Posted on 01/17/2008 6:03:54 PM PST by Teflonic
Best Buy's Geek Squad isn't exactly known for respecting people's property. This time, however, instead of us catching them, they caught a guy with child porn.
A middle school custodian sent in a hard drive back in August of 2007 to recover lost data. Upon performing their usual search (and invasion of personal privacy), the Geek Squadders at a Twin Cities location found over 800 images of young girls between the ages of 7 and 15 in various states of undress and performing sexual acts. The Geek Squad promptly turned the evidence over to the police. The police eventually obtained a search warrant and -- upon execution -- found more evidence in the janitor's home.
While we would like to say that this guy is sick and deserves whatever punishment he gets, we are disturbed by the conduct of Geek Squad employees who seem to make it a habit of going through customer data. Whether or not the data is illegal and leads to arrest, warrantless searches by non-law-enforcement personnel is disturbing on an ethical level and we're pretty sure unconstitutional.
If our computer has died, and we need to do a retrieval, who do you recommend we take it to (who won’t pry), and how is the actual retrieval done (if our computer is dead)?
I have no prob with what he did and no prob with what the Geek Squad did.
Circuit City is bankrupt....good grief.
Circuit City is bankrupt....good grief.
What is the point of running killdisk when you are there to recover data?
I ran some type of program like that when we donated computers from our office. I loaded up a DOS program that filled the hard drive with letters 9 times over.
If Child Porn Janitor wasnt savvy, he probably left his browsing history intact which would give the cops a pretty good case....and maybe even have saved his kiddie porn passwords and other evidence.
It isn’t so much someone prying, it’s the fact that once you physically turn the machine over to a 3rd party, such as the Geek Squad, you voluntarily give up your right to privacy.
I would suggest not having anything illegal on your computer, and if you have things on there yo want to keep private encrypt them.
Amazing, in a lot of child porn cases, the “collectors” don’t even change the names of the files to something innocent sounding. I bet that was the case w/ the janitor in the article.
Though, I read somewhere, can’t remember where, the Geek Squad is known for searching for porn on computers brought in for service. They especially are looking for the more unique homemade kind, not the stuff you can find in the back-room at the video store. Appears they like to trade it among themselves.
Got into an interesting discussion in class about the possibility of a law that would compel a computer repair man to report child porn to the authorities much as the law that educators & medical personnel having to report suspected child abuse.
I know a lot of people posting here feel that the Geek Squad was in the wrong for violating the janitor’s privacy, but the stories about child porn cases that we heard about in my class were sickening. In fact, while I was taking the class last Fall, an adjunct at the school (in a different department) got arrested in a child exploitation sting where he flew to Detroit to meet a woman (who was really an FBI agent) because she had agreed to let him have sex w/ her two kids ages 3!!! and 5!!! During part of their online chat, this guy tells the agent about a trip to China he had made the year before where he had a sexual encounter w/ a 14 year old girl and her 8 year old sister.
There are a lot of really sick, sick individuals out there!
It really wouldn't matter if it had been downloaded, since I have a script that clears my cache and wipes all unused disk space every day. If the file was in my cache and wasn't opened, no link files or other traces should exist, and even if they did, the file itself would not exist on my computer, so there would be no issue.
To answer your original question, it would be possible, but would require someone to know where all of the traces are supposed to reside for a particular user profile, etc. It is not easy, and would require a lot of knowledge about the victim in order to make it stick.
Your best bet is to use an OS that requires a username/password for each user, and make sure that you keep your password secret. Then if your spouse downloads and saves illegal material on the drive, the files will all have his/her account identified as the owner of the file, regardless of wherer they are stored.
If you're talking about EFS (encrypting file system), you are both right and wrong. On it's own, EFS uses a strong encryption algorithm, but the weakness is that the key to decrypt the files is the user's account password. Those are stored in the SAM hive on the computer, and unless the user has a strong password, most of those can be quickly cracked using open source tools such as Ophcrack. Once you have the password, EFS becomes useless. I'd recommend a 3rd-party tool such as TrueCrypt, BestCrypt or PGP, with a strong password.
Let's take your hypothetical one step further: Suppose you bring your car in for a oil and filter change and the mechanic finds the cocaine in the trunk even though he had no reason to open the trunk in the first place? Or suppose the cocaine is in a closed briefcase in the trunk and the mechanic finds the cocaine while snooping? Better yet, suppose some punk unlawfuly breaks into your house to commit a felony only to discover an illegal weapon, which immediately discloses to the cops when he arrested the following day.
ok ok... murder is a bit extreme and the plumber would have no way of avoiding it. We're talking about the plumber opening the kitchen drawers in order to check you out. You ok with that ?
I take care of my own kids. Police need to be out chasing illegals and other criminals instead of seeing what someone looks at.
Police will always do what is he easiest. Speed traps etc or most fun, i.e. learning how to use a .50 cal sniper rifle for swat team duty.
John
To the best of my knowledge there’s no legal requirement for a computer technician to hold anything in confidence when presented with a computer to repair, though I imagine that legal cases could be made in case of commercial exploitation of information or software....
On the other hand, I like to think of myself as a reasonably honorable person, and when I work on a computer I will hold anything I learn in confidence, as long as there’s no harm in it. At my jobs over the years, I’ve had to sign all sorts of confidentiality agreements, and in my current job, I’m actually covered by “insider trading” restriction laws.
But if I were ever to come upon something illegal like child porn, you can bet that I’d turn it over to the authorities.
Mark
The police searched his home and found VHS tapes, Zip disks, floppy disks, DVDs and hard drives full of the stuff. There is no Trojan Horse that will pile the stuff up on an array of different storage devices.
As for me, nothing illegal, just personal. In addition to my journal, there's banking info. How can I do a retrieval of my dead computer with all that personal information on it? I'm really only interested in my journal. I will have lost a whole year of my life if I can't retrieve it. I guess I should go back to the old pen or pencil method.
I guess the janitor didn’t read the Geek Squad’s “privacy policy”. I’m sure they have one.
The results of an investigation into this matter is what I'd like to see. Pictures is pictures, but bringing actual humans into this janitor's mix is the real deal.
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