14 DAY TRIAL // Data belonging to current criminal investigations conducted by police in the Netherlands has been leaked online, being accessible through a simple search on Google.
The sensitive information includes dozens of documents containing details of suspects of murders, robberies, and even a Jihadist organization.
Google bots did their job
It looks like all this was the fault of a system administrator who placed the content on the personal website of a relative. The reason for doing this remains unknown.
Google relies on automated web crawlers to index pages on the web and serve search results. Unless a web page has a meta tag in the HTML code indicating that the resources should not be crawled and indexed, these bots scan the information and add it to the Google database of searchable web content.
This way, it was possible for the confidential information from the police to become available through Google search.
The Dutch police issued a communication (Dutch) regarding the incident, saying that an investigation was started, and it was determined that a system administrator placed the confidential content on a public website. The individual responsible for the leak has been suspended.
After the discovery of the incident, the files were immediately taken down. The police statement does not mention if Google has been contacted to remove the content from its cache, which, for a temporary period of time, shows copies of pages that no longer exist or cannot be accessed for some reason.
Plenty of confidential details present in the files
According to NRC Handelsblad (Dutch) news publication, searches on Google based on the name of a suspect revealed the investigation files.
These included details about the suspects observed during the investigation, such as photos and addresses, the cars they drive, the places they frequent, or the individuals they meet.
Observations from the officers also included the schedule of a 17-year-old; the data present in the file consisted of details about the time he left the house, what he wore, transportation used for going to school, and more.
Some entries in the file point to the fact that the teenager escaped the police monitoring but was quickly located based on the mobile phone signal.
Certain data in the files was obtained from top secret organizations, such as the Criminal Intelligence Unit, which operates within the police force and handles informants.
Apart from details about the suspects’ activities, the leaked files contained names and phone numbers of investigators involved in the cases.
