A nightmare for those involved and a mixed blessing for the mainstream press. John Moore looks at the two-sided tale of the recent iCIoud hack...
The massive release of stolen celebrity pictures that began at the imageboard AnonIB, an affair that's since been dubbed Celebgate (or The Fappening, if you really want to be crude), must have caused some fevered meeting among newspaper and website staff on Sunday 3rd September. They had a fine line to walk when working out exactly how much salacious content they could get away with, without crossing the line. Seriously, if infamously amoral celeb blogger Perez Hilton - who has a long track record of publish-and-be-damned insouciance - is pulling photos from his site and sites like Gawker are wringing their hands about this breach of privacy, others needed to tread carefully, because the legal rottweilers must be on the loose. Or was this change in attitude more than just the result of legal approaches?
This response to this leak appears to have reflected the changing attitude of the press and public toward the hacking of images such as this. In the post-Levison UK especially there appears to be a greater understanding about the machinations that go into such things and a far more circumspect reaction to their emergence from the vast majority of the media. It's interesting to note the shift in tone of a mainstream tabloid press that has been, it appears, using hacking as part of its arsenal for many years.
Typical Tabloids
The Sun, let it not be forgotten, was the organ that printed naked photos of the man currently fourth (soon to be fifth) in line to the throne, taken with a phone camera, on its front page without his consent along with endless other celebrities captured by the zooms of their various paparazzo. Yet even it summoned up a little indignation with its 'iMad' headline - though it came alongside a bikini-dad picture of Kate Upton, and among its three pages of coverage, it also provided a handy list of all the women that featured in the affair in case you weren't sure who to search for on Google. The Star, unsurprisingly, appeared barely able to control itself at the thought of a video of Kelly Brook being part of an as-yet-undistributed cache. Classy as ever.
There has been a little bit of similar hypocrisy evident on The Daily Mail site. Beside an article in which Monica Lewinsky (a lady who knows a thing or two about being pursued by the tabloids) bemoans the leak of the pictures into the public domain, I can see at least two 'candid' (read, bloke hiding with a long lens) pictures of bikini clad celebs in the infamous right-hand bar and another trumpeting a celeb 'parading her curves' via Instagram. These both contrast sharply to the mild outrage expressed about the people behind Celebgate.
Across the web and in print, a consensus quickly formed, and the pics soon became harder to get hold of. Even Twitter stepped in to threaten those sharing them via its platform. If you want to chart the change in attitude, compare the widespread dissemination and comparatively salacious attitude of the press to the release of Scarlett Johansson's stolen photos (that emerged almost exactly three years previously) with those of Celebgate. For a start, it took legal threats to get blogger Perez Hilton to take those down, and I don't believe there was anything like the grovelling apology and promise to change his ways that he came up with this time around (tinyurl.com/qbxwxj2).
The Blame Game
Of course, the stark fact that Johansson's hacker got a ten-year sentence for using techniques that seem scarily similar to those used in the Celebgate hack (ostensibly social engineering and research to guess passwords, though he targeted email) sobered everyone's reaction quickly. This was a crime, no doubt. So among the press, attention immediately turned to exactly how the photos had got into the hands of these self-styled 'collectors' inhabiting shadier parts of AnonIB, 4Chan and Reddit. iCIoud quickly became the prime suspect, a theory that has since been borne out in word and deed by Apple. Although it denied a weakness in its system per se, it pointed toward well-established hacking techniques being used to work out passwords and promised to push extra security and two-step verification.
US satirist, Jon Stewart, quite possibly put it best: "You're telling me that something named after something that appears firm and stable, but is in fact just a mass of water vapour, might provide only the illusion of security. Interesting..." Interestingly, he also then turned his ire on the hand-wringing, prudish reaction among US mainstream TV media. "So what's the take-away here?" he mused. "Better security in the cloud, two-step verification? Or maybe something, I don't know... blame-ier..." (youtu.be/ Hxp4XXEX4Yw).
By 'blame-ier' he refers to the all-to-common theory that dictates that 'If you didn't take pictures like this, then they wouldn't get leaked', an opinion that is logical, but is also ultimately blaming the victims for a crime. While it may be reasonable to call them naive for storing personal data on a cloud storage system without necessary safeguards (or at least two-step verification), the leap to 'You shouldn't take naked pictures of yourself' is actually a big one. These people may well have left a window open for someone to crawl in through and steal from them, but that logic is akin to saying 'If you don't want to be robbed, don't own anything.' Or, as actress Lena Dunham put it, "The 'don't take naked pics if you don't want them online' argument is the 'she was wearing a short skirt' of the web."
Moving Forward
Of course, the internet is the internet, and now the pics are all out there, they're out there, and if you want to find them then you can, but not via Reddit - even after its r/TheFappening became the default location to find those pics. (Incidentally, it was the fastest growing non-default subreddit for three days after the release of the photos and ended up with 150,000 subscribers.)
Eventually, though, it was shut down by mods, so as to avoid a 'whack-a-mole' like pursuit of constantly having to bring down pictures that were the subject of legal claims and those that allegedly included underage subjects. This was despite the site's overseers also making a case for why those subreddits were allowed to thrive in the first place, while simultaneously pleading with its users not to share them (tinyurl.com/o4prc3b) by saying "Virtuous behavior is only virtuous if it is not arrived at by compulsion" - its version of 'Please just play nicely'.
You can guarantee that if, as many news sources have reported, the hack was the work of an organised group of traders and collectors of such images, then they will quickly reassemble somewhere else (AnonIB has been mysteriously 'undergoing maintenance' since the whole thing kicked off) and will continue their work - their stealing, their hacking. Many words will be written on why, many names have and will be used to describe them (most of them derogatory), certain niches will celebrate them, and the FBI is probably trying to track them down right now. Ultimately, though, as Aaron Sankin observed in an excellent piece for The Daily Dot (which we highly recommend you read: tinyurl.com/lgw2hfj), the Celebgate leaks are essentially celebrity gossip taken to its logical extreme." And for the same reason that millions of people found it impossible not to look, they'll be another hack at some point, and more people will have their privacy horribly compromised. We just can't help ourselves.