A policeman working for the French internal intelligence agency, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI), was arrested at the end of September with the accusation of selling confidential information on the Dark Web.
By using the pseudonym of Horus, the agent was selling personal infos on a platform called ‘Black Hand’: with a price list from €30 to €300, the agent was offering to his customers a series of information ranging from bank coordinates to personal identification data like social security, identity card, registered vehicles, geolocalisation and much more data.
Thanks to his posting at the judicial division of DGSI, Horus had privileged access to the French Ministry of Justice's national platform on wiretapping, together with the databses from the police and Interpol –among his services, he also provided the tracking of mobile phones, turning the essential elements of state security to criminal aims.
The DGSI agent was requesting bitcoin as currency for his transactions, so not to leave any trace of his criminal acts: nevertheless, the internal security services of DSGI managed to get to Horus by discovering the documents he was selling, which he consulted by using his personal code. According to police sources, he was in contact with several members of organized criminal networks, who were eager to get information about any possibile judicial investigation on them, as well as people involved in financial crimes.
The case of Horus sheds a sinister light on how French intelligence services recruit their personnel and control their activities: the renegade agent could have easily sold his precious informations to a terrorist group, something which should not be excluded considering the recent history of failures by the security agencies in preventing Islamist terrorist acts on French soil.
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