The law enforcement tech in question (Accurint) was not directly used in the hacks.
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.
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.