Ex Police Officer Used Law Enforcement Tech to Hack Women’s Explicit Photos
leoweekly.com
leoweekly.com
(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).
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.
It's real, real hard to get the polity at the national level to care about a 0.2%-of-the-population issue. I don't think we can expect a democratic solution to this issue.
I kinda doubt this guy would have got caught if he wasn't blackmailing the women.
1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468308/google-ceo--if...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin#Sexual_harassment_a...
Some people get it after that. Otherwise, I would see them makes some entertaining mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they still did not see the problem with electronic surveillance.
There are probably millions of Americans who would, without hesitation, hand their unlocked phone to their pastor or a police officer. Your "hand me your unlocked phone" exercise won't really work.
For a uniquely interesting spin on this, you might look at the case of Doug Jensen. After participating in the January 6th events, he willingly went for an interview with the FBI and then gave them his phone and his passwords so they could look.
To me, that seems emblematic of a person who has never in their life been in a outgroup.
The lack of awareness it would take to do that is astounding, but worth paying attention to; there are plenty of folks in the US who have never actually been on the receiving end of state power.
As such they have no way of discerning what that power looks like, much less an appreciation for the real effects of it's use on themselves.
Since the 1970s in the us most people were not impacted by health challenges where they had to do anything, maybe with the exception of aids. I never had to think about getting a vaccination or a health issue that might affect me, I always got my shots for school, never thought about it.
I think the covid vaccination was the first time a lot of adults had to think about a vaccination and there was a lot of pressure to get it (I'm in that category, I never gave vaccination a second thought, got a flu shot every year for example). People in my family who were engineers, always been vaccinated, even in the 50s knew some people with polio got influenced by the anti-vaxer world on facebook and started talking about the dark conspiracy and secret payoffs of us govt health workers. That was very sad to see.
This isn't true, because I've lived here my whole life and experienced zero vaccine requirements since being so young I can't remember. Many that I or my parents chose to get, but those were by choice.
This may be state-dependent.
Though this is all somewhat irrelevant; the government didn’t mandate vaccines in most contexts. Coercion, yes, but not proper mandates. I’m thinking more of having my favorite businesses shut down, arbitrary restrictions that don’t make sense, government bodies ignoring clear law, etc. And I’m in a free state, compared to most others!
To be perfectly fair to her, it is harder to become a police officer in the UK (3years of education), otherwise I would have applied at the local police station, some places in the USA have only 6 weeks of training.
Send her a link to this article. Highlight this part:
> "A former Louisville Metro Police Department officer used law enforcement technology as part of a scheme that involved hacking the Snapchat accounts of young women and using sexually explicit photos and videos they had taken to extort them, federal prosecutors said in court documents filed on Tuesday."
Some people live in an absolute fairytale.
I imagine that if the covid droplets in the air are visible, we would have a much easier time convincing people to wear masks in the beginning of the pandemic.
For instance, you family and friends over. They use your wifi to access illegal content.
The police now want to see everything about you that you ever did. they don’t need to ask. And being white and wealthy will only help you so far.
Everyone is guilty of something. Make enough laws and we will all be guilty of prison time crimes!
No one who studied history ever said this.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
It's not a valid point and has nothing to do with ethics. If you're a gay person, there's nothing unethical about that. But if you happen to live in the Middle East, there's a good chance that your government wants to murder you because of that. Keeping it private is not unethical and doesn't point to you doing anything bad. And it's now impossible to live most of your life without some of it leaking out onto the web, even if you aren't the one actively putting it there yourself. Companies collecting data, people posting stuff about you, etc. If you live any part of your life, it's likely it will end up on the internet without you doing anything.
You see, every year there's one or two toddlers in her class that realize that either they can hit back, or take revenge by stealing those plastic cards in her purse she finds so important. And the other gets the idea they might get some support from their parents if they steal her emergency Jack Daniels bottle and take it to their parents.
With privacy HOW WILL THE POLICE FIND REASONS TO THROW THOSE CHILDREN INTO RE-EDUCATION CENTERS? Without constant surveillance of yet more aspects of those children's lives (OUTSIDE of school or anything perfect, I mean government related, of course). I mean unless every hairdresser tells Youth Services that these are bad parents.
With privacy how will youth services find reasons to throw children of parents who've committed heinous crimes into youth services? Heinous crimes such as abortions or same sex marriages or even ... gone to a protest for those unmentionable rights, or legalizing Satan-juice and Belzebub-smoke? Those parents could even be Jesus-killers, sorry, Jews is the PC term isn't it? Or terro...Muslims. We can't use that as a reason, but obviously children can't be trusted to those parents, so we'll trust them to youth services, you know, where half the girls grow up to be prostitutes, and most boys have more drugrunning arrests than points on their final exams. I mean the ones that actually do their final exams at all. Ahhhhh ... God bless good old American government style child upbringing!
Think of the children! Think of Gladys! Think of the heinous crimes some children might be confronted with! DO YOU WANT BABY JESUS TO DIE?
In other words privacy is bad if and only if the government is near-perfect. If the government is no better (and in fact significantly worse) than the society it serves ... then privacy protects you.
Why? Because people assume that it is highly unlikely that they will be the target of such a search, assume that a warrant would be needed, and in the bigger scheme of things, a backdoor is worth having in case someone who has committed a crime or is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime can be pursued.
So there's a principles / practicality tradeoff that I think people are making.
Further, telling people that the government might spy on you with the purpose of locking you up or fining you comes across as overly paranoid. Again, not saying this hasn't happened in the past or in other regimes, but this just isn't a sizable number of people's experience (in the US or Canada for example).
Rather than directly handing someone an unlocked phone, I like to think of it more like the residents of high-rise buildings who leave their curtains open no matter WHAT they're doing in the apartment. They figure the chances that someone is looking in THEIR window is miniscule even though the technology to do so is cheap and easy to obtain. The thing is, I bet a LOT of high rise residents, especially on higher floors, do leave curtains open all the time.
Meanwhile your nudes are getting stolen by cops.
Anti-privacy people come in a lot of shades.
Some of them like to think of themselves as "good people" who never need to be protected from the law because they believe they always follow the law, therefore, the law is always on their side.
Some of them are holdouts of a bygone age where people championed an open internet coupled with an open society and open government.
There's probably more categories than that, but those are the two I encounter most often on this website. Unfortubately, if you read into what they're sayinf, they hold moral positions on the issue so it's next to impossible to have discourse with them.
I'm pro-privacy: I think we have a fundamental (natural) right to privacy, and I support legislation that practically strengthens that right. But that doesn't mean that I agree with you on everything, and it's unreasonable to expect that.
Safe harbor was probably not the right word; I'm talking about people you can't even have basic privacy conversations with because their worldview is just so baseline different. It's next to impossible to have conversations about privacy with a person who believes you should be able to view all sensitive information about a person because of their belief that a transparent society is analogous to bleach. The people who believe they and their friends are the last bastion of good people on Earth and that they have nothing to hide cannot be reasoned with either.
These are people who won't even say, "privacy is important".
One day, one of these people suddenly quits, moves to Dubai, and buys a Bugatti.
The backdoor is now a front door.
Do you wear clothes around your family?
If the photos were of a pet dog playing the park instead, nobody would be concerned except maybe around realizing that the tech could also be used to expose wrongful material in the same way.
Is that why? We all shower and change clothes on a regular basis(I assume), there's nothing wrong with it. Yet, I'm sure most of us do that in private perhaps only in front of a romantic partner. Something doesn't have to be taboo to be personal or private.
Au contraire. Step outside to let the world see you doing those things and see how well you fare. You are going to realize quickly just how wrong those things are. Humans aren't rational. Just because we all do it doesn't mean it isn't deemed wrong.
Of course, as with any wrongful act, you can get away with it as long as you aren't caught.
If you want to flip things around, there is absolutely nothing that you can do that is wrong if nobody else not party to the act knows about it. Fundamentally, wrongness can only be judged when third parties are aware of an act.
The acts of which we speak are wrong, but you can get away with it so long as you aren't caught.
- Technological solution. Implement end to end encryption, and encrypt data at rest. Use techniques to prevent third parties from gaining access to decryption keys.
- Human solution. Strengthen, and critically, enforce laws that protect the privacy of individuals. Severely punish and hold to account misuse of data & PII.
It’s not dumb luck that the first and second amendments of the US constitution both provide protections against an unjust government. I’m not a gun fan by any means, I just see the similarity between the soft and hard approaches to addressing an issue.
We should come together as a group to write a new amendment that protects one's digital life to propose to congress via a lobby group.
The authors of the Constitution absolutely understood how critical privacy was with respect to personal information. "Papers" is the keyword here, the OG Americans were 100% harassed by the British Gov.
4th Amendment:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Just because I'm not building a bomb in my basement doesn't mean I want all my dirty laundry trotted out in front of the world.
If they know what they are looking for, have a warrant. It is that simple to me.
/s
Speaking English doesn't confer magic powers. The same people who made up the the communist/nazi secret police are in every government, the only question is if they are in the ascendant. The stakes are very high, and we've seen in the 20th century that the situation can turn sharply and without warning that most people will accept to the point where some violent idiot is running the show.
In some senses, a constant string of leaked nudes out of police departments is the best case. At least that will keep people asking how to preserve privacy. I'd rather have this Wilson bloke looking at people rather than the return of Lavrentiy Beria. Mr. Wilson is on the heroic end of the spectrum compared to what will happen with these spy networks, which are most effective when wielded politically.
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...
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
And it's a particular character flaw that makes them think they'd get away with it, even though they tell others. That's also a reason why police officers like to make inappropriate racist or sexist jokes: It's relatively harmless but by the reaction they can evaluate which colleagues would back them up.
I found this[0] which on a cursory reading doesn't seem to support the above. There was also a pop-sci book[1] which seems to argue the above, but I don't know how much weight I put behind it (and I'm not curious enough to get the book and look for references.)
Does anyone know of any data or research to support or refute the claim "law enforcement has a higher rate of sociopathy than the general population"?
[0] https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2018.08.002
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Saints-Killers-Suc...
For example, doctors meet people all day long with unhealthy lifestyles, and how many persist in saying "you have to change your diet, lose weight and exercise" to each one?
Police officers deal with lawbreakers all. day. long.
lawyers have to represent their client.
etc.
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).
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?
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.
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.
You may not have given them a signal or any reason to feel safe revealing their true selves to you.
(Source, for what its worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACAB)
All Nazis are bastards. Yep, that works.
All pedophiles are bastards. Still works.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2022/10/82-of-portland-area...
The Oregonian has a pretty obvious slant and bias in related reporting.
Another thing worth considering is “who’s benefiting” from all the reporting about “dirty” “homeless filled” “unsafe” Portland, as generally it’s conservative and pro police organizations that pull it out as a scare tactic to all the people in the suburbs or even more rural areas of the state.
If they do, the result will be worse, because it will have been because they realized they could hire private security for cheaper than funding public protection.
If you don't like the unaccountability of cops, look forward to the accountability of Pinkerton private investigators.
Maybe I'm part of that "capital class", I'm not sure what that means exactly but I know I'd much rather look after my own affairs.
Because the alternative to public policing isn't no police; it's rich folk paying the interior-territorial arm of PMCs to march around their property with body armor and high-powered rifles, while the rest of the populace sorts things out themselves. We didn't always have public policing, and one can look at history to see what the prior alternatives were.
Not nearly as many as are currently protected by public police. I'm sure we can find a better alternative to the status quo than "Tell grandma she needs a license and some monthly range time." Better make sure we gift her a firearm with low kickback for Christmas; her wrist bones have been so frail these past few years...
But realistically, you could have John Wick levels of combat skill and you would still have yawning holes in your security. You have to sleep and you can only be in one place at once, so there is only so much physical property you can fully protect. Wealthy capitalists outsource their security and mitigate their paranoia by dividing full awareness of their security surface between compartmentalized vendors, each of whom has to assume they're under surveillance by one of the others. If you are personally wealthy, congratulations, but I'm gonna guess you live somewhere with high public safety and never worry about your lawyers or accountants taking up with kidnappers or extortionists.
The capital class is not just about having a lot of money, but being able to leverage it in the acquisition of political and social power. If you have to conceal your power, do you really have it?
And not showcasing power, concealing or misdirecting the perception of your power or lack thereof, has been identified as an important strategy from Sun Tzu to Teddy Roosevelt.
The intent is to suggest unarmed, non law enforcement organizations.
That’s why the constitution is all about limiting the role of government.
A Really Basic police reform step might be to institute minimum standards for hiring police. And assign the "background checks" job to a carefully monitored central specialty office.
2. Bring back sheriff;s instead of having police forces report to a mayor or other executives, the head of the police force should be an elected position accountable to the people
3. Expand open records laws to include policy manuals for every police force, and create a Citizen Review Board that can have no more than 1 retired or former police officer, judge or prosecutor on it. Today many "Citizen" review boards are filled with insiders of the force, retired cops, family members, prosecutors,etc
4. Mandatory body camera's for all public interactions with at most a 3 strike policy where if the officer fails to record an interaction more than 3 times they are terminated
5. End Qualified immunity
Do a bunch of the above and I would argue that would satisfy both sides of the spectrum.
The list from just the last few decades is very long.
How do you square that with your view that there are consequences for bad behaviour?
I’m sure there are lots of petty power games and actual enforcement of rules back at base most of the time, but armies have a record of behaviour that is probably worse than any other profession.
Even your description of ‘extreme punishment’ sounds like it may be crossing into something that isn’t acceptable or legal. Hazing and such like isn’t discipline or rule enforcement.
I believe we were talking about current affairs not "war bad". Cops on average have significantly worse behavior than military personnel and it's not even close. When we're talking about the military that also doesn't just mean FOB's in the Middle East.
>Even your description of ‘extreme punishment’ sounds like it may be crossing into something that isn’t acceptable or legal. Hazing and such like isn’t discipline or rule enforcement.
I appreciate your altruistic tone—legality is different while serving unfortunately. You are legally not considered a citizen or protected by laws that consider citizens. That being said this, the punishment I'm talking about is not hazing. It's more of what you would consider an overly severe sentence by a Judge.
I also should not have said "every" rulebreaker.
Some are more professional than others, but giving young guys guns and sending them into challenging situations is going to result in people getting shot.
This is primarily a result of the War on Drugs, and expanded with the War on Terror. War's are fought by a military, not a police force.
Edit: for example, I think that your other post with the five bullet points could hold up to reasonable scrutiny when presented to the pro-cop crowd, but would likely fall on deaf ears with them if you lead off with the paramilitary framing.
Me thinks there are other problems within that particular police department.
This sounds like McLovin was involved.
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.
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...)
Police can generally use open doors (and windows?) as “probable cause” to enter in the US.
Sometimes the US has strange laws, but if you are right (I somehow doubt it or maybe just hope it) then I would find it particulary strange.
That's a FAR cry from being able to use the EXISTENCE of an open door or window as probable cause ITSELF.
I'd also separate privacy and security (especially privacy) from the debate over funding or defunding the police. The solution to abuses like the Accurint breach is to dramatically reverse the proliferation of sensitive personal data held in the digital ecosystem. If it's not there, it can't be found and exploited.
Citation needed. Policing has been tremendous, irreparable harm to disadvantaged groups. You're completely missing the point of defunding - you're almost there when you say there should be more funding. There needs to be funding around non-police community work.
Also the "few bad apples" phrase doesn't work as you're using it. The point is that a few bad apples spoils the bunch - it makes them all rotten. Which is very true even though you weren't intending it that way. Even if most cops wouldn't directly do something awful, most cops will stand aside and say nothing when they see a fellow cop do something awful. Which is literally how George Floyd died.
We also could have learned the lesson years earlier such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tony_Timpa
Cops will always and forever defend their right to fuck shit up and not suffer the consequences. Cops will NEVER go for the ideas you suggest, and any money you send them for "training" will only turn into luxe contracts for ex-cops and extra overtime for everyone.
Cops love being cops because of what the institution is now, today. The toxicity, the freedom to do shit without consequences, the lucrative overtime, all of it. And cops are incredibly good at agitating when they are threatened – oh you want to make it so we can't shoot people? Okay we're not going to do any work at all for months. Or maybe we send someone's cousin around the way to scare you – you think that's a problem … call the cops!
The problem imo with the "mostly good people" line is that it ignores the fact that in a harmful institution most "good people" will just go along with whatever is happening. Any "good cop" who speaks up against a fellow cop gets their face bashed in (see the current case in SF where they straight up killed another cop in a training exercise …). Good people in shitty situations can make harmful choices and generally don't do the (very difficult and dangerous) work of speaking up to change things.
Defund. We need something new.
The government does not want you to maintain any privacy.
Last year the Biden White House and the Democratic Congress passed laws lowering reporting requirements of digital transactions to $600 - down from $20,000. So now if you receive >$600 of payments in Paypal/Venmo/etc., they will report it to the IRS. Also, they will demand your SSN because they need it to report to the IRS.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/venmo-paypal-zelle-must-report-...
https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2021-11-04-New-US-Tax-Repor...
"Defund the Police" makes a lot of sense when one actually looks beyond the tagline. It means taking the money from the police state to empower other social services to do their jobs. This helps police, too–most officers are ill equipped to work with the mentally ill, and this sometimes leads to shootings that should've never happened. Nobody wants that.
this is beyond what one individual has done, there are levels of involvment.
this crime was enabled by others.
* "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."
In such a scenario, the language makes sense.
(If not, then you should specific so...)
On the face of it, the guy is just a random psychopath hacking women Snapchat accounts and using their explicit pictures to blackmail them.
It’s disgusting but it wouldn’t be extraordinary if he didn’t also manage to become part of the police. You have to wonder how someone with this particular psychological profile actually got hired.
They explicitly look for this type of person to hire.
A huge chunk, just by volume, of news comes from the local crime beat. That means journalists need to be on friendly terms with cops, because they usually have a near-monopoly on this information and can choose to give it to someone more pliant.
So that's why you get tortured headlines like 'Bystander killed by bullet in officer-involved shooting' - maybe the editor is a lawn-order authoritarian, maybe not, but they definitely don't want their sources to dry up.
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.
> 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.
The existence of similar tools doesn't reduce the abuse the officer committed.
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.
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".
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.
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.
From the Accurint website: "Find out why more than 400,000 public and private organizations of all sizes rely on powerful, industry leading LexisNexis Accurint® to support their business goals.", mentioning Collections, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Law Enforcement, Legal, Private Investigations.
It very much sounds like a generic database that millions of Americans have access to. Are they all just one bad day away from hacking everything and everyone with all that access to this super advanced hacking technology? Probably not.
The website continues: "Accurint® for Law Enforcement is a cutting-edge investigative technology that can expedite the identification of people and their assets, addresses, relatives and business associates by providing instant access to a comprehensive database of public records that would ordinarily take days to collect."
You're right that Accurint plays a fairly negligible role here, but only because the officer didn't even begin to tap the tools at their disposal. Whether that was a mistake, stupidity, or fear of retribution, the fact remains that there are many, many ways to get your personal data as a cop. Palantir/Accurint are very much the tip of this iceberg.
I wonder if they take locking account access as seriously.
Ugg. Let's actually do the opposite and send a message. This is a sexual predator.
Please contact your useless-congress-criter* to rub this in their face.
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 )
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.
slow clap
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.