If a Best Buy technician is a paid FBI informant, are his searches legal?
This is interesting:<p>> The search of Rettenmaier’s hard drive has a further wrinkle. The image was located on “unallocated space,” which is where deleted items reside on a computer until they are overwritten when the space is needed. Unallocated space is not easily accessed — it requires special forensic software.<p>> Prosecutors said that the Geek Squad technician who searched the unallocated space was merely trying to recover all the data Rettenmaier had asked to be restored. Riddet argued that the technician was going beyond the regular search to deleted material to find evidence the FBI might want.<p>It's not difficult to recreate files that have been deleted but not fully wiped from the disk. But it's also not trivial. If the Best Buy techs are finding things in those regions of the disk then that means they're explicitly looking at what's there. It's not just a matter of, "<i>Hey the desktop wallpaper of this guy's laptop is kiddie porn, I should report this!</i>", these guys are actively searching people's computers on behalf of the Feds.