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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.
Oh, you're precious. In China, the bullet to the head would be the person who uncovered the person in power who was selling information because "social harmony" prevents admitting to these sorts of abuses and fueling any sort of notion that the Chinese government can't adequately control its own police force. Now, maybe the actual person selling the information will "disappear", but that's not even assured. For that a little kickback bribe from all those sales will probably be enough to wash away the crime. In fact, the government might keep paying the guy and just use him as an indefinitely mole.
In a democracy, justice through exposure of criminals can restore trust. In a totalitarian regime, breakdown of trust "never happens". Sure, sometimes you don't get to it quickly enough so you have to either "issue a correction" or maybe even quietly do a "trial" while quickly burying the story in the news. Actually exposing the corruption would only reaffirm every person's own personal experience and might even encourage them to step forward on what they know, and that's something they don't want to have to deal with--a lot of those people are paying them bribes (or somewhere down the chain) to look the other way. No, you want to bury those fuckers as "muckrakers" making up "false accusations" upon "upstanding, outstanding citizens"; they could use a good bullet to the head or some other "accident".
This is why we can't abide backdoors. Their existence presumes that all government and law-enforcement members are trustworthy people.
They are not. And people like this guy will abuse backdoors for his own profit.
It is also the past. If you think police selling information to rich criminals is new, you're very, very ill-informed.
to hide.
So be sure to vote for politicians who will pass laws to give state access to every aspect of your digital life.
And if a policeman passes your location on to your ex partner who has raped and beaten you, it is your fault for having had something to hide.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.