French Officer Caught Selling Access To State Surveillance System On the Darkweb (zdnet.com) 68
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.
If this guy doesn't get the guillotine (Score:2)
How is this news? (Score:5, Funny)
My complete surprise. NEVER saw this one coming.
Let's see. About 10 million Slashdot posters have been predicting this.
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonder what US and UK police get tracked with?
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Yep. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This is why we should have a single electric eye up in space looking down on us. And it should be American. One eye perpetual.
Forget this Five Eyes nonsense. I love France, but trust has limits.
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France isn't one of the 5 eyes...
But it is part of the nine eyes [wikipedia.org].
(France plus Denmark, Netherlands, and Norway.)
Basically that means France shares five eyes intelligence, but is not automatically exempt from intelligence targeting.
Surveillance is optional but... (Score:2)
While I believe that police and intelligence agencies certainly should be paying attention to our digital interactions and activities, I believe it needs to be more selective and carefully targeted than is usually the case. In IT se
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Indeed.
One down, probably a few 1000 more that do this on some scale to go.
needle in a haystack with two straws (Score:2)
No, that's not what was going on.
10 million Slashdot posters were busy advertising how they were going to pile on to the issue with a big "said so" at the first sign of human fallibility (as infallibly projected), despite the original prediction having a zero value add.
In the he-said/she-said fiasco now playing out on the national American stage, you can pretty much bet that the loudest voices in the camp of "well, if the accusers aren't
Re:sometimes, EU is too kind (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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Ah, yes, I'm racist [wikipedia.org]. At least you could try to make an argument, like how the Chinese Dream [wikipedia.org] has mostly supplanted the idea, but then the Chinese Dream in practice is much closer to the worst of the America Dream--unbridled greed in the name of progress. Bringing up rampant corruption is just going to "inconvenience" the narrative--someone who does it to have the money for bribes to advance their career would proves just how many people act in realizing "the Chinese Dream". So, whatever the stated motivat
Bullshit; They shoot peeps for much less. (Score:2)
They save Torture for people they Really don't like.
Fuck.
Re:sometimes, EU is too kind (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Some mistrust of government is healthy for a society. It is too much trust that is dangerous.
Sure, but too much mistrust and society turns into a bunch of smallish gangs with government being seen as just another gang. An early sign of that is when regular citizens start seeing police as a danger to be avoided.
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Parents used to advise kids to find a cop if they get lost. Now they tell them to find a woman with kids and avoid the cops.
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Did anyone care? (Score:4, Funny)
He advertised the system as a way to track spouses.
Ah oui, but we are French! We love freely and let our spouses roam, but we will not accept corruption in our peace officers. Away with you. Monsieur!
Trust (Score:5, Interesting)
But governments can be trusted with built-in encryption backdoors. Hmm.
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But governments can be trusted with built-in encryption backdoors.
Yes, that would certainly give citizens a powerful tool to keep track of those in their government and thus increase trust betw...oh, wait....
Strat
Why bust him? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the future.
Criminals can be made, and busted by the same service.
It seems like the perfect use.
Re:Why bust him? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is also the past. If you think police selling information to rich criminals is new, you're very, very ill-informed.
Hey, politicians? Are you listening? (Score:2)
Here's where the "government only" backdoors to your industry's R&D end up. Doesn't even take North Korea to kidnap spouse and kids of the ones you entrust with sensitive access, all it takes is fucking money!
If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Trust the government! (Score:2)
Forensic security (Score:2)
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To go with the full cost to embed invisible identifiers shows they cant trust any of their gov/mil workers.
Too many people who will never be loyal to France have been granted work deep in gov and mil.
So many with split loyalty who are supporting other nations, their faith.
The only way to keep the flow of information sharing from the NSA, GCHQ is to offer total security over all documents.
The question is why France allowed this rather good system of security to
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And trust is important, but not in the way you think. Human nature means that no matter how much you vet employees, putting them in a position of trust you'll get some rotten ones. You will even have those who were once trustworthy who longer aren't due to some grievance or compromise.
Embedding hidden data into a document has ZERO impact on the trustworthy because they're not selling or givi
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Think of how bad the total loss of information had to get that needed a per document per person in the mil/police tracking
Vetting works well. Think of the NSA, the GCHQ after the 1970's and CIA.
Understand the person. Their politics, their education. The politics of their friends. Who educated them. The politics of their university. Faith and lifestyle.
Friends, bank accounts, spending habits, reading material. Hou
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There is a way. It's an old trick known as a canary trap [wikipedia.org].
Note that manipulating non-meaningful elements like spacing, case and punctuation doesn't work because they are not guaranteed to be preserved. A simple normalization would destroy the watermark.
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It should be possible to encode 5-8 bits of difference in various ways in a page without it being too visible or obvious. Even if a clever adversary were to reformat, transcribe every page they may have stil