Police data, including on probes, leaked via Winny

A 26-year-old officer at the Metropolitan Police Department's Kitazawa Police Station in Setagaya Ward accidently leaked internal documents, including information on investigations, onto the Internet via the Winny file-sharing software, MPD officials said Wednesday.

About 9,000 documents, including reports on interrogations, and 1,000 photo images are believed to have been leaked from a personal computer belonging to the senior patrol officer, the officials said.

The leaked data include classified locations of N-system, or automatic license plate readers, and names of juvenile suspects, they said.

The MPD is questioning the officer, whose name was not released, while analyzing which specific data had been leaked, they said.

The officer, who works for the station's Community Police Affairs Section, had imported the data concerned to his own home PC by borrowing an external hard disk from a 32-year-old sergeant in the same division, the officials said.

The sergeant used to work for an organized crime unit at MPD headquarters, and so the leaked data are believed to include information on investigations he was involved with at the time.

The department learned of the leak from messages posted on a huge Japanese Internet bulletin board called 2 Channel, the officials said.

The officer in question did not respond to a survey the police department conducted in March to check if any of its employees had installed Winny in their private PCs following a spate of data leaks via the software.

According to the leaked material, the N-system readers are installed at 1,017 locations across the country. The information also included their detailed locations and police stations overseeing them.

The National Police Agency has not disclosed the locations or the number of license plate readers allocated to different municipalities.

The leaked data also included arrest warrants and interrogation reports in juvenile cases, many of them containing specific names and addresses, in addition to the criminal history of the individuals involved.

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