My wife’s cousin does data recovery for a retail chain that is not Best Buy; they use Encase for data recovery because, according to him, it’s the best suite of tools for recovering data.
I don’t know what tools BB uses, though.
Not per se, no. I think the “agreement,” specifics are important.
Getting paid regularly would certainly transform him from private actor. But if I were to learn that the $500 was to repay expenses he incurred in a one- time favor of examining a hard drive for the FBI, then no.
Nor does his regular reporting strip him of “private actor,” any more than Mrs. K across the street implicated the Fourth Amendment by calling the cops twice a week with complaints about kids on her lawn.
It’s certainly possible that the tech is no longer a private actor, but the defense bears the burden of showing this to be so.
Exactly. So we don’t know if this is a “in plain view” situation and in many ways that is a hinge point of the argument. So it’s a little odd that you seem to assume the answer throughout this thread.
This thread confuses me.
Is the issue whether or not it was a legal search or is it whether or not it is proper for the FBI to pay people looking at our computers for information?
It doesn’t work that way though; for what we were doing, it was usually either corporate computers, or duly subpoenaed personal computers, typically in trade secret litigation. In both cases, it was not uncommon to look for things like images of things.
And if you’re searching for images, you usually don’t have an inkling as to the filename, and wouldn’t trust it if you did, as files are easily renamed, especially by shady characters trying to obscure their tracks.
So you’d go looking for every image file on the hard drive, regardless of filename or extension, and you’d go digging in the unallocated space as well. If there was anything illegal on there, it would certainly be dredged up and thumbnailed, and be clearly visible as a part of the investigation. And I can guarantee you that had we run across anything like that, the first thing we’d have done would have been to call the local PD, and offer them the original hard drives (we worked from copies made with write-blockers).
Now Best Buy may not have forensic software costing five figures, but it’s not a particularly tough thing to go scrounging around in unallocated space for deleted files,
I guess ultimately we should be glad that these sorts haven’t become savvy to steganographic techniques. That would make this kind of thing nearly undetectable.
It’s both. The FBI paying people to do warrantless searches of random people’s computers would be illegal. If the FBI is merely rewarding people for reporting crimes they encounter in the normal course of their job, that’s not illegal but raises questions whether they are incentivising snooping.
Since I know of at least one other chain that uses it, and since it has a stellar reputation for data recovery, the assumption did not seem a crazy one.
But even if they use another tool, the plain view argument might survive – as long as they recovered graphics files and checked them manually, the same result is reached.
Yes, it’s certainly possible.
BTW, I’m pretty sure your anonymity would survive actually typing the name of the stellar chain your wife’s cousin works for. Just saying.
MIcrocenter.
But the “stellar reputation” refers to Encase, not the chain.
Oh, sure. But that’s not what Best Buy is or should be doing.
And while there are obvious economic arguments for just using whatever tools are around, if we’re going to take personal data privacy seriously as a society (so far we are not), then that indicates we should make the investment to have the right tools for the job that can preserve privacy.
Hospitals don’t use a shared plaintext file that anyone can access. They use special software that preserves the privacy of their patients.
The documents on someone’s computer ought to be as private as the results of their colonoscopy.
That’s not a view that society has really adopted, though. It’s perhaps a good idea, but it’s your notion of normative treatment of data, not the actual extant recognized practice.
Oh, I’m not defending Best Buy, just pointing out that some of these things can be non-snoopish, depending on what was being done. If someone was just restoring files from unallocated space at the customer’s request and the pedophile customer was particularly organized, even the directory tree structure or filenames might be sufficiently incriminating without even having to view any images at all.
FYI, hospitals and healthcare aren’t any more secure than any other normally secured system; they’re in the same league with banks and the like.