French Cop Arrested For Selling Sensitive Law Enforcement Info On The Dark Web
from the all-the-best-jobs-are-the-inside-ones dept
The problem with giving law enforcement access to so many databases full of personal info and so many tech tools to fight crime is that, inevitably, these will be abused. This isn't a law enforcement problem, per se. It's a people problem. When the job demands the best people but still needs to maintain minimum staffing levels, things like this happen:
A French police officer has been charged and arrested last week for selling confidential data on the dark web in exchange for Bitcoin.
[...]
French authorities also say the officer advertised a service to track the location of mobile devices based on a supplied phone number. He advertised the system as a way to track spouses or members of competing criminal gangs. Investigators believe Haurus was using the French police resources designed with the intention to track criminals for this service.
He also advertised a service that told buyers if they were tracked by French police and what information officers had on them.
The discovery of the officer's misconduct came to light after French police shut down a dark web market. That there was a cop selling cop stuff to criminals on the dark web is inevitable. If it wasn't this investigation, any of the dozens of others happening around the world would have uncovered a law enforcement officer doing bad things. Two of the federal agents involved in the Silk Road investigation ended up being charged with money laundering and wire fraud after they stole Bitcoin and issued fake subpoenas to further their own criminal ends.
Again, it's a people problem -- one that's present anywhere people are given power and access not present in most jobs. The problem is government agencies, in particular, tend not to hold their own employees accountable and work hard to thwart their oversight. The more brazen examples of government malfeasance are enabled by the dozens of smaller infractions that go unpunished until they're the subject of a lawsuit or government investigation.
More to the point, this is exactly why no government agency -- not to mention the private companies involved -- should be allowed to utilize encryption backdoors, as the EFF's Director of Cybersecurity, Eva Galperin, pointed out on Twitter. It's not just about the hundreds of malicious hackers who will see an inviting, new attack vector. It's that no one -- public or private sector -- can be completely trusted to never expose or misuse these avenues of access. And since that's a fact of life, sometimes the best solution is to remove the temptation.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: backdoors, dark web, encryption, france, police, police database
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
So, regulate Google and Facebook to prevent accumulation!
Of course, you hedge with "completely" because the solution is OBVIOUS.
As always, your scale for focus is limited to one Frog! NEVER even mention globalist mega-corporations KNOWN since Snowden to provide data on EVERYONE to NSA with "direct access".
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Humans do surprise me anymore.
And be right about them.
As a police officer I could have placed a Dongle on the computer, Then QUIT, and used it to remote access the system to find any info I needed. And probably never been caught, until someone had to Check/fix/update the hardware..
Which could be YEARS in the future..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Lawyer harder
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Wow, arrested‽
In most American departments, that would net the cop nothing more than some unexpected time off. Maybe they'd be pushed to resign and become a cop one town over.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
cool german polic cd, french stuff, usa stuff
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
He also advertised a service that told buyers if they were tracked by French police and what information officers had on them.
Sounds like he was just making the French police GDPR compliant.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]