FBI Caught Using Best Buy Geek Squad As Paid Informers

Another peek behind the curtain:

Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example…

Unsurprisingly, the FBI also has a number of paid informants. Some of these informants apparently work at Best Buy — Geek Squad by day, government informants by… well, also by day.

According to court records, Geek Squad technician John “Trey” Westphal, an FBI informant, reported he accidentally located on Rettenmaier’s computer an image of “a fully nude, white prepubescent female on her hands and knees on a bed, with a brown choker-type collar around her neck.” Westphal notified his boss, Justin Meade, also an FBI informant, who alerted colleague Randall Ratliff, another FBI informant at Best Buy, as well as the FBI. Claiming the image met the definition of child pornography and was tied to a series of illicit pictures known as the “Jenny” shots, agent Tracey Riley seized the hard drive.

Not necessarily a problem, considering companies performing computer/electronic device repair are legally required to report discovered child porn to law enforcement. The difference here is the paycheck. This Geek Squad member had been paid $500 for digging around in customers’ computers and reporting his findings to the FBI. That changes the motivation from legal obligation to a chance to earn extra cash by digging around in files not essential to the repair work at hand.

More of a problem is the FBI’s tactics. While it possibly could have simply pointed to the legal obligation Best Buy has to report discovered child porn, it proactively destroyed this argument by apparently trying to cover up the origin of its investigation, as well as a couple of warrantless searches…

[I]n Rettenmaier’s case, the alleged “Jenny” image was found on unallocated “trash” space, meaning it could only be retrieved by “carving” with costly, highly sophisticated forensics tools.

He accidentally located it with expensive forensics software. So basically the Best Buy guy was either running expensive forensics software given to him by the government on every computer he encountered, or he was told to do it to this one specifically, which immediately makes me wonder if the computer problem that sent the computer to the repair center to begin with was engineered as part of a much larger operation to take this guy out. Once you go there, you have to ask if the image in the unallocated space was put there, or got there honestly. Anyone who runs into an operation like this, will always see the darkest possible possibility. Once strings are being pulled, there is no telling what is real and what is Memorex.

I have no idea if the guy in question was a scumbag or not. But I will note, I saw the pedophile triangle symbol somewhere in my travels on the internet news blogs, probably linked by Free Republic. I had no idea what it was, until weeks later I saw it revealed as such in the Pizzagate articles. When I saw it, it was just a strange doodle in the side bar, but it would have been in my computer’s memory somewhere, and it would have looked like I had a pedophile code symbol on my machine.

If I wanted to attack conservatives, I could post an article at Free Republic, and on the linked page, stick child porn pictures, resized by the html to a single pixel, a size so small that you would not see them on the page, but your computer would load them and save them in memory. Then although the page looked innocent to you, your temporary internet files would be filled with full size child porn image files loaded from the page, and that would eventually end up in unallocated space.

I could be loading child porn on your system right now. It doesn’t even have to be government. A leftist citizen or private group could do it, and report you to the FBI anonymously as a child porn criminal. As far as the FBI agents investigating you would know, you had kiddie porn on your system, and someone accused you. Clearly you are guilty.

So this all sounds great when it lands exclusively on pedophiles. Ten years ago I would have said, “Hell yeah! Go git em!”

Now I am more circumspect. A devious government agency, controlled by liberals, could exploit such a system to plant evidence and have it innocently discovered by an ostensibly uninvolved third party. Devious liberals could easily exploit it in a way the government would be forced to play along with to keep their secret. And we are approaching a time when liberals will be so panicked, they will not only be willing to do that, they will feel it is morally justified.

There is a reason the FBI agents were lying about the whole thing to the judge. This is the TIPS program, resurrected covertly, and it is much more expansive than this article would indicate. It is not just this isolated Geek Squad, but almost all, if not all, of Best Buy’s Geek Squads. More ominously, it is also just about anybody who goes anywhere that government would want to search, but can’t without a warrant. It is plumbers, electricians, maid services, landscapers, furniture delivery people, package delivery people, temp agencies, janitorial services, cable TV guys, phone company guys, utility workers, meter readers, carpet installers, and on and on.

Start a company specializing in shredding sensitive documents for clients, and if you pass a background check (probably done prior to any approach, without you even knowing this whole system exists), you will be offered an opportunity to make some side money by placing a 4G enabled scanner on your shredder that will beam everything to your handlers as you shred it. Now when a target’s medical records pop up because a doctor’s office hires you to shred their old files, OCR software can flag the name, and it is reviewed and goes in his file.

Today, in many places, you cannot call a guy to service the heat in your house, without him performing at least a cursory government search of whatever he can see, so he can file a report later on. And if you are already of interest, say because you are investigating Pizzagate on Voat, they will hear you call him on your phone and he will be contacted before he arrives by his handler to be given special instructions on what to look for, and what to try and get. His tool box may have a camera in it, and he may carry a USB drive to stick in any data device he sees to offload spyware.

Expect him to go mining through any private area he has access to when you leave to get him coffee. And all of it will go in your file. As I have said, nobody would believe what is out there. In many places, it is everywhere, everyone is looking at it every day, and the only camouflage it has is nobody could believe it could possibly exist in America.

Note how just in this Best Buy there were three different informants who touched this single computer case, despite only one tech assigned to it. They literally have informants watching informants. Clearly, if resources for this program were limited, the Bureau would have recruited three informants at three different companies, and tried to finagle them into each case they were interested in at each company. That the informant density is so deep in one place, rather than spread out thin, would indicate that they aren’t running things on a shoe string and don’t need to spread out resources. It is probably this thick everywhere.

Every Best Buy has this many informants, and so does every other company which does large quantities of computer repair in such targeted areas. Remember that the official TIPS proposal was for a pilot program which turned 1 in 24 citizens into informants. That was the shoestring test system, set up in a few months on a paltry test budget, just to see if such a network could be run. How many informants do you think the full-bore, fully-funded, decade-plus old, final product today has? One in ten citizens in some jurisdictions? One in seven people informing to government? One in five? Today, it is not impossible in some areas.

Those informant bosses at Best Buy in the article also probably run prospective hires past their handlers, and those who are not totally down with the surveillance state, or who have that liberty-minded unctuousness that might buck the system, will not get hired. The next hire, when he comes on board, will probably have already passed his background check to become an informant, totally unbeknown to him, and without even knowing he is going to be pitched to join this system. And I would bet they will all trend leftist in their psychology.

Now the freaky part. All of these informants are not just informing on what they see in the course of their day at work in the office. Many are being trained up to run ad-hoc in-person surveillance and harassment operations on the side, and they are practicing them on innocent citizens who will not have the ready access to lawyers and counter-surveillance specialists that, say, your average mafia member might have to fight back with by exposing the system widely. I will bet these guys have been paralleling targets in their Geek Squad cars on the highway. I’ll bet some here have seen one while he was doing it.

And often, purely by chance, I have noted from anecdotal experiences online that many of those innocent citizens experiencing this happen to have some role in the conservative movement. It isn’t surprising. Leftists will naturally enjoy being a cog within such an overarching, intrusive government, bullying fellow citizens, while conservatives might turn on the system out of principle.

So only one type of person would probably be allowed in, meaning the other will tend to be on the other end of the equation, when these networks look for guinea pigs to practice on. And that ignores if somebody at the top has a particular identity they want data on.

Mark my words. Things happen in cycles, and things like this have been on the upswing for some while. Now, it is so big, that we are seeing little bits of it percolate up here and there, even through a controlled media that is itself penetrated with such agents at the editorial level in many places. And this is despite the fact that the government knows that if this gets wide exposure, it will be a mess of unprecedented proportions.

The problem is that it is getting so big, and is showing up in so many places, that the people running it cannot control every exposure. That in itself tells you how big it is. As each exposure makes it through to the media, another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

The biggest scandal of this century is coming, and when it hits, I firmly believe that it will make infecting blacks with Syphilis look like Mother Teresa’s charity work.

The damage wouldn’t be so bad, if every case of people it was directed at were mobsters, child molesters, Muslim terrorists, and serial killers, even though ideally things like this shouldn’t exist in a free society. But when it hits, every Joe and Jane America in various areas, including very important people who drive the national dialogs, are going to find they have a very detailed file, including even their most intimate conversations and moments, recorded in digital format for all posterity.

Then it gets ugly. If somebody pro-law enforcement like me is horrified by this, the regular public will be apoplectic.

As a final addendum on the TIPS program, despite it being openly proposed in the official Citizen Corp website, only one reporter at one foreign outlet was allowed to report on it, after which it provoked several domestic editorials against it. At the bottom of the one article was this note about the reporter:

Ritt Goldstein is an investigative journalist and a former leader in the movement for US law enforcement accountability. He has lived in Sweden since 1997, seeking political asylum there, saying he was the victim of life-threatening assaults in retaliation for his accountability efforts. His application has been supported by the European Parliament, five of Sweden’s seven big political parties, clergy, and Amnesty and other rights groups.

I post these things because I am already in the database. If you are not, know it is out there, so you can make an informed decision on whether you want in or not. Never give up the fight, but know there may be strategic reasons to stay off the radar until things break open.

ITZ out there, and it is nothing like you were taught.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because the government machine is closing in on everyone