14 DAY TRIAL // Members of Anon Verdict, a sub-division of the Anonymous hacker collective, have leaked details for 52 officers and employees of the Cincinnati Police Department.
The group motivated their deeds by blaming the department for the unnecessary death of Paul Gaston, a black man that was shot and killed on February 17, 2016.
Mr. Gaston died after being shot numerous times by police officers because he reached for a pellet gun while officers were trying to arrest him. A few minutes earlier, Mr. Gaston was seen stumbling out of the pickup truck, after crashing into a telephone pole.
Paul Gaston's death sparked the data leak
Despite two videos of the incident that showed that police officers were justified in using lethal force, things may have escalated after the New York Daily News ran a story highlighting a similar case that occurred a day earlier.
In a strikingly similar incident, Cincinnati police peacefully arrested a suspect after he pointed a fake gun at officers called in to investigate an assault.
The only difference was that this suspect, Christopher Laugle, was white. Police officers admitted that they didn't know the gun was fake when the suspect pulled and pointed it towards them. In spite of his threatening actions, Mr. Laugle was peacefully arrested, charged with menacing, and released on a measly $2,000 (€1,800) bail.
Information did not include any "private" data
After these incidents made their way into the national media, the Anon Verdict group released their leak, first on PasteBin (who quickly took down the data), and then via the Quick Leak service (still up, we'll refrain from sharing the URL).
The data leak contained information such as the officers' names, the names of their family members, home addresses, email addresses, social media profile links, and phone numbers.
In a statement for Cincinnati.com, police Lt. Steve Saunders said that all of the data was easily accessible via Internet searches and that the group didn't actually hack any of their servers.
Below you can see the Anon Verdict data leak video, a screenshot of the leaked data, and the written version of the data leak announcement.
