Best Buy defends practice of informing FBI about child porn it finds

Enlarge / A customer speaks with employees at the Geek Squad counter inside a Best Buy store in Downers Grove, Illinois, on Tuesday, May 23, 2017. (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Nearly 200 pages of documents released Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that Best Buy's top officials have "enjoyed a particularly close relationship" with the FBI for at least a decade, if not longer.

The filings were obtained by the advocacy organization as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in an attempt to better understand how the retail chain sometimes uses its "Geek Squad" tech support service to aid law enforcement. In a document from 2008, the FBI's Louisville, Kentucky, division is described as having a "close liaison with the Geek Squad's management." In some instances, the agency even paid Best Buy employees directly.

The FOIA suit was filed last year in the wake of a federal prosecution of a California doctor, Mark Rettenmaier, who was charged with possession of child pornography in 2014. In court filings from 2015, Rettenmaier claimed that when he took his computer in for repair, Best Buy technicians, at the behest of the government, searched his hard drive without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

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