 Alright, so this case starts in 2011, and this is a long-time investigation and it was done by OC Orange County's leading news source of culture and entertainment, OC Weekly. This is where I first found some of the article, and this is a series of craziness here. And I love the caption here, it says, by dropping off your computer, you wave your fourth amendment rights, the FBI-Geek Squad. This is a crazy, crazy case. It makes me infuriatingly angry because you have a misabuse of government power. You have them paying off informants to find evidence on people. This is, there's nothing good about any of this. So let's start with a guy who brings his computer in 2011 and brings his computer into the Eek Squad because it won't boot. So he drops it off there and he sought assistance. At the time, nobody knew the company's repair addictions, routinely search customers' devices for files that could earn them $500 windfalls as FBI informants. Yes. And some of you are going, wait, this is old news, this is old news. Yeah, this did happen a while ago and like I said, we started in 2011 and we led to this January 4th as when this first started coming to light. And in short, what they did was find an image, the Eek Squad did, that appeared to be child porn so they properly alerted authorities. Now I think that is a, if you find something like that, if you find someone doing something illegal, calling the police, calling the proper authorities is a reasonable first step for this because you are not the judge or jury. We have a legal system here, albeit flawed, it's what we have and they followed the procedure. What we didn't know was that they were getting paid for the procedure. That is not, I don't expect if I call and report a crime occurring if someone's breaking into a car and I call, I don't expect to get paid on that. I'm doing it because it's part of being a good citizen in society. And I understand, plus that I have not had to deal with this at my business. We have not had anyone bring anything in such as this and run into a problem. But they find the image but this is where it gets a little disturbing that they were searching for the image. And I say that because it won't boot them doing a deep scan and finding what they referred to as the Jenny image because of the series of photos, they found a single photo on this person's computer and they did it in the unallocated space. So they went searching for this. But it didn't sound like this came in as a data recovery job, which makes it that much more confusing. It's a computer that won't boot. If your computer doesn't boot, I don't turn it into a data recovery job unless you request it. We charge a lot of money for that. Everyone does. Data recovery is technical and deep and that's not what the, based on what we learned here, it was part of it. Now because of them, because the GeeksCraft was getting paid, that led to a dismissal. And here's part of the problem. This is the way the law works. You have to prove that you knew it was on your hard drive. Just being on the hard drive, especially in unallocated space, we have all kinds of crap that gets on our hard drive. We have images that are cached from the web browsers and maybe that's proof he was going to the site. It may be used as evidence, but you have to prove he knew it was on there. The fact that they went hunting for it, that's where the concerning part comes in. The more concerning is when you have people who aren't acting no longer as a good citizen by just reporting something illegal, they're getting paid incentives to do it. Well, now you've broke your trust in that person's testimony. So now I have someone who's being paid to find dirt on me who has no direct connection. If I make 500 bucks this guy has to deal with the law, you can see how that's a problem. So that actually caused it to be dismissed. Now, the other disturbing part about this is what if, and I don't know the details enough, but I'm assuming this guy was innocent, they dismissed it. But let's play it the other way. You've paid informants, they find a treasure trove of it, they find the guy, but then the evidence gets dismissed because of this. So once you break following due process, that's a big problem. You could have screwed up a real case. I don't think this one's a real case because the other problem the judge had was the FBI and I've decided to start doctoring the details of when they searched it and how they searched it and what they searched for, which has also led to dismissal of it, which again, now you've got gross abuse of government power. So at the same time, and this goes over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, let's dig into this more. They did a Freedom of Information Act, and it turns out that, yes, yesterday they filed this lawsuit. They have basically this relationship circumvents computer owners' Fourth Amendment rights to search and seizure. So this becomes another big problem. And this is such a crazy story. I'm really hoping more of this comes to light, and I want people to really stop and think about that. For example, a documentary for like the Geek Squad employees only alert the FBI when they happen to find illegal materials during a manual search of images on a vice that the FBI does not direct those employees to actively find illegal content. That's still fuzzy. What are they manually going through on there? And also, if it's in the unallocated space, why is it in the unallocated space? And what are they searching for? It sounds like they went on a fishing expedition. So I'm kind of keeping an eye on this case. I've followed it from the inception until it's come here. And there's still some transparency. I think they had some stuff redacted. They also plan to continue challenging the FBI. Stonewalling in court later this spring. In the meantime, you can read the documents produced here and here. And I'll leave all the links of where the progress is. And you can actually read the different. They actually have all the documents on here that they've gotten so far. And they've done a lot of redacting on these documents. So this is where law should be very transparent in the way things are handled. If the FBI is paying them, we really should know about it. And Geeks Squad, that's scary for people that work there. I'm willing if maybe some people work for Geeks Squad, they can throw some comments below and shed some light into more details. Or my guess to be everyone's like being real quiet. You're like, look, we don't want to get in trouble. This is a big FBI investigation. But you should not have to surrender your rights. And especially when you talk about the potential for planting evidence here, some kid at Geeks Squad, they're not notoriously overpaid people. So 500 bucks, that's a pretty decent incentive. I hate to think that they would do something like this. But hey, I can make 500 bucks by dropping an image on there. That is, oh, yeah. This is a really crazy, crazy thing. And the fact that the FBI basically got the case dismissed because the judge was angry at them and they were manipulating the evidence just, it really makes me mad. This is an insane case. I'm going to keep following. But I want to make you guys aware of it and share your thoughts in the comments below. Let me know what you think of this. But this is some pretty crazy stuff.