Yes, we’ve tried to remain above the frey. Lofty goals and higher ground and all that. But then I’m reminded that this is Apt. 11D, and we aren’t that lofty. So, let’s talk about naked celebs.
You know the story. A hacker(s) on 4Chan got his hands on a bunch of naked celebrity pictures. Because celebrities are just like you and me. Don’t you have an iphone full of naked selfies? Oh, come on.
OK. Let’s back up. Why do so many celebrities have naked pictures on their cell phones. Is it because they travel a lot, so virtual sex is really important? Or do they need “to bank some selfies” of their fabulous bodies, before everything gets all saggy? Or does everybody take a lot of naked selfies, and I never got the memo? Is Taylor Swift the only smart celebrity?
Now to the next question. Why didn’t the hackers sell these pictures to TMZ? Is this too dirty for TMZ? Or did TMZ know that they would get into major hot water?
More questions. Are the hackers making money from this? If not, then why are they doing this? Sheer vandalism?
Does anybody care what Emma Watson and Jennifer Lawrence look like without clothes? OK, stupid question. I’m clearly not gay.
With the market flooded  with naked celebrity pictures, does this bring down the value of Kim Kardashian sex tapes?
Apt. 11d 
Leaving aside whether or not I have naked pictures of myself on my phone or in the cloud, I have plenty of pieces of personal information there that I would not want made public. I don’t see what somebody’s celebrity status has to do with whether or not hacking personal accounts is wrong. I hope they catch the people the same as I hope they catch the people who hack for credit card numbers.
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I just assumed that the naked photos were all photoshopped.
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I think the photographs are real. And, of course, hacking into people’s personal accounts is an evil thing to do.
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“Or does everybody take a lot of naked selfies, and I never got the memo?”
Yes, that’s it.
At first, I thought, how odd, that celebrities would upload pictures (frankly of any sort, but especially naked) to iCloud. But then, I realized that every picture you take on your iPhone gets uploaded to iCloud (if you set up the photo “backup” feature), and that one might not think that backup up means that your pictures could get stolen (I’m thinking that the CIA/NSA/ other people who should really know better have gotten into the same kind of trouble).
(I am not surprised that beautiful women (and, actually even just regular women) would take pictures of themselves naked. Nude bodies are an artform. Now, I haven’t seen the pictures (and I won’t look — I agree with people who say that looking at the stolen pictures is a violation of the actor’s privacy, and though I think celebrity brings a big loss of privacy, I don’t think it includes the right to see naked pictures of that haven’t been authorized). So I won’t argue that every nude is art, but, nudes certainly can be art, and many artists and photographers and models are comfortable with the nude body as an artform. I know a few who have pictures of themselves naked on their walls (i.e. posed for photographer/artist friends, got prints as a result, and like the pictures enough to display them. They don’t usually put them in their living rooms).
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How many commenters here change their passwords frequently? And don’t write them down?
I’ve deleted many emails on suspicion they were phishing attempts. Some of them have looked very, very convincing. One mimicked an airline we had recently used–but the e-ticket in the email was not the current form. I found that out by visiting the airline’s website. (As the scam was, “confirming your recent ticket purchase.”)
There are reportedly so many ways to hack into someone’s account, including keyloggers on public machines, I don’t think anything can be kept from a determined hacker.
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Oh, and to add, I agree with MH — this kind of hacking has to be treated as theft, as though someone had broken into these celebrities houses and stolen their computers, with the photos on them, or their scrapbooks.
The large scale theft of credit card numbers is a standard, too, one that might require similar criminal investigation techniques (including the significant issue of global reach of the crimes). But, in many ways, this is a more personal crime and violation, since the scuttlebut is that these celebrities accounts were targeted.
I want more of the discussion about this incident to be about the theft, theft that we are all increasingly vulnerable to, than about the naked pictures.
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I heard this piece the other day. Very disturbing. http://www.wbur.org/npr/346149979/smartphones-are-used-to-stalk-control-domestic-abuse-victims
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Caitlin Flanagan is as smart as Taylor Swift… Her Twitter “Whenever I take nude photos, I just strip down to my sacred undergarments. AND I use my Brownie camera, AND I never use film.”
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So, I was just watching clips from Arrow last night (grumble grumble–don’t need another stupid show to watch) and one of the characters does a lot of hacking. But for good, of course. And then there’s Chloe on 24. And many other hack-y characters on tv and in movies. I think we subtly encourage hacking through pop culture. Hackers on tv are heroes. The real life hackers who found the nude selfies are wannabe heroes with impulse control issues.
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I think we are still figuring out how we want to think about information, now disconnected from a physical context. There’s definitely a subculture of “information wants to be free.” Some of the subculture is naive, not thinking through how information can be abused (like the use of tracking software to track and harass) or how people who write will make a living if words, even strung together elegantly, are free. Some of the subculture wants to change the world and how we think about information (that we become comfortable with fairly large losses of privacy, both personally and institutionally). I don’t think we’ve figured out the balance, as a society. The discussions about Edward Snowden (fled to Russia/gives remote TED talks) and Aaron Swartz (prosecuted, eventually committed suicide/folk hero).
I think we need to have much stronger discussions about information and how private we want it to be, and what the consequences of distribution should be. And, those discussions are different for different kinds of information. Bank account numbers, for example, need to be kept secure in order to prevent abuse of the numbers. But, security methods can try to account for the cost/likelihood of theft. Some information, say, health records, or information about children, or private photographs can’t be handled with economic compensation, or at least only in the sense that significant injury or death can be compensated that way.
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People want to see naked women, of course, but there is nothing special or interesting about the naked bodies of celebs even though they’re beautiful. There are millions of pictures of beautiful naked women on the internet and the difference in this situation is that these women didn’t consent to having their pictures splashed all over the place. That’s the appeal for the viewer, that they’re getting to see something they shouldn’t be seeing. It’s not the women’s bodies themselves.
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Good comment.
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They’re famous. Being famous makes them special and interesting to people. That’s practically what being famous means. Lots of people want to see all kinds of pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, that’s why the paparazzi follow her around and sell pictures of her. Why should her private selfies be any different?
Women have been victimized this way online for year, but in the past they were mostly not as famous. There is nothing special about illicit pictures. The appalling genre called revenge porn* consists of pictures just like the ones from the celebrity hack. They are often selfies sent to or taken by the intimate partners of the victims who put them up online as ‘revenge’ for something or who get hacked exactly the same way. Some of the websites dedicated to this stuff actually offer a ‘service’ – pay a few hundred bucks and they’ll take the pictures down. It’s horrifying to read about how badly some women have suffered from this kind of thing.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_porn
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This article https://www.nikcub.com/posts/notes-on-the-celebrity-data-theft/ suggests that the perpetrators are part of a ring that targets female celebrities, hacks their pictures and then trades them. Basically there are a good number of hackers out there trying to steal these pictures and they trade amongst themselves in a black market for them. Same as the guys trying to steal Home Depot’s credit card numbers, except a different target.
It is obviously a serious crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act federally and probably some state laws most places as well. Since the perpetrators can be anywhere though, and the crime may be years in the past now (how long does Apple log Icloud activity for?) enforcement may be challenging. There are some listed on this page http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/story-index/cyber-crimes and others that don’t make the news, but there are a lot of victims of this kind of crime compared to the number of prosecutions.
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Weird. I just showed The Net to my students and we were talking about concerns about privacy in 1995 compared to now, and a bunch of students had no idea there were nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence et al out there.
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Pop culture is for old people. Seriously.
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