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French Officer Caught Selling Access To State Surveillance System On the Darkweb (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "A French police officer has been charged and arrested last week for selling confidential data on the dark web in exchange for Bitcoin," reports ZDNet. French authorities caught him after they took down the "Black Hand" dark web marketplace. Sifting through the marketplace data, they found French police documents sold on the site. All the documents had unique identifiers, which they used to track down the French police officer who was selling the data under the name of Haurus.
Besides selling access to official docs, they also found he ran 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.
Besides selling access to official docs, they also found he ran 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.
you have to give credit to a China-like approach: swift bullet to the head to deter all future people
China executed a few people for selling baby formula laced with melamine. Since then they have had ... dozens more incidents of intentionally contaminated food.
"Shooting people in the head" is NOT a deterrent to people that don't think they will get caught, and it is an easy excuse to NOT fix the systemic problems of poor regulation, corrupt food safety inspectors, nobody double checking the checkers, etc.
The contaminated formula was sold for years, killing many Chinese babies, and was only discovered when it was exported to New Zealand, and the melamine was detected by NZ food inspectors. Most other Chinese food scandals also were detected by foreigners.
In the French case, the solution is not to "shoot the cop" but to ask why he had access to so much information in the first place. For instance, to get GPS info on a phone, he should have needed his ID, a PIN or password, and a valid warrant. Yet he apparently needed none of those things. This is far more than "one bad cop". It is a rotten broken system. None of their internal systems or cross checks caught this guy. It was only revealed by outside info.
Breakdown of trust in the government strikes at the heart of society.
Some mistrust of government is healthy for a society. It is too much trust that is dangerous.