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How The FBI Used Geek Squad To Increase Secret Public Surveillance
In 2011 a gynecology doctor took his computer for repairs at Best Buy's Geek Squad. But the repair technician was a paid FBI informant -- one of several working at Geek Squad -- and the doctor was ultimately charged with possessing child pornography, according to OC Weekly. An anonymous reader quotes their new report:
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 doctor's lawyer argues Best Buy became an unofficial wing of the FBI by offering $500 for every time they found evidence leading to criminal charges. |
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| There are no conversations. |
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| cauz |
March 12, 2017, 12:31 p.m. |
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| Olivia Munn |
The word 'geek' today does not mean what it used to mean. A geek isn't the skinny kid with a pocket protector and acne. There can be computer geeks, video game geeks, car geeks, military geeks, and sports geeks. Being a geek just means that you're passionate about something. |
| Elisabeth Kubler-Ross |
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths. |
| Britt Daniel |
I wish records got made faster and looser with less thought in them, but since touring is so much more profitable than records, you spend so much time on the road that it's hard to work on them. And the records get further and further apart. |
| Art Garfunkel |
Records have images. There are wet records and dry records. And big records. |
| Franz Kafka |
The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving. |
| Paul Farmer |
You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education. |
| Peter Capaldi |
The big reason that 'Doctor Who' is still with us is that every single viewer who ever turned in to watch this show, at any age, at any time in its history, took it into their heart - because 'Doctor Who' belongs to all of us. Everyone made 'Doctor Who.' |
| Gilbert K. Chesterton |
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. |
| George Hamilton |
I'm my own doctor. I have a group of people who call me up on a weekly basis. I'm a 'doctor' without a license. |
| Olivia Munn |
A geek isn't the skinny kid with a pocket protector and acne. There can be computer geeks, video game geeks, car geeks, military geeks, and sports geeks. Being a geek just means that you're passionate about something. |
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I had a dream that I had to take my cat to the bomb squad. What does that mean? I don't know. It was an office building though.
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Silk Road investigator gets more jail time for second Bitcoin theft
A Secret Service agent already convicted to 71 months in prison for swiping Silk Road Bitcoins will get another two years for a separate Bitcoin theft, Reuters reports. Shaun Bridges pleaded guilty to stealing 1,606 Bitcoins -- worth around $360,000 at the time and now valued at over $11 million -- from a Bitcoin wallet controlled by the Secret Service. The theft was discovered when the agency tried to return some of the coins after they were seized from the European BitStamp exchange.
That sounds crazy, but there's more. B...
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What's the Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written?
An anonymous reader writes:
Stuxnet is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written, given the difficulty of the objective: Deny Iran's efforts to obtain weapons grade uranium without need for diplomacy or use of force, John Byrd, CEO of Gigantic Software (formerly Director of Sega and SPM at EA), argues in a blog post, which is being widely shared in developer circles, with most agreeing with Byrd's conclusion.
He writes...
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Lawsuit Reveals How Facebook Profited Off Confused Children: Report
Documents outlining how Facebook profited off children are expected to be made public soon, according to Reveal News of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), who requested the documents. From a report:
In a report about the trove of previously-sealed documents, Reveal News explains that Facebook has previously faced lawsuits for failing to refund charges made by children playing games on Facebook. According to Reveal, the children did not know that their parent's credit card was stored on the platform when they cli...
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An alien-obsessed student from Brazil has mysteriously disappeared while working on his own secret X-File.
Bruno Borges, 24, vanished from his home in Rio Branco on March 27, leaving behind his bedroom decked out floor to ceiling in “Da Vinci Code”-style alien language and satanic signs, the Mirror reported.
Modal Trigger
Bruno BorgesFacebook
Some of the elaborate writings in the room are passa...
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Did Elon Musk Create Bitcoin?
EditorDavid 5 hours ago 108
An anonymous reader quotes CryptoCoinsNews: It should be no surprise that the elusive hunt for Satoshi, often referred to as the father of Bitcoin, has led to the theory that Elon Musk has been hiding a big secret from all of us. Sahil Gupta, a computer science student at Yale University and former intern at SpaceX, believes just this... Bitcoin was written by someone with mastery of C++, a language Musk has utilized heavily at SpaceX. Musk's 2013 Hyperloop paper also provided insight into his deep understanding of cryptography and economics...
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merry christmas doctor coke
This post is a comment.
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Hacker Group Leaks 'NSA's Top Secret Arsenal of Digital Weapons'
Hacker group 'The Shadow Brokers', which last year allegedly released top-secret tools that the National Security Agency had used to break into the networks of foreign governments and other espionage targets, today said it is disappointed with President Donald Trump, and released more such alleged tools. From a report on Motherboard:
On Saturday, The Shadow Brokers, a hacker or group of hackers that has previously dumped NSA hacking tools, released more alleged exploits. The group published a password for an encrypted cache of files they distributed last year. "Be considering this our form of protest," the group wrote in a r...
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Startup Still Working On 'Immortal Avatars' That Will Live Forever
Startup Eternime, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, is still working on "immortal avatars" that, after your death, will continue interacting with your loves ones from beyond the grave. An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
Give Eternime access to your social media profiles and the startup's algorithms will scrape your posts and interactions to build a profile... The algorithms will study your memories and mannerisms. They'll learn how to be "you"... Eternime was announced in 2014 after Ursache developed the idea during the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Program. He wasn't entirely sure if he should develop the project fur...
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Malware Developer Who Used Spam Botnet To Pay For College Gets No Prison Time (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
The operator of a 77,000-strong spam botnet was sentenced to two years probation and no prison time after admitting his crime and completely reforming his life. The former botnet operator is now working for a cybersecurity company, and admitted his actions as soon as the FBI knocked on his door back in 2013. The botnet operator, a 29-year-old from Santa Clara, California, says he was tricked by fellow co-schemers who told him they were not doing anything wrong by infecting computers with malware because they were not accessing private information such as banking...
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