Fake evidence? Maybe, but I think the primary worry is the incentive to lower the bar to the point they ruin lives.

The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Was it just baby photos? The classic "naked baby on a fur rug" pose? Grandkids in the pool? The article doesn't say. All we know is the judge threw out the case as a non-issue.

But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated. No matter how clear his innocence is announced, he'll always be stained.

Would the Best Buy employee have reported the image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course. Many innocent photos of children can make us uncomfortable depending on the circumstances; it's human nature to be a bit oversensitive about any situation involving kids. Some false alarms will be inevitable.

But if I was most likely a young, ignorant low level tech and someone offered me $500 (and the praise of a high authority), I could see myself pushing the button on every photo of a kid in a wet swimming suit.

Paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.

I find it hard to believe a computer tech encountering real child porn needs to be incentivised to report it.

Bingo.

Digital evidence is really easy to fake, often leaves little if any evidence that it was planted, and the prosecutors don't have much incentive to look for evidence to determine whether the digital evidence was planted or not.

A good analogy is imagine if dry cleaners were paid by the FBI every time they found a dime bag accidentally left in someone's pocket. How many of those dime bags do you think would get planted by the employees to collect their $500 reward?

A good lawyer can bring this up; that there is no chain of custody .. but you need to afford a lawyer. If someone in a low paid job is incentivised to find this evidence, they could occasionally just plant it, get their few extra $$ a few times a year, and some other low paid worker could get screwed over because they can't afford anything other than a public defender.

They then get a sex offense charge, can't get a job, are looked down upon by all their friends/family no matter how much they claim innocence and get even poorer.

I realize a Geek Squad member isn't quite as low income as you can go, but it's still low income people incentivied to hurt other low income people. .. Mortys killing mortys.

Or better yet. You get a bag of clothes in, "Hey, I know this guy, he's an a$$hole, I'm going to plant something in his clothes and report him, ha!"

That can always happen, it's just that now one would also get a compensation.

I don't think it is just that. In the dry cleaning example, the evidence would be extremely slight, it would turn into a he-said/she-said case, and either no one would get convicted or there would be enough evidence to convict the dry cleaner. And the dry cleaner can do this at most once before the police became suspicious. The cops will probably be suspicious right away: either the drugs are valuable and no one would actually leave them behind, or it is something like weed and the consequences will not be severe enough for the cops to bother.

In the case of the images, the evidence might be just as slight, but the police have essentially communicated to the employees that they won't be looking too deeply at the evidence and juries are ignorant when it come to technology and punitive when it comes to 'illegal images'.

The argument here as the defending attorney is ridiculously obvious: the employee has both motive and incentive; but I'd still give high odds of conviction (or worse, a plea bargain) and even if acquitted the accused will be marked for as long as people remember.

As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none. Of course, digital images cost nothing, so there isn't a right price to set. I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.

Or, you know, you could have law enforcement maybe not turn the rest of society in to paid snitches. Not everyone wishes to live in a reimplementation of East Germany.

I realize that for many people 'pedophile' is the root password to the Constitution (not my line), but the existence of horrible people should not be an excuse to elevate authoritarians.

> I suppose they could do something like, if one person keeps "finding" the same images, then maybe look into it.

You're still missing an important implication of this, now a real child pornographer's lawyer can get him off by creating enough doubt in Jury's mind that Geek Squad's employees planted the evidence, especially since they are getting paid for it.

In other words, not only there is a risk of innocent people getting arrested and possibly going to jail, there is a risk of guilty people going free.

> As long as the reward is less than the cost of the bag, none.

A dime bag by definition retails for $10. $500 < $10. (The cost is reduced by buying in bulk, if you wanted to scale up this scheme.)

I haven't had my coffee yet and missed the perverse-incentive / fraud aspect... thanks for pointing that out.

It's definitely a problem. Imagine you hire a plumber to snake your drains and he places a bag of weed behind the pipes, snaps a picture, and reports you to the police for possession. He gets paid for the plumbing job, paid for the reporting of a crime, and keeps his weed.

Much easier with digital imagery. Just create a "new folder" in someone's "My Documents", plant some illicit imagery, and boom-- easy pay-day.

The plumber wouldn't get to keep the weed. The police would take that as evidence. This is why the reward would need to be higher than the price of the weed.

I think they are making an equivalence to digital files. With digital files, you can copy it over and keep the original. In his example, essentially the plumber only took a picture of the weed, handed the cops the picture, and took the weed home with him. At least that's how I interpreted it.

Yea, I get the analogy they were making, I just was pointing out that it's not totally correct. The police are not going to give you an award if you show a picture of weed in the house. They would need to see the weed in the house and collect it as evidence. If anything, showing a picture of weed in the house and then having the police find no weed there may give them probable cause to search the plumber for the weed...

Same with digital files, if the same Geek Squad member keeps "finding" evidence they plant on peoples computers, the Geek Squad person is opening themselves up to a ton of risk. In order to plant the digital files you are by definition in possession of the banned files and are breaking the law. Any good law enforcement agent would realize that the same person is unlikely to find illicit files and that it is more likely that they are planting evidence.

The point is that there is not an easy payday. To get paid you must break the law by possessing the files. Plus, just copying the files to the persons computer would leave an obvious trace considering they know when the Geek Squad was there and know when the files were copied.

Even if the fraud if being committed poorly, it will drag the accused through the mud before the truth comes out.

Even though the doctor in the article was not convicted (and I guess we'll never know the whole truth of the matter) you can bet his colleagues and friends aren't looking at him quite the same way.

Close, but no dice. 100 EUR worth of weed (street value) is only worth 100 EUR if the person wants to keep it (ie. is a regular smoker) or wants to sell it (ie. is an aspirant dealer). Assuming an employee of Geek Squad is either is a rough stretch. For people who are neither (such as myself), weed can be worth 0 EUR (to me, weed is completely worthless as I don't want to put effort into selling it, and don't want to smoke it). An irregular smoker wouldn't smoke enough to finish 100 EUR of weed. They might rather prefer say 90 EUR cash instead. And even a regular smoker could possibly be able to know cheaper sources than street value.

If a plumber wanted to plant weed in your house (to get a reward like that proposed above), they would need to acquire the weed. It only makes sense to acquire the weed if the price to acquire is less than the reward. It doesn't matter whether the plumber smokes or not.

Good point, but Cableshaft had the right idea of it. I mean, at no point in the plumber scenario does the plumber have to actually part ways with his weed: "Sorry officers, I guess the guy must have moved his stash after he realized I must have seen it!" He didn't take custody of the drugs he's reporting, he just took a picture / called it in.

In the dry-cleaner scenario they obviously wouldn't have a great excuse for missing dime bags since they'd have custody of it.

REGARDLESS, I think the point isn't about "setting the right price" or comparing scenarios in which planting evidence is easier / harder, it's that ANY price is going to enable perverse-incentives for bad actors in at least some situations.

> Of course everyone agrees with a see something say something policy

How about until that leads to discovery of maybe some unfavorable political opinions. What is to say the limits to criteria and how they might be interpreted.

There is a reason people are concerned about privacy

It is worth noting that we can also see this at the police level, where a cop plants evidence, turns on the bodycam recorder, then "discovers" the evidence, getting caught at it only because he didn't fully understand what the record button did.

With retail store employees, there isn't even an expectation of trustworthiness when it comes to handling evidence. They are not officers of the court, and have no duty to act in the interests of justice. They likely do have a duty to the customer to keep their private affairs private.

There are few reasons for any repair technician to ever open files containing customer data, and zero reasons for them to do it outside of a well-sandboxed, auditable environment, with specialized applications rather than the default OS tools. Rather than opening as a rectangular array of pixels, an image would display its bytes in a hex editor, with decoder plug-ins displaying the header information and metadata for that file type, and the results of a file integrity and malware scan.

It seems likely that Geek Squad is not set up for that kind of work. It's just too expensive to sell to consumers in a retail store. So if Joe Employee loads a suspicious image onto the customer's machine, then "discovers" it by opening it, and reports the discovery to the cops for monetary reward, that is indistinguishable from Joe Employee accidentally discovering genuine criminality, because it was not done in an auditable environment.

Yeah, in general I agree here. I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment?

It would be quite easy to plant some pictures but another matter to build a case solely on the existence of them. That chain of custody issue would likely be an argument brought up by the defense. Also, not to mention the act of acquiring the images to plant is probably also a crime. It's a lot of really risky moves and effort for a very small payout (500 dollars? Much easier to steal small valuable parts for that)

So, yeah - paying for tips, I think it's a bad idea, but the abuse likelihood seems pretty small.

> I wonder if the payout is at the time of the report, or at the time of a conviction or even indictment?

The article suggests the technician was paid even though the charges were dropped.

>It was previously reported that the technician had been paid $500 (£360) by the FBI.

> The charges were dropped in November 2017 when a federal judge ruled that the image flagged by the Geek Squad technician was not sufficient evidence for the FBI to request a search warrant. The judge also ruled that the photograph did not qualify as child abuse imagery.

So, paid just to report anything? Yeah, that's a terrible idea.

I'd imagine this leads to a ton of false alarms.

"Kids running around in the sprinker, their wet swimsuits clinging a little too tenaciously? Report it to the FBI, dude! You could get paid and the feds would be your friends."

>there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.

Well witnesses and victims are generally compensated by the courts and/or victims-witness advocate programs (which go by different names in different states). I don’t think many people argue those programs or payments incentive crime in order to cash in.

And in this case I’m not so sure it’s an opportunity to “cash in” as what the article references are one time payments of $500-$1,000, and while maybe comparatively a lot of money for these individuals, it’s a hell of a lot of risk to plant evidence only to turn it over to the FBI for inspection by their experts, with a very real possibility of implicating yourself, for a comparably small amount of money. And if one of these employees identifies more than one suspect, better believe that employee is going to come under FBI scrutiny.

I have seen witnesses in federal cases paid 6 figures, and even then knowing the facts and the risks, I don’t think anyone would suggest it’s an opportunity to cash in.

It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar.

The customer in the article had a non-pornographic image of a naked child. Where they just baby photos? The article doesn't say. The judge threw out the case as a non-issue.

But the guy's career as a doctor is over. His life is devastated.

Would the Best Buy employee have reported the innocent image if there wasn't the chance of compensation? Depends on what the image actually was, of course.

The bottom line is that paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.

I find it hard to believe computer techs encountering real child open need to be incentivised to report it.

>The bottom line is that paying people to report crimes in certain situations inevitably results in many more false alarms, which can be irreversibly damaging to the accused.

False alarm or not, paid or not, the Best Buy guy only identified and turned the pictures over to authorities. He did not file the criminal charge and had no influence on that process. There are many more safe guards in place, the FBI and the prosecutor and the prosecutors boss. They made the decision based on the pictures, and yet another safe guard was the judge.

Your point is taken and well received about the damage being done, but that has nothing to do with the Best Buy guy/payments. The FBI/prosecutor could each have independently made the decision the photos were not child porn.

Prior to digital cameras, drug stores that used to develop film (maybe still do) were notorious for identifying pictures of crimes (child porn included) and turning them over to authorities. In law school there was a pretty well known case of one such defendant who was the grandfather and the photos were of the grandkids running through the sprinklers in the yard naked. I won’t mention the outcome, but charges were filed and either way the damage was done, but is it the fault of the film developer? Does it really matter if the developer was paid or not?

> It's not just about planting fake evidence. It's primarily about being incentivised to lower the bar.

Yes, people do bad things without monetary incentive. It could just as easily be that some employee didn't like some 'jerk' customer. Well, maybe I will let the FBI harass them.

> Given that these people are not trained law enforcement, are typically low paid, and there is no chain of custody of the equipment whatsoever there is an incentive and real opportunity here to make crime in order to cash in.

Even you're only looking at one aspect of things. Even if all the Geek squad employees are completely honest, now this gives an actual child pornographer's lawyer a way to cause enough reasonable doubt to get his client off.

I seriously doubt that. Just looking at the metadata of the files should be enough to clarify what happened.

And anything obtained in the raid of their home wouldn't be subject to such reasonable doubt.

The only way I could see things happening the way you suggest is if law enforcement doesn't examine the evidence digitally before raiding the home. If the evidence then turns out to be planted, any evidence found in the home might be thrown out due to it being an illegal search.

But in that case the prornographer will still have been publicly revealed. And the feds will have a geek squad to investigate as well.

Isn't flagging pictures making a suggestion so that a real law enforcement officer can check a reduced number of pictures instead of all pictures in existence? Starting from the real officer making a decision the process is normal law enforcement isn't it?

I had the same thought, but then realized the tech could plant images on the computer himself.

I'm not as worried about techs planting the images because even among people willing to break the law to make money, this is an area often considered too immoral to touch and the consequences are massive if caught. I'm more worried about people over reporting images and people having lives ruined over the mere allegations and investigations. Photos of your own kids running around a water sprinkler on a hot summer day can be enough for some busy body to call inappropriate. Even fully clothed images fall on the copine (spelling?) scale. Or maybe there is some films of people who specialize in looking young, but who are of age (I remember a court case where a court expert testified than someone was clearly underage, until that person showed up and proved they were of age and were a professional in the industry; imagine what could've happened if she hadn't shown up).

It goes beyond that. My father once tried to print some photographs through Wal-Mart. They refused to do so without a copyright waiver from the photographer--which was him. They looked at the images, decided they were "too professional", and proceeded to enforce the copyrights of the imaginary professional photographer.

Not only is this troubling from a law enforcement perspective, but it also provided him with a true story he could use to backhandedly brag about how great his photos are, and also an excuse to purchase expensive, top-of-the-line photo printers until the end of time. ~Thanks, Wal-Mart.~

There is good reason to avoid empowering busybodies to enforce laws on other people in public when they would have no standing to do so in a court. We simply can't trust random people to know the laws they purport to enforce, enforce them fairly and impartially, and preserve the rights of those they target for that enforcement. We can't even fully trust professional cops, judges, and lawyers with all that at once, which is why the legal system is set up to be adversarial.

If you witness a crime, you can certainly report it if you feel that's necessary, but paid informants and vigilante enforcers are a few steps too many down a very dark path.

That is definitely the idea. But, the point here concerns the opportunity for crime-making by the incentivized Best Buy employee. Nothing in that process raises the barrier to that happening.

Yeah, but I'm sure there was a case of someone flagged in this exact way for possession of child pornography, and obviously the guy was branded a pedophile by local news, fired from his job, spent months in jail....and in that time, literally no one thought to look at those pictures and make a common sense decision. When he finally managed to get them in front of the judge, it was obvious the only pictures found were of his own kids playing in the kiddie pool outside in the summer.

I think what I want to say is that I have no trust in the process, it's incredibly easy to ruin someone's life permanently.

There are some valid cases for compensating whistleblowers in services fraud, for example, clinics that engage in scamming Medicaid.

These are called Qui Tam (on behalf of the king) cases and some of the largest judgments in all of litigation with quite a few in the billions.