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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.
My complete surprise. NEVER saw this one coming.
Let's see. About 10 million Slashdot posters have been predicting this.
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".
But governments can be trusted with built-in encryption backdoors. Hmm.
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.
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.
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.