Japan cop leaked yakuza info online
p2pnet news | p2p:- An unnamed Japanese policeman has been fired for accidentally leaking confidential information via Japanese P2P file sharing application Winny.
Data included the names, addresses and personal information concerning 400 members of the notorious Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza criminal gang, says ComputerWeekly.com.
The cop worked for the Metropolitan Police Department in Tokyo, “which confirmed recently that personal information regarding 12,000 people related to criminal investigations had been distributed across the internet from the officer’s PC,” says the story, going on:
“The police officer had installed the Winny file-sharing software on his PC, and did not know that confidential data was being made available to other users via the P2P network.”
Also See:
ComputerWeekly.com – Japenese policeman fired for accidentally leaking data over P2P, July 20, 2007
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July 21st, 2007 at 5:20 am
What an incredibly stupid cop. Not only does he inadvertently leak private information, but he leaks info to members of one of the oldest Yakuza gangs? Holy crap on a stick, I can bet this idiot is not gonna end up well. Luca Brazzi may be sleeping with the fishes, but this idiot is going to be fed to them.
July 21st, 2007 at 10:11 am
Or perhaps these venues will simply make a rational economic decision to stop playing Canadian music. How’s that for advancing Canadian culture?
July 21st, 2007 at 10:51 am
It’s humorous seeing this article plaster across sites like this , the Register, etc…
The reason I say this, is that this is not the first occurrence of this sort of thing, here in Japan.
The thing that most of the articles miss, is the fact that this police man, as well of many of the other dingbats that have ended up leaking sensitive information on the Internet, did so by not only using the Winny P2P application, but by installing it on a departmental notebook PC, and taking the notebook PC home and accessing the net from a local carrier(of course this is strictly prohibited by the both the Japanese police and the self defence forces, but it happened none the less).
This enhanced by the fact that most of the illegal breaches came as a result of a virus propagated over the Winny P2P network, which takes a screen shot of your desktop, bundles the files in the My documents folder, scan the HDD for images, and then uploads them to the Winny network and or several famous uploading sites.
The virus is often propagated through Adult oriented files, as well as popular movie screeners, which means that there is a high possibility that these people downloaded “illegal” files in the first place to get infected.
No matter how you explain it, this is a result of stupidity and the police and military, here in Japan… because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that you should use AV software, and not hook computer with sensitive information, to a public network.
The sad thing about this, is that this embarrassment to the police and military, has cause them to go on a personal vendetta against P2P applications in general, trying to shift the blame of their ignorance to the P2P applications, and gaining a strong ally in the Entertainment cartails and software businesses, here in Japan.
This has even fueled speculation, that the Virus was developed by the Entertainment cartail to gain political support.
Doesn’t this tactic remind you of a similar tactic happening in other parts of the world?
Just my two cents
July 21st, 2007 at 10:54 am
(Apologies for my prior mispost, if it’s still around!)
I worry that an anti-P2P culture may be on the rise in Japan, or at least among Japanese law enforcement and legal communities.
The coder of WinNY, once the most popular file-sharing app in Japan, got tried and convicted of thoughtcrime, merely for making the program. (See WinNY’s Wikipedia article.) This implies that WinNY, and similar anonymizing P2P software, is illegal software under Japanese law.
So, this story raises the question: Did the cop get fired for using P2P inappropriately, or did he get fired for using P2P -at all-?