Defense lawyers for the doctor argue that Geek Squad City\u2019s technicians acted as government agents by receiving payments from the FBI, regularly speaking with and referring cases to the FBI, and creating a program to search for child porn. If a government agent wants to search a computer, they need a warrant, and the case has raised issues of privacy invasion and violation of constitutional search and seizure rights.<\/p>\n
Both Best Buy and the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Los Angeles deny any violations in the search of surgeon Mark Rettenmaier\u2019s hard drive, for which the FBI obtained a warrant after being contacted by a Geek Squad supervisor. That in turn led to a warrant and search of Rettenmaier\u2019s home, which led to the discovery of \u201cthousands of images of child pornography,\u201d according to a reply brief by assistant U.S. attorneys Anthony Brown and Gregory Scally.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Fourth Amendment is offended by none of this,\u201d the federal prosecutors wrote. \u201cNothing unreasonable occurred here, and there was no arbitrary invasion of anyone\u2019s privacy by governmental officials\u2026and there\u2019s not a shred of evidence that anyone at the FBI directed anyone at Geek Squad City to detect and locate child pornography for the purpose of reporting it to the FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n
[The Geek Squad and the Fourth Amendment<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n Best Buy issued a statement to The Post which said that Geek Squad employees \u201cinadvertently discover\u201d child porn about 100 times a year while trying to recover lost customer data. \u201cAs a company, we have not sought or received training from law enforcement in how to search for child pornography. Our policies prohibit employees from doing anything other than what is necessary to solve the customer\u2019s problem. In the wake of these allegations, we have redoubled our efforts to train employees on what to do \u2014 and not to do \u2014 in these circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n But James Riddet, the lead attorney for Rettenmaier, contends documents released by the FBI after an evidentiary hearing in January show years of close cooperation between Geek Squad and the FBI field office in Louisville, Ky., which would then launch federal investigations around the country based on where the computer had come from. The actual documents were ordered sealed in the case, but were described and often quoted in briefs filed after the January hearing that were first reported by R. Scott Moxley in the Orange County Weekly.<\/p>\n Riddet declined to be interviewed. But in court filings he said that there were \u201ceight FBI informants at Geek Squad City\u201d between 2007 and 2012, and that the facility\u2019s \u201cdata recovery system was designed to identify and report child porn from all over the country.\u201d A number of Geek Squad employees received $500 or $1,000 payments from the FBI, documents and testimony showed. Riddet cited\u00a0an FBI letter to the U.S. attorney in Kentucky which stated that, \u201cUnder the control and direction of the FBI, the CW [confidential witness] agreed to notify the FBI when CW detects the presence of child pornography during the regular course of CW\u2019s employment and is willing to testify in a court of law.\u201d<\/p>\n One Geek Squad employee who received a $500 payment from the FBI filed an affidavit saying he was \u201cextremely reluctant and irritated that the FBI gave me money, and tried to give it back\u2026The FBI indicated to me they could not take the money back because they had to spend it as part of their budget.\u201d But he then noted, \u201cI contacted our legal department\u201d to tell them about the payment, which led Riddet to emphasize that Best Buy\u00a0management had been put on notice about the FBI payments.<\/p>\n Best Buy\u2019s statement to The Post said, \u201cWe have learned that four employees may have received payment after turning over alleged child pornography to the FBI. Any decision to accept payment was in very poor judgment and inconsistent with our training and policies. Three of these employees are no longer with the company and the fourth has been reprimanded and reassigned.\u201d<\/p>\n Federal prosecutors wrote that \u201cIt is true that a few payments to Geek Squad City supervisors by the FBI unnecessarily muddied the waters here. But however ill-advised those payments may have been\u2026the money, more of an embarrassment than an incentive, did nothing to turn Geek Squad City supervisors into government agents or Geek Squad City itself into a secret FBI surveillance machine.\u201d Employees there are working on about 2,000 computers at any one time, the prosecutors said.<\/p>\n Riddet also cited an internal FBI report announcing a meeting at Geek Squad City, which noted, \u201cThe Louisville Division [of the FBI] has maintained close liaison with the Geek Squad management in an effort to glean case initiations and to support the division\u2019s computer intrusion and cyber crime programs.\u201d The same agent wrote in a separate memo that agents were \u201cseeking training of the Geek Squad facility technicians designed to help them identify what type of files and\/or images would necessitate a call to the FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n The FBI only turned over informant files on four of the eight Geek Squad employees it worked with, Riddet wrote, but in one of the files, an employee told agents\u00a0he \u201cwas in the process of writing a software program [that] would help them identify potential images of child pornography in their computer systems\u201d and that \u201cFBI investigative information\/techniques [were] revealed to source for operational purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n Federal prosecutors Brown and Scally responded that the software was intended to identify child porn on employees\u2019 work-issued computers, not customers\u2019 computers. They said that \u201cGeek Squad City supervisors reached out to the FBI, not the other way around,\u201d and only did so when they \u201cstumble[d] across disturbing images of children being sexually abused.\u201d Best Buy said, \u201cWe have a moral and, in more than 20 states, a legal obligation to report these findings to law enforcement. We share this policy with our customers in writing before we begin any repair.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>
![](\"http:\/\/img.washingtonpost.com\/wp-apps\/imrs.php?src=http:\/\/img.washingtonpost.com\/news\/true-crime\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/55\/2017\/03\/BestBuy-1024x682.jpg&w=1484\")
\nBest Buy Geek Squad agent Josh Sorensen replaces a motherboard on a laptop at Geek Squad City in Brooks, Ky., in a 2012 file photo. A child pornography case launched at the facility led to the discovery that eight Geek Squad technicians had served as paid informants for the FBI. (Ken James\/Bloomberg News)<\/span><\/h5>\n