http://www.ocweekly.com/news/fbi-used-best-buys-geek-squad-to-increase-secre... https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/if-a-best-buy-technician-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13841504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13363669 Recently unsealed records reveal a much more extensive secret relationship than previously known between the FBI and Best Buy's Geek Squad, including evidence the agency trained company technicians on law-enforcement operational tactics, shared lists of targeted citizens and, to covertly increase surveillance of the public, encouraged searches of computers even when unrelated to a customer's request for repairs. Assistant United States Attorney M. Anthony Brown last year labeled allegations of a hidden partnership as "wild speculation." But more than a dozen summaries of FBI memoranda filed inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse this month in USA v. Mark Rettenmaier contradict the official line... Other records show how [Geek Squad supervisor Justin] Meade's job gave him "excellent and frequent" access for "several years" to computers belonging to unwitting Best Buy customers, though agents considered him "underutilized" and wanted him "tasked" to search devices "on a more consistent basis"... evidence demonstrates company employees routinely snooped for the agency, contemplated "writing a software program" specifically to aid the FBI in rifling through its customers' computers without probable cause for any crime that had been committed, and were "under the direction and control of the FBI." "The end-run around the Constitution can be summed up in one terrifying word: Outsourcing. ... When the government trains, directs, and pays a "private citizen", that person becomes an agent of the government. This makes those persons subject to the same rules; probable cause, warrants, oath or affirmation. ... The admissibility of evidence found by a private citizen usually turns on the governments share of the search. In other words, how involved was the government? While cases where the government ordered or paid a citizen to conduct the search are fairly straightforward, others aren’t. In determining whether to admit the evidence in question, courts consider questions like: whether the government initiated the search how much control the government had over the private citizen who conducted the search, and what the private citizen’s purpose was in conducting the search. And what was the FBI doing? Oh yeah... paying them..training them...giving them lists of people to search"