A comprehensive, jargon-free guide to the celebrity nude-photo scandal and the shadowy Web sites behind it
Jennifer Lawrence poses on the red carpet at the world premier of “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.” She was one of several victims of a celebrity hacking. (AFP /Andrew Cowie)
It’s a late entry, and a sad one, but the trove of stolen celebrity nudes that hit Reddit like a bomb over the weekend may just qualify as the Internet story of the summer. After all, it’s the perfect Internet scandal: sex, Bitcoin, shadowy hackers and long-reigning Internet darling Jennifer Lawrence.
And yet, the ongoing incident — which the FBI has said it’s investigating — is far more than a tawdry tabloid story. It also raises a lot of profoundly important issues about technology, security, privacy and power in the digital age. There are practical implications, as well: The leak is inspiring many inhabitants of the “cloud” — a club that, in all likelihood, you belong to — to take a second look at their security settings. Let’s parse the key questions.
What happened, in a nutshell?
Here’s the TL;DR version: On Sunday, a large cache of nude celebrity photos were uploaded to the anarchic message-board site 4Chan. It’s not entirely clear who uploaded the photos, or how many people were involved, but the images seem to have come from a loosely affiliated network of undeniably creepy dudes.
From 4Chan, the photos spread to Reddit. From Reddit, they moved to the rest of the Internet. Celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton have since confirmed that some of the photos are genuine. Which has left law enforcement, security experts and site moderators pondering what, exactly, they should do.
Which celebrities got hacked?
The cache purportedly includes photos of several dozen female celebrities, including Lawrence, Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Avril Lavigne, Lea Michele, McKayla Maroney and Ariana Grande. There are also some lesser marquee names in the mix, such as Jessica Brown-Findlay (“Downton Abbey’s” Lady Sybil) and Hope Solo (the U.S. women’s soccer star).
Lawrence, Dunst and Upton have confirmed that their photos were stolen. Some of the other women, including Maroney, have denied the photos are real.
Whether real or fake, there could be a lot more photos where they came from. Gawker reports that, on the message board where the Lawrence leak originated, users have promised an imminent trove of yet-unreleased images, including hacked photos of Kate Bosworth, Hayden Panettiere and Leelee Sobieski.
Who did it?
We don’t know for sure, at this point. But on 4Chan, where this whole mess started, users refer repeatedly to a long-running network of celebrity-hackers, collectors and sellers. One post refers to it as an “underground celeb n00d-trading ring.” (“N00d” being the favored message-board slangfor “nude.”)
The ring wasn’t organized — little of 4Chan is. But essentially, it appears the site hosted a kind of shady, loosely organized black market for celebrity photos. Some people would try to sell them; some would try to swap or buy; many amassed large collections that they bragged about, unabashedly, when news of this particular cache broke. (Think of it like baseball cards, but for a nastier and less scrupulous crowd.)
Alas, we don’t know the actual identities of the people in this little club. But at least one man who advertised the photos for sale — 27-year-old Bryan Hamade — has insisted he is not a hacker and didn’t steal any photos himself.
