The Justice Department was sued Wednesday by a privacy group seeking information on the FBI recruitment of Best Buy employees to search consumer computers for child pornography during repairs — a practice that came to light in court documents in a recent case in Santa Ana, California.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Trump administration’s Justice Department, demanding access to records about any FBI training and payment to Geek Squad workers to search customer computers without a court warrant.
At issue isn’t the criminality of child pornography or efforts to stop the exploitation of children by sexual predators. EFF is concerned that the FBI may be violating the constitutional requirement that law enforcement agencies obtain judge-approved search warrants, based on evidence there is probable cause of a crime, to search computers.
“Informants who are trained, directed, and paid by the FBI to conduct searches for the agency are acting as government agents,” EFF civil liberties director David Greene said in a written statement. “The FBI cannot bypass the Constitution’s warrant requirement by having its informants search people’s computers at its direction and command.”
The San Francisco-based nonprofit privacy group sued the Justice Department after it refused a request for documents about how the FBI recruits, trains and pays Best Buy workers to find illegal child pornography on customer computers sent to Best Buy for repairs.
“The public has a right to know how the FBI uses computer repair technicians to carry out searches the agents themselves cannot do without a warrant,” EFF senior counsel David Sobel said in a statement. “People authorize Best Buy employees to fix their computers, not conduct unconstitutional searches on the FBI’s behalf.”
The FBI refused to provide records to EFF based on the agency’s policy of not confirming or denying ongoing investigations.
Interestingly, President Trump is no friend of the surveillance state, having been a target himself, but it seems as if all of this operates on another level, even beyond his scrutiny, let alone control.
The case is being waged on behalf of a supposed kiddie porn criminal, but these days I never assume anything I see is real. He might be, or he might just have fallen afoul of the machine somehow.
My guess is there are places where this is everywhere. Temp agencies, data-entry companies, medical providers, banks, ISPs, and on and on. Each probably began with a legitimate reason for being, like medical workers trained to cull through records, looking for injuries consistent with chemical weapons manufacture, bank tellers trained to look through records for indices of money laundering by drug cartels, and on an on.
But once you build that network, it is just idling most of the time, so it is a small step to first use the assets to amass intelligence on anybody who falls under any suspicion. Soon, why not use the machine when it is idling to amass files on everyone. If somebody looks boring, you can move on and simply come back and check them out periodically later. But every so often, you may find something interesting, and now you are one up on the competition. Then if a governor calls and asks to know more about somebody who mailed a critical letter, maybe that governor will be President one day, and that is a powerful marker to have. So you run the name through the master database file, just that once.
The unnerving aspect of this to average citizens, is the idea of a shadow government, composed of one group of various citizens who have no official vetting (except for a lack of allegiance to Constitutional protections on privacy, and perhaps blackmail-ibility and control-ibility), who are being subtly pitted against regular citizens by government entities for unknown reasons.
Those who haven’t been paying attention, and suddenly one day find the government was looking at their most private aspects of their lives, without any real reason, as if probing for weaknesses, will instinctually grow defensive. There will be the violation of expectation in suddenly finding they have been targeted, and the perception that someone with government authority was potentially preparing to act in a hostile fashion, without any legal justification or reasonbable cause for doing so.
It will be interesting to see where the lawsuit goes, but if my surmises are correct, they have probably already dug up enough dirt on the judge to maintain control. If not, I would definitely watch my ass if I were in the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
No eating out for them, or drinking at bars, or taking long walks down streets in DC in the early morning, if they know what is good for them.
In fact, I hear Moscow is beautiful this time of year.