news A Queensland police officer has been charged for alleged unauthorised access of a police database, according to the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC).
The commission said that, following its investigation, a 47-year-old, currently serving sergeant from the Brisbane region was charged yesterday.
The officer has been charged with alleged unauthorised use of the Queensland Police Service Qprime database.
The charges include three charges of Misconduct in relation to public office, and three alternate charges of Computer hacking and misuse – both of which are contrary to different sections of the Queensland Criminal Code 1899.
The officer has been served with a Notice To Appear in court to face the charges and is expected to appear in the Brisbane Magistrates Court on 18 July, the CCC said.
As the issue is now before the courts, the CCC added that it is unable to comment further.
The Queensland Police Service published a statement on the case, saying the officer involved has been stood down from duty.
“In keeping with our commitment to high standards of behaviour, transparency and accountability, we have undertaken to inform the public when an officer faces serious allegations of misconduct. This does not mean that the allegations against the officer have been substantiated,” said the QPS.
The news comes almost exactly a month after a very similar case, also in Queensland, in which a serving officer was charged for accessing the Qprime database.
Elsewhere, a former bikini model has lodged a formal complaint with the Queensland Police Service’s internal affairs division and the CCC claiming that officers accessed her Qprime file over 1400 times.
According to The Courier-Mail, Renee Eaves launched a Freedom of Information request to determine how many times officers had accessed her file.
The results revealed that the file was accessed 1435 times between 2006 and May 2016.
“It’s abuse of public office,” she told the news source.
The Qprime (Queensland Police Records and Information Management Exchange) database records official police crime reports, including road crash, crime, missing persons and domestic violence applications and orders.
Calling authenticated access hacking is abuse of the rule of law. They can’t just go freely throwing that around. Hence the Freeman whistleblower case. They just throw it around freely with no case at all to silence people illegally. The media throw it around like it’s nothing also. Pretty revolting.
Not exactly. The dictionary definition for hacking does include authorized access for illegal purposes, according to both Wikipedia (not so reliable), and Urban Dictionary (a little more reliable than Wikipedia). He may have had authorized access to the database, but since his motives for access were not ethical, he has stepped into the gray area of the hacking definition. I suppose, legally, it should have been called something more like “illegal use of a database with authorized access”, but in saying so, it would largely depend on how the law, and the public, view a crime labelled as such.
“Urban Dictionary (a little more reliable than Wikipedia)”
It’s not even April 1st, what is wrong with you?
If his access, in this case before the court, was unauthorised (i.e. he did not have authorisation to access the data for the reason that he did access it…it was unofficial access) then would it not still fall into the ‘unauthorised access’ category and, therefore, technically be ‘hacking’?
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