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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.
The wide and normal use of unique identifiers in documents at a police level is news.
Wonder what US and UK police get tracked with?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
But governments can be trusted with built-in encryption backdoors. Hmm.
This is the future.
Criminals can be made, and busted by the same service.
It seems like the perfect use.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
He was only charged and arrested for, effectively, embezzlement. He was making money from selling state surveillance data without sharing the profits, thus criminally depriving his organization from their own take of the criminal proceeds.
No one, nor their immediate families, of that surveillance system should be allowed to continue existing.