No, anyone who remembers the Best Buy/FBI debacle knows that this statement is very well-grounded in reality. If you took your laptop to Best Buy for repairs, the FBI got a copy of your hard drive contents.
Nowhere in that entire case does anyone allege that the FBI was regularly being sent entire copies of the hard drive contents of best buy customers.
The FBI merely taught workers how to identify and report CSAM. There is nothing illegal about that.
EFF only sued because their FOIA request for info about their training process was denied, and after the FBI argued why they shouldn't grant the request, EFF agreed and backed down.
Not only did the EFF agree to dismiss the case, their blog post claim of a supposed Fourth Amendment violation was never even argued in any of their filings at all.
In my opinion, to construe a simple disagreement/misunderstanding over a FOIA request denial (which was proven as legal and justified) as "If you took your laptop to Best Buy for repairs, the FBI got a copy of your hard drive contents"... is patently and demonstrably false, and does not make any sense whatsoever.
So you think in this case the EFF was wrong? It seems that way, but I'm not sure I fully understand what you meant. Why wouldn't the training process be public?
Another thing is that while perhaps entire copies of customers' hard drives weren't sent to the FBI, the Best Buy repair staff dug through the contents of people's hard drives. If I have a software issue with my OS (or whatever the repairs were about), I wouldn't expect the repair staff to look at my photos. Obviously, is CP was set as the wallpaper or something, you can't miss it, but why is it OK to look into random folders looking for suspicious files?
You’re making the same mistake the EFF’s post wants you to make.
Employees were trained on how to identify and respond to CSAM. The training material was not released based on the FOIA request.
That doesn’t imply that the employees were poking around above and beyond where they had to look to do their job, and it doesn’t imply that full copies of your hard drive are being copied to the FBI.
