federal Rules of Evidence, which many states are modeled after:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/
You will not find any support for your claim that this evidence would be inadmissible.
@Mr. Gunn: “people, faced with a menace such as communism, terrorism, child porn, or whatever horror the future holds, always forget…”
Yup, that was going to be my point. Kiddy Porn is the excuse de jour for shredding our rights. Or Drugs (gasp: Crystal Meth!!).
It’s not like the government is going to say, “We will watch you always, everywhere, to protect your from double parking.”
And in our corporate welfare state, subcontracting to private parties is (or should be) the same thing as governmenal searches.
And removing the presumption of privacy can be as effective as the government doing it themselves.
So yeah, the gov’t loves this sh*t. Suck on that, you Conservatives that are defending this practice.
And, again, there are laws that require, for example, the peopel processing your film to review it, and turn you in if there is a crime depicted in it, as with child porn. Extending this to computer techs isn’t much of a stretch.
I agree the sucker got what he deserved. However the GS overstepped their boundries. I will be dissuaded from bringing my PC to them simply becuase they are snopping my personal files, which poses a big identity theft risk.
Thats why you keep a microwave and a powerful degausser handy….
If they cops come to your house to retrieve you comp, booby trap it and when the degausser goes off, it will destroy anything with magnetic data…and then you can sue the cops for destroying sensitive equipment and not finding anything in the process, completely replacing any hardware lost in the ordeal…
@A_B: Thanks for the info, looks like i’m completely incorrect. My apologies.
I have to agree that child porn is bad, and I understand the reasoning behind a Geek Squad employee turning someone in after finding it.
My issue comes with the eventual handling of the case in court. My brother had the same thing happen to him as this gentleman did, except the child porn that was found on his computer wasn’t his. He didn’t download it, or take the pictures himself. Unfortunately, my brother was such a nice guy that he let anyone who needed to use his computer (which I know isn’t the smartest thing). Someone had evidentally downloaded it on his laptop, but he had no way of proving who did it or where he was when it was downloaded.
The sad thing about all of this? The court decided that it WAS his porn, even though he had passed two separate lie-detector tests (that weren’t admissible in court). So he got kicked out of the Marines, spent every last penny he had on a useless lawyer, and eventually shot himself in the head.
Thanks for snooping around my brother’s laptop, Geek Squad. Thanks for helping to ruin and eventually end my brother’s life.
Has anyone here ever ran a spyware removal scan and noticed filenames appear on the scan? There are many tools out there that scan the machine and display all the file names that it’s searching. If the guy on the Geek Squad noticed a suspicious filename, he would report it and he did not go searching for it at all.
If the customer requested his files to be backed up and listed specific locations, the geek squad is going to copy over the files and notice filenames. You can’t just assume that as soon as a computer is brought in the first thing they look for his porn, there are lots of other ways to find child pornography on the machine.
@Evols That is exactly correct. I worked for geek squad for two years and in that time we found two pedafiles. First one was found doing antivirus scans and the second during a data backup (that guy was as dumb as a box of rocks). Oh, and anyone asking how you can prove the file wasn’t planted; When a file is added to the computer an attribute it receives is the creation date. If that date is before the PC was brougt to GS than it was already there. This date is changeable, but that is in no way practical for an agent to modify.
Considering the fact that time and date stamps can be altered with little effort and the their is now a cash award bounty for information on suspected owners of computer with illegal images on them there is nothing to keep an unethical computer tech from planting evidence to collect the bounty.
Considering the fact that as a Geek Squad Agent, we’ve found CP on people’s computers before, I assure you it’s a simple thing to see without “snooping” in people’s files.
Take permissions for a drive, you see a long list of file names run by.
Transferring data from the customer’s drive to an eternal for a backup, you see a lot of file names.
What drew our attention in our case, was “6yr_old_takes_her_first_fucking.avi”. I made a note of it, and kept an eye on the file transfers. When I started seeing porn with the headers of 11yo, 13yo, 7yo, in my eyes, that means I morally should look, to see wtf is up.
A thumbnail showed me more than I ever wanted to see.
The agents in that case did what was right – its just your wicked hate-on for us that makes you paint it in a negative light.
I happen to work at a computer repair shop. I can tell you that there are plenty of ways to find this stuff with out looking. I have found it myself many times and even got in the local paper ( [deseretnews.com] ). When you are looking for virus/spyware infections most scanners show you the file name you are currently scanning. When files whose title alone are revolting start flashing across the screen that’s when you call the cops. Definitely not snooping.
Trust me- I’m a lawyer!
UNLESS GS acted at the direction of the state- there are no 4th amendment constitutional issues involved here. The Constitution is a check upon the power of the State.
Secondly- while Perv could possibly have a civil complaint against GS for computer trespass (if the state recognizes such), it still does not rise to a violation of his 4th amendment rights by the state.
Third- evidence “gathered” by a third party is NOT inadmissible, and I have no idea where such an idea got started. Evidence is admissible provided it is relevant, material, and its probative value outweights its prejudicial value. If it was discovered by police misconduct- then 4th amendment issues are involved. But note- there are many exceptions to the exclusionary rule.