Two police officers are facing punishment on charges of selling extremely sensitive personal data of citizens, such as NID details and phone call records, to criminals online.
The officers include a superintendent of police at the Anti-Terrorism Unit and an assistant SP at the Rapid Action Battalion, tech news website TechCrunch has reported.
Major General Ziaul Ahsan, director general of National Telecommunica-tion Monitoring Centre or NTMC, confirmed the incident to bdnews24.com.
The two police officials used to sell the information via Facebook and Telegram, he told bdnews24.com.
The NTMC identified the leak and wrote to the home ministry for the two officials punishment. The ministry then asked the RAB and police to take steps against them, Ziaul said.
He said ATU and RAB-6s access to the server was blocked after the incident. Officials of the two units are required to get information through their headquarters.
The NTMC is a government intelligence agency established under the home ministry to monitor all telecommunications traffic and intercept phone and web communications to detect and prevent threats to national security.
As part of its mission, the NTMC runs the National Intelligence Platform, or NIP, an internal government web portal that holds classified citizen information, like national identification details, cell phone registration and cell data records, criminal profiles and other information.
Asked how the data from NIP were taken out, Ziaul said: "We don have any weaknesses here. We can easily detect if someone takes out information from our system." —bdnews24.com
