4-26-2018 French police investigating a woman for suspected ties to ISIS have made a chilling discovery, according to French police officials and prosecutors: the arrested woman had a USB drive that contained the personal details of thousands of French police officials.
That’s raised fears that a similar data breach may have helped an ISIS militant carry out the notorious June 2016 murder of a French police commander and his domestic partner, a civilian police employee.
The USB was discovered last October during raids on apartments and properties linked to the 25-year-old woman, who’s been identified publicly only as Mina B. She now stands accused of being in direct contact with an ISIS-directed group in the Belgian city of Verviers that was raided in January 2015. Two extremists were killed in that raid.
Phone intercepts linked Mina B. to the Verviers group, and police launched an investigation that culminated April 9 with charges that Mina B. had helped a friend leave France to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq. At that time, police also announced that they had discovered the USB drive in her apartment.
The USB drive, according to French investigators, had been partially erased. Reconstruction of some of the drive’s contents, however, recovered at least one personnel database, from 2008, that included a raft of details about police officers, including home addresses and vehicle information. Specialists are still trying to reconstruct the USB’s full contents.
“This is a disaster,” said one French police officer who works undercover on counterterrorism operations and cannot be identified.
The officer pointed out that while the restored database dates to 2008, “that’s only 10 years and many of the officers are still in service. The information contains all the information one needs to stalk and murder hundreds of police officers in their homes, which as you know has already happened.”
The officer was referring to the June 13, 2016, double murder of Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, a police commander in the Paris suburb of Les Mureaux, and his girlfriend, Jessica Schneider, 36, who was an administrative assistant in the police station at Mantes-la-Jolie, another Paris suburb. The accused killer was
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10-8-19 PARIS — When 12 people were killed at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, Mickaël Harpon — a future killer himself — declared, “serves them right.” A shocked colleague in the city’s Police Department heard him, and a sharp argument ensued.
But that was nearly as far as the complaint went. Colleagues of Mr. Harpon, who slashed four co-workers to death last Thursday, preferred “restraint,” a leaked internal police report said, and their bosses never pressed them. That summer, the police appeared to have had a chance to stave off the computer technician’s attack. They missed it….
Meanwhile in Mr. Harpon’s desk there investigators this week found a USB drive containing jihadist propaganda and the addresses of some colleagues….Mr. Castaner said that in recent years about 20 police agents had been pushed out of the force for showing signs of radicalization….in July 2015, an official with SDSI,” or internal police security, “Major Y, responsible for tracking signs of radicalization, (was informed) of the marriage of Mr. Harpon with a Muslim woman, of his conversion to Islam and of the fact that he no longer shook women’s hands or embraced them.”…
Harpon sometimes brought in (to share at his IT work) little cakes baked by his wife, the same woman with whom he exchanged more than 30 religious-themed text messages in the minutes before his attack.
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10-8-19 "We will wage an unrelenting fight in the face of Islamist terrorism," Macron told a ceremony at the police headquarters where the attack took place. France must develop a 'society of vigilance' in its fight against the Hydra of Islamist militancy, he added. "The administrative services alone, and all the combined services of the state alone, will not be able to overcome the Islamist Hydra," said Macron during the sombre ceremony held in pouring rain at the police headquarters near Notre Dame Cathedral….
Mickael Harpon, 45, had worked in IT at the department for 20 years but recently converted to Islam and began expressing extremist beliefs
Harpon was shot dead following the rampage inside the historic Paris Police Prefecture, next door to Notre Dame Cathedral.
His wife, Iham, was arrested soon afterwards and told detectives that he had ‘heard voices’ and was ‘incoherent and suffered a dementia attack’ the night before.
She has since been released from custody, and has returned to the flat they shared in the Paris suburb of Gonesse.
Harpon and his wife were both registered as profoundly deaf and have two children aged nine and three. Harpon had converted to Islam 18 months ago, and his wife is also a Muslim who comes from an Arab background. The nature of the attack corresponded with similar ones carried out by terrorists affiliated to ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
An investigation as now been launced to see if Harpon was in contact with other Islamists intent on death and destruction.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7549795/USB-details-French-intelligence-officers-home-Paris-knifeman.html
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The most recent case was revealed last week when a top aide to Parliament was arrested and charged with spying for North Korea. That case came after a French intelligence officer was charged with selling confidential information to organized crime groups, an ISIS member was found with a thumb drive loaded with confidential information about 7,000 French police officers, and recently unsealed documents revealed that a French police officer had helped obtain a fake ID that was used to help raise money for a ring that provided financing to the suspected organizer of the November 2015 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. The incidents have battered French law enforcement and intelligence communities over the past two years but have received little public attention. ...
Other incidents include revelations that an analyst for the French domestic intelligence service, known by its initials as the DGSI, used his work resources to sell confidential information to both organized crime groups and to as yet unidentified foreign economic intelligence collectors. After the analyst’s arrest in September, it was revealed that the transactions were done using contacts through the anonymous browsing service Tor in exchange for cryptocurrency payments, often as little as $35 per tracked phone number.
In another incident this spring, a French police officer was charged with losing track of a USB drive that contained huge amounts of personal information of police officers. The drive was found in an apartment linked to a jihadi cell suspected in the June 2016 murder of a French police officer and his partner in their home outside Paris. ...
In the case of the officer who helped his brother obtain a false ID card that allowed money to be sent to ISIS and Abu Jihad al-Munfarid, a French ISIS member, prosecutors accused the officer of betraying his country and having been duped by family connections to aid an ISIS member.
“How could you provide an identity card to your brother and his accomplice to commit scams knowing that the money was being sent to ISIS members in Syria?” asked the prosecutor, according to the French daily Le Parisien.
“I do not know,” said the officer. “What do you want me to answer you? It was stupidity, monumental idiocy. I provided ways for them to commit scams to fund the cause. The facts speak for themselves.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mitchprothero/france-isis-leaks-sensitive-data
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2016-17 “Organ theft during wars, civil wars, dirty wars, wars involving undisciplined armies is not uncommon,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, chair of Berkeley’s doctoral program in medical anthropology and director of Organs Watch, a California based documentation and research project told CNN in response to the February claim. She also told CNN that the market in human organs is brisk commenting that “The demand for fresh organs and tissues ... is insatiable.” Scheper-Hughes added fresh kidneys from “the brain dead or from those executed with the assistance of trained organ harvesters are the blood diamonds of illicit and criminal trafficking.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis-defector-reports-on-sale-of-organs_b_8897708
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2016-17 “Organ theft during wars, civil wars, dirty wars, wars involving undisciplined armies is not uncommon,” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, chair of Berkeley’s doctoral program in medical anthropology and director of Organs Watch, a California based documentation and research project told CNN in response to the February claim. She also told CNN that the market in human organs is brisk commenting that “The demand for fresh organs and tissues ... is insatiable.” Scheper-Hughes added fresh kidneys from “the brain dead or from those executed with the assistance of trained organ harvesters are the blood diamonds of illicit and criminal trafficking.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/isis-defector-reports-on-sale-of-organs_b_8897708
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