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Ex Police Officer Used Law Enforcement Tech to Hack Women’s Explicit Photos
- jaywalk 4y agoThe title is a bit clickbaity and misleading. The tech he used gave him information on his targets, which he then provided to a hacker. There are no details about what the hacker did, but he probably used social engineering and/or guessed passwords to gain access to the target Snapchat accounts. The law enforcement tech in question (Accurint) was not directly used in the hacks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- superkuh 4y ago>The law enforcement tech in question (Accurint) was not directly used in the hacks. Ah yes. It was just used to collect "meta-data" not accessible through legal means. Totally harmless.
- econonut 4y agoDid you read the article? Sounds to me like that "meta-data" is all accessible and the tool speeds up the process of collecting that data. I recall tools being posted to Hacker News that help a person find all social media accounts linked to a name. Doesn't sound too different. > Accurint, a product of data brokerage firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions, is advertised to law enforcement agencies as a tool that can quicken investigations and “discover non-obvious connections between people that might not otherwise be known.” Combining databases of public and non-public information, Accurint can provide detailed information about a person, including their phone numbers, relatives and associates, employers and social media profiles associated with their email account.
- socialismisok 4y agoThe cop was trained to use this tool, and likely would not have had the technical know how to achieve this on his own. The existence of similar tools doesn't reduce the abuse the officer committed.
- econonut 4y agoAnd the comment thread were in is in reference to the title being clickbaity and misleading. And trained to use this tool? It doesn't take training to type a person's name into a textfield. Try going to Google and typing in a full name and city. Chances are you'll find the address, past addresses, phone numbers and roommates and family members. Probably not for yourself because most people on this site understand tech, but try it for some of your less tech/privacy aware friends.
- socialismisok 4y ago"it's no different from Google" seems pretty factually wrong to me.
- nickthegreek 4y agoI have access to Accurint through my work, it is one of the most powerful lookup services I have ever seen.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- socialismisok 4y agoI don't think it's necessary to apply that distinction. The cop had these women's accounts hacked, he used a number of tools and connections to achieve that goal. One of the tools used was this piece of tech, but it was only a single link in the chain. Ultimately the story is "cop abuses access to tech to exploit women".
- luckylion 4y ago"Ex cop uses oil-refinery to run over woman".
- socialismisok 4y agoCome on, that's reduction to an absurd degree. The cop used special access to technology directly to get the information on these women.
- luckylion 4y agoOf course, it's meant to show the problem in that argument. It's all part of the chain. A more accurate headline could be "Ex cop paid hacker to hack women", but that doesn't sound quite as good. If there's a complete list of passwords for every citizen at Accurint and the hacker was just a middle man because the "ex cop" doesn't want to touch a computer but he gives them the username + password, then yes, he "used law enforcement tech to hack them". But it doesn't sound like that's what happened.
- strix_varius 4y agoIt's intuitively clear that your rebuttal is a poor one made in bad faith, but we might as well get into why: I could use an "oil-refinery" to run over someone. I have equal access to cars and gas stations to the police. However, I couldn't use Accurint as part of a chain of tools to extract explicit photos of someone. Access to Accurint is a privilege of the police. Without this person's abuse of the elevated societal privilege that police get, he wouldn't have been able to extort his victims. He'd still be a shitty person, with all the same motives and lack of morals, but without the power his police network gave him, he would have been impotent to achieve his goals.
- frgtpsswrdlame 4y agoSidenote: how come when a police officer does something and gets fired for it, the headlines always state 'ex police officer?' The headline reads to me as if he was not a police officer at the time of the offense but the article reads as if he was. It feels confusing on purpose.
- airza 4y agoWell, as the second sentence of the article says, it seems relevant here because he was able to use the application… with his law enforcement credentials.
- rolph 4y agoso hes not a cop anymore, then uses credentials provided by previous employment to access an LEO app, and commit a crime. this is beyond what one individual has done, there are levels of involvment. this crime was enabled by others.
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoAgreed. If the offense happens while the person was an police officer, it should read "Police officer used..." and the article should explain that they got fired for it.
- socialismisok 4y agoThe media loves to protect the institution of the police. If they can downplay the idea that maybe this is indicative of a broader problem with policing by saying "former" police officer, they'll jump at the chance.
- khazhoux 4y agoThe media is complicit in making police appear to be passive bystanders when whey kill people. The most egregious example is "OIS". Instead of "A police officer shot and killed a 22-year-old man on Friday," news articles will say: * "22-year-old man dead after an officer-involved shooting on Friday." * Or even more mangled: "An officer-involved shooting involving a 22-year-old man occurred on Friday."
- jimcavel888 4y ago
- raldi 4y agoRemember when people used to say, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” on the topic of whether there should be backdoors for law enforcement?
- maerF0x0 4y agoThey never remember events like these, because it doesn't serve their purposes or narrative
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shadowgovt 4y agoOh, don't worry. People still say that. (Mostly because this sort of story is quite rare. It should happen zero times, but plenty of people are very happy with the status-quo tradeoff. I mean, we're talking about folks that the public trusts to carry lethal weapons openly, in spite of the damage they do with them; access to espionage tools are way down the security-and-safety-concern ladder from the Glock Gen 5s on the officers' hips).
- superkuh 4y agoA slight clarification: It's rare that it is caught and prosecuted. It's common enough within authority spies and enforcers that they have a word for it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
- r00fus 4y agoGrotesquely orwellian.
- shadowgovt 4y agoThat still makes it rare, since the vast, vast bulk of the citizenry isn't married to / dating spies and enforcers. I'm not implying this should just be a "cost of doing business," but I am implying that most of the citizenry has implicitly accepted it as such, so we can't expect democracy to fix this issue.
- funynotfunny 4y agooh my god, where
- socialismisok 4y agoMaybe it's time to reevaluate the role of police in our society. As an institution we've given them too many tools to exploit people, steal from people, do violence to people, and lie under oath. When I read stories like this, of which there are many, or see studies that say 40% of police admit to commiting domestic violence, it sure makes me believe we've hired exactly the wrong set of people to hold power.
- para_parolu 4y agoBut do you hire them?
- socialismisok 4y agoOur taxes fund them, so in a sense, yes. We could fund civilian organizations to perform many of the functions of police, and do so without weapons and oppressive technology. Then reduce our police forces.
- wlesieutre 4y agoFor the record, the police are a civilian organization, the fact that they like to gear up in military equipment and pretend they're in a war is part of the problem
- socialismisok 4y agoOf course. But it's common enough lingo to use phrases like "civilian oversight" to refer to non police community members. The intent is to suggest unarmed, non law enforcement organizations.
- NegativeLatency 4y agoPortland actually has such an organization: https://www.portland.gov/streetresponse https://www.portland.gov/streetresponse
- mchanson 4y ago
- shadowgovt 4y agoI'm willing to wager Louisville Metro has a policy for an officer surrendering their service weapon upon retirement or discharge. I wonder if they take locking account access as seriously.
- liminal 4y agoThe officers "resigned" so presumably they can be hired again one town over.
- noir_lord 4y agoThe headline is bad but the story is somehow worse, he then used them to extort them. FFS. > Prosecutors recommended that Wilson receive “a sentence at the lowest end of the applicable sentencing guidelines” as a result of his guilty plea to both the “Slushygate” charge and the cyberstalking charge. Because of course they did.
- yaur 4y agoWhich, if you made it through TFA is 3 years of probation, no jail time.
- usmannk 4y agoThe 3yrs probation was for a different person. Not the one involved in the headline.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nofinator 4y agoSlushygate? > "a series of incidents in which Wilson and other officers assaulted pedestrians by throwing beverages out of unmarked patrol vehicles, sometimes filming their exploits" Double FFS. What a scumbag bully.
- mikerathbun 4y agoWhy put all that time and energy to get naked photos of women just to extort them not for money or sex, but for more photos? Is the Internet running out of porn? This seems like a high risk low reward crime.
- shortstuffsushi 4y agoIt is, of course, a power thing. Yes, there's an endless supply of porn, but the "real thing," especially if gathered without consent or explicitly agains their will, is "more satisfying." To be clear, not advocating for this.
- maerF0x0 4y agoI have to say this is one area that I actually support the defund the police narrative. Privacy and security should be a sort of digital human right, and rather than have a perverse incentive to not disclose holes (even if it's simply weak handling of an indviduals own data), police should "Serve and protect" by suggesting or even helping secure an individual's privacy and security. What might that look like? Perhaps every time Accurint is used against a target they should be emailed/mailed/delivered a report that details all the findings? That would help someone be better protected from malicious actors.
- b112 4y agoThe law just needs to catch up with meat-space laws. An example, I don't know of a Western style democracy, where it is legal for a cop to walk by your house, notice an open window, and crawl through it... And then start searching your house, afterwards claiming "It wasn't breaking and entering! And all this stuff was just laying around!" The law should be 100% the same for digital "stuff", in that, there needs to always, always, always be a justifiable reason, a warrant as well, before even the thought of a search can occur. No back door usage, no "cyber tools", even if the phone is unlocked, on desk, nope! An open port(al), eg a window, doesn't give any reason for the search to be valid. In terms of legalized back doors, and in encryption, that is 100% counter to all of the above. Case in point, if you want to know the content of someone's phone? You can lock them up until they provide access -- after a court order requiring them to. EG, contempt of court, or some such. (Even if the above doesn't jive in your legal locale, there are ways to enable the same. New tech, new laws, to enable the same concepts, and freedoms, and security, and privacy, our societies have known for centuries...)
- okwubodu 4y ago> An example, I don't know of a Western style democracy, where it is legal for a cop to walk by your house, notice an open window, and crawl through it... Police can generally use open doors (and windows?) as “probable cause” to enter in the US.
- 4y ago
- firasd 4y agoSnowden said these kinds of pics were passed around at the NSA too.. And here's a case of how California Highway Patrol officers used to pass around pictures from phones they scanned https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Disturbing-texts-in-CHP-officers-nude-photo-5846327.php https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Disturbing-texts-in-CHP... Basically, beyond the general ethics that should restrain individuals from non-consensual distribution of intimate imagery, and the policies on social networks and other institutional environments banning this kind of activity, lies the domain of law enforcement... and if they have the ability to access people's phones like this then they have an obligation to be scrupulous about their behavior
- some_random 4y ago
- aliqot 4y ago
- shmde 4y agoSo what ? But still he managed to expose the massive levels of spearheaded snooping and spying done by the American government. I would've still smoked the pipe dream of having privacy and security in my country when in reality you can be tracked all the time without your consent in the name of "National Security"
- acheron 4y ago
- draw_down 4y ago
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThere's no real evidence Snowden was a Russian spy. The best people can come up with is that he's in Russia, ignoring that he was stopped there en route to Ecuador.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- i_love_cookies 4y ago
- joemazerino 4y agoThis sucks and the cop involved is a man of low moral standing. He deserves what he gets.
- y-c-o-m-b 4y agoHe deserves far worse than he gets, trust me.
- Magi604 4y ago"In June, the DOJ announced that Wilson, 36 at the time, had pleaded guilty to a cyberstalking charge as well as to a charge related to what LMPD has called “Slushygate,” a series of incidents in which Wilson and other officers assaulted pedestrians by throwing beverages out of unmarked patrol vehicles, sometimes filming their exploits." Me thinks there are other problems within that particular police department.
- drooby 4y agoWhat the fff… This sounds like McLovin was involved.
- shove 4y ago
- rossmohax 4y agoNever used Snapchat, but isn't it main feature that messages get deleted automatically and have very short TTL?
- kornhole 4y agoI thought so too, but someone needs to set that in the message which perhaps they forget. The problem with Snapchat is that it is not E2EE (End to end encrypted). Snapchat seems to sit in a strange place of being a little more private than Facebook and other big tech messengers but not as private as E2EE messengers such as Matrix, XMPP, Briar, Signal.. I suppose it is because they revenue is ad based and they need some data for ad targeting. Their future seems very tenuous to me.
- trasz 4y ago>Prosecutors recommended that Wilson receive “a sentence at the lowest end of the applicable sentencing guidelines” slow clap
- ospzfmbbzr 4y ago
- 93po 4y agoI imagine it's because women are overwhelmingly the victim and target of these invasions. Also please don't victim blame.
- ospzfmbbzr 4y ago
- 93po 4y ago
- MichaelCollins 4y agoYou are moaning about the headline containing accurate information (that the victim was a woman) because it offends your weird politics.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoYou seem to be reacting emotionally when seeing that headline, yeah.
- imwillofficial 4y agoI wonder how this third party hacker hacked into the Snapchat accounts
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThe usual account takeover playbook involves mining socials etc for the answers to password reset questions, and given the LexisNexis mentions in the article I would guess that’s what happened.
- imwillofficial 4y agoThanks, do you know where I can find more info on normal methods? This “playbook”
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThere have been a couple episodes of Darknet Diaries that have talked about this, I think “The Pizza Problem” and “Dirty Comms” maybe? He covers some SIM swapping stuff as well, and the arms race between companies security teams and the quickly professionalizing account takeover market. It’s a bit annoying to Google for obvious reasons, but there was a huge leak of celebrity photos in the early aughts that was similar; iCloud passwords reset because celebs used their actual pets names as their password questions etc.
- UberFly 4y ago"Prosecutors recommended that Wilson receive “a sentence at the lowest end of the applicable sentencing guidelines”... Ugg. Let's actually do the opposite and send a message. This is a sexual predator.
- anonlmpd 4y agoAnon account because I don't want this connected to my real name that I use on HN for fear of backlash. The LMPD is horrible, you can see plenty of their failings outlined on the /r/Louisville subreddit. I live in KY and have worked with the LMPD directly and indirectly though a past employer. I have been in the "back room" and heard them speak surrounded by people they felt safe around. It's pretty much everything you can imagine: sexism, homophobia, racism, misogyny, and the list goes on. They way they talked about the people they ostensively "serve" was absolutely disgusting, literally made me sick to my stomach, they had complete distain for citizens. This specific visit happened in 2018 IIRC. My eyes should have been opened after 2013/BLM but they weren't, what I saw/heard was shocking and completely altered my perception of the police, my mind was fertile ground for when 2020 rolled around. At of mid-2020 I was in full support of police reform but resisted "ACAB". At this point no sane people could support the police and I fervently believe ACAB, the is no reform for this horribly broken system. It must be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up (without using the same ~~people~~ bullies).
- bbarn 4y agoAnyone who wants the job of a cop, for the pay that it offers, should immediately be suspect. I have held this belief my adult life and see it proven time and time again. The only motivation to do that job with that level of stress is either seeking power/authority or very rarely some altruistic motivation. Which of those things do we hear about more?
- shortstuffsushi 4y ago> for the pay that it offers Could you explain your thinking here? Cops are, at least near me, paid quite well, have good perks, get paid a ridiculous amount of overtime, and have pensions. This, plus the power of the position, seems obviously attractive.
- CSMastermind 4y agoOr it's just a job. I served in the Marines (infantry) and got out about 10 years ago. A handful of guys I served with became cops or US Marshalls or prison guards. Because that was the best job they could get with their skill sets. Lots of police departments, at least back then, were actively recruiting people leaving the service. And as a civilian I'm old enough now to have interacted with many police officers in many different contexts in many different places across the US. One or two of them were power tripping psycopaths for sure. But the VAST majority were just men and women doing a job like anyone else.
- pGuitar 4y agoI wished someone leaked current NSA projects like Snowden did back then... We would probably be very disappointed to see how little changed and how worst it is.
- seaourfreed 4y agoI'm sure he was only able to access their data with a WARRANT. Just kidding, we all know that the protections for government to get access to our private data aren't in place. We must have WARRANTs required (with technical confirmation) before they can get access to private data.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoWhat a thoroughly despicable human being! That's also why I'll never keep nude photos of myself or other people on my devices. I even refused to accept such material from girlfriends. Even if it isn't me who gets hacked, I might get blamed... I don't even want to come close to such an allegation.
- DoItToMe81 4y agoVery curious as to how this develops. Does Snapchat have a police backdoor for account access? Does LexisNexis store password leaks and sell them to the police? There are many things not being said.
- kornhole 4y agoWhy does Snapchat not have E2EE (End to end encryption)?
- monksy 4y agoThe LAED bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4051 https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/405...) to break encryption for LEOs is still on the table. Please contact your useless-congress-criter* to rub this in their face. https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member * I sent a letter to Duckworth stating my concern. She copied and pasted a fear mongering response that "but bad people may use it and lindsay graham is perfectly capible of sorting through all of this". Also, if you know better than I do.. please follow up with more resources of private data being abused by the government. (i.e. loveint, etc )
- rossdavidh 4y agoNot only is this dude a sleazebag, he also sounds pretty stupid. He basically announced, to lots of people, that he was committing felonies, and did it in a way which leaves a large electronic paper trail, and then brags about it to yet more people. Then, he did other stuff ("Slushygate") which draws attention to himself and his department as a source of trouble, and then presumably is surprised when he gets discovered.
- mxuribe 4y agoBut part of me is somewhat happy that the dude in question is NOT so intelligent...because i sure don't want smarter criminals, and worse yet, don't want smarter criminal cops! I want criminals and criminal cops easier to catch! (Of course, i also feel, that we as a society need to figure out how to best ensure criminals and criminal cops don't get created in the first place...or at least minimize such creation as much as possible.)
- inkcapmushroom 4y agoYou can basically guarantee there are smarter criminal cops out there, using the same methods as this guy to steal nudes and sell them to other blackmailers rather than doing it themselves. This guy is obviously too dumb to be the first one to come up with schemes like this.
- mxuribe 4y agoSadly, i'm sure that you are correct.
- theknocker 4y ago
- xenospn 4y agoHey look it's the exact scenario privacy proponents have been warning us about! Who would've thought?