Say hello to men who hate the NSA but love invading the privacy of women [View all]

[LiberalArkie]

http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/1/6092769/creeps

Over the weekend someone released hundreds of revealing photos of celebrities that appear to have been stolen from private storage. In response to this, a bunch of anonymous guys on the internet copied them and posted them all over the town square, because the internet is written in ink and if you are ever a victim once in your life the internet will remind you of it forever.

These men are the detritus of human society for whom the internet provides a warm blanket, so let's remove the warm blanket for a minute.

It's still not clear how the private photos were obtained, but there's a good chance the victims were hacked — it's happened before. The last time, a man named Christopher Chaney illegally accessed more than 50 email accounts to steal nude photos and was later rewarded with 10 years in prison. Now, the hunt is on for the latest perpetrator. One theory pegs at least one user of AnonIB for the hack, and 4chan thinks it has already identified the guy who did it. While that's going on, people are looking for other things to blame, like iCloud and victims that didn't use better passwords. In any event, there's a small group of one or more people responsible for this heinous intrusion. But they're not the only ones responsible for it.

Take the members of Reddit, for example. If you're not familiar with Reddit, this is the best way I know how to describe it: it's an "anything goes" online message board where the loudest voices belong to misogynistic trolls who value anonymity over decency. In reality, "anything goes" is a bit of hyperbole, since the site does have two major rules: no child porn, and no posting "personal information." And because Reddit is a special place, its ban on posting personal information will protect you unless you happen to be an attractive woman that lots of people want to see naked.


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http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/1/6092769/creeps