Private files belonging to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the nation’s biggest police union, including the names and addresses of officers, forum posts critical of President Obama, and controversial contracts made with city authorities, were posted online yesterday after a hacker breached its website, The Guardian reports. FOP, with about 330,000 law enforcement officers, said the FBI was investigating after 2.5GB of data taken from its servers was dumped online and swiftly shared on social media. The union's national site, fop.net, remained offline last night.
“We have contacted the office of the assistant attorney general in charge of cyber crime, and officials from FBI field offices have already made contact with our staff,” said Chuck Canterbury, FOP national president. Canterbury said he was confident that no sensitive personal information or financial details of their members had been obtained. “Some names and addresses were taken,” he said. “It concerns us. We're taking steps to try to notify our members but that is going to take some time.” Threads from the FOP's members-only online forum were also leaked, including some in which officers expressed anger at Obama, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and “illegals” who were in the U.S. without documentation. Canterbury said the union had called in security contractors to investigate and the hack had been traced to an IP address in the UK. “They were able to feed our system a pseudo-encryption key that the system should not have accepted but did because of software errors,” he said. Canterbury blamed “anti-police rhetoric” for the hack. “This is just a group that is negative towards law enforcement,” he said.