Jennifer Lawrence says what she thinks about having naked pictures of her stolen and published online.
“Just because I’m a public figure, just because I’m an actress, does not mean that I asked for this,” she says.
“It does not mean that it comes with the territory. It’s my body, and it should be my choice, and the fact that it is not my choice is absolutely disgusting. I can’t believe that we even live in that kind of world. ”
I can, but only because I’ve been paying attention to it for more than three years. And anyway I can’t, really. I’m thoroughly convinced of it by long observation but at the same time I’m permanently incredulous.
“It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime,” she tells Kashner. “It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it. It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.”
“Scandal” is completely the wrong word for it. “Outrage” would be a better fit.
It’s astonishing that anyone needs to point out that’s a crime. But she does. Shows how far there still is to go.
Looking at it as a scandal, and making the people whose photos were stolen the issue, rather the theft, also tends to deflect attention from Apple’s responsibility to keep customers’ backed up data secure and their failure to do so.
Note how many stories refer to phones being hacked rather than iCloud. (Kirsten Dunst referred to the real culprit in her “Thanks iCloud” tweet).
Unfortunately, beyond the sexism, there’s another issue that tends to do this, which is that
(a) the victims are famous and look good in photographs and
(b) the “theft” was not of a physical thing and explaining what the thieves actually did in any kind of detail beyond “there was a theft and it involved hacking” is too complicated. Even those last four words risk switching off the readers attention, and as far as news sites go, it’s all about the clickz. And we only have ourselves to blame – we want news websites to run for free, instead of buying our newspapers in physical form. The upshot of that is their only income is advertising, and the upshot of that is the endless stream of “you won’t believe this one weird trick” headlines desperately trying to tempt you in. Talking in any detail about the actual crime is something that, realisitically, only IT professionals will actually read all the way to the end and understand. I’m not excusing this fact.
Granted, but is it relevant? We live in a complicated, specialist society. Getting into the details of _anything_ will make almost all of us get eyes glazed over before long. But – I would think – we can appreciate the rights and wrongs of plenty of things without all the details. Is grasping this as a crime and violation contingent on getting those details, at least, all the way to the point where the technical points leave most of us in the dust?
One of the most disgraceful aspects of crimes like this, is the fact that practically NO ONE even asks who stole the private photos in the first place, let alone expresses any outrage at their criminal acts.
If I steal emails or other privileged information from a company or person, I can expect to be publicly named and charged, and the public will then think of me as a criminal. But apparently I can do the exact same thing with a woman’s nude photos, and no one will spend any time even asking who did it, let alone go after me.
Granted, but is it relevant?
No, it isn’t. We, and especially the media, don’t have any problem with announcing that a crime was committed when account numbers or credit card info is stolen. I don’t notice any real hesitancy in media and companies calling music and TV or movies being pirated stealing (there’s an argument about the severity with which it should be dealt).
Only when it comes to nude photos, usually of women, does it become all about the victims’ actions. It’s a lot like rape versus robbery; we could say that a victim should not have gone out in some dark dodgy place while flashing an expensive watch, but the victim blaming analogy with rape stops there because we don’t let the robber get away with the crime because of that.
This is rape culture: our society’s actions indicate that we as a society don’t think sex crimes are really crimes, often depending on how attractive and desire able the victim is deemed to be. The fact that we don’t do this with robbery (“I’m giving you a lesser sentence cause it was a solid gold watch”; “no crime committed here cause they just took your new album and posted it online”) is what makes it rape culture.
Christopher Chaney is in prison.
That’s good, qwints.
Note though that Chaney had a criminal past involving insurance fraud, and that part of the reason the judge was harder on him was that he didn’t just target celebs. From a news story: “Prosecutors said Chaney also targeted two women he knew, sending nude pictures of one former co-worker to her father. The judge noted the damage to the women was in some ways worse than what Chaney’s celebrity victims endured.”
anthroscienceguy@2:
also tends to deflect attention from Apple’s responsibility to keep customers’ backed up data secure and their failure to do so.
Arguing about the technical details of the crime serves to deflect attention from where the responsibility lies, with the criminal.
One of the most disgraceful aspects of crimes like this, is the fact that practically NO ONE even asks who stole the private photos in the first place
The guy who was trying to monetize the postings is on the lam, and has been denying up and down that he knows who did it. One can bet that Reddit’s system logs are iCloud’s system logs are being combed through to try to figure out who did what and when. That kind of forensic analysis takes time (and is expensive) and I’d estimate there’s better than 50/50 odds that the perpetrator will be caught within a year. I have experience with doing such investigations, and all I can say is “godspeed” to the analysts digging through the data!!! (I’ll hoist a cold Rockstar in your honor in a couple years when the details filter out in the security community, if they do)
There are two aspects to the crime, Marcus, the criminal and the company with the lax security that encourages (rather strongly) its customers to trust in that security. If someone stole your valuables from a safe deposit box at a bank and you found out the bank’s security wasn’t as tight as they’d told you you’d be plenty pissed off at them, and for good reason. It wouldn’t preclude you from being pissed off at the people who actually stole your stuff. The only person in that scenario that it wouldn’t make sense to blame is the person whose stuff it is (which is of course what most of the media is doing). In the case of these photos, pointing to the victims is obviously wrong, but pointing only at the perpetrator is awfully convenient for Apple.