Revenge Porn: The Open Secret
The town of Lake Forest is like any other town in the North Shore. Nothing eventful happens on a daily basis, good or bad. But in March 2017, a letter was sent to everyone in the community from the local high school. It wasn’t just sent to alumni, parents of alumni, and current students, it was sent to everyone in town. It was just a precaution but nonetheless it was disturbing.
A website had been brought to the attention of the school board. According to the letter, the site contained numerous explicit images of women and underage girls from high schools all over the Chicago area. For privacy purposes, they refused to disclose the name of the site. As it turns out, they didn’t need to. The following week, NBC Chicago published a story about the site because several Chicago-area high schools had forums. As it turns out, it was much worse than that.
The site was called “Anon-IB,” short for “anonymous image board,” and it wasn’t exclusive to Chicago. There was a category specifically for Illinois, and there were forums for Illinois high schools, towns, area codes, even employees of specific businesses. Sure enough, Lake Forest High School had its own forum. Fortunately, there weren’t any pictures posted to it. There were requests by anonymous users for recent graduates but nobody had actually posted any images. There were no usernames to go on, and all posters came up with their own names each time they commented. The school had sent out a letter as a precaution to notify parents.
Although no one in Lake Forest was on the website, the feeling of relief may be short-lived. The forum was still active. The website had been listed by name on the news. Someone could very easily check out the site themselves and post whatever they wanted.
There were categories for each individual state and a handful of countries, but also different types of women. One was labelled “Drunken Chicks.” Another was called “Peeping Toms.” One category was labeled “College Bitches.”
Bradley University had its own forum.
There were explicit pictures of two different Bradley women online.
It’s not legal in Illinois to post these kinds of pictures. According to a lawyer with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, “non-consensual posting of private sexual images are a class 4 felony, and punishable with one to three years in prison.” Although commonly referred to as “revenge porn,” a more appropriate title would be “non-consensual porn,”
A quick scan showed that the entire Anon-IB community was toxic. There weren’t any usernames to each post as they don’t require registrations or accounts. On the surface, every post was anonymous. The pictures were referred to as “wins.” There were several people who were asking to trade pictures. Others said they would only post when others posted what they had. No full names were used, only a first name, a last initial, and the graduating class, possibly to avoid coming up in any Google searches. In some cases, the women who found themselves on the site responded.
“YOU FUCKERS BETTER TAKE THESE DOWN I MADE THE MISTAKE OF TRUSTING SOMEONE A LONG TIME AGO IT’S NOT SOMETHING I’LL DO AGAIN TAKE THESE DOWN NOW,” one said, before it goes into graphic detail.
Women were commonly referred to as sluts and commenters frequently bragged about how easy they were prior to obtaining pictures. They appeared to show no remorse for what they posted.
In April 2018, a little over a year after the letter was sent out to Lake Forest residents, Dutch police raided the Anon-IB servers. The website had been under investigation for a year after the owners of the site had allegedly hacked into iCloud accounts and stole photos from phones and computers to post online. As it turns out, the actual posting of the photos wasn’t what got them into trouble, it was the hacking.
Even a year later, the Bradley forum was still there. It was a new forum after the old one had apparently expired after not receiving a number of replies. It was about a month old, There were a handful of explicit pictures of Bradley students. There were also non-explicit pictures posted to go along with requests.
What made Anon-IB so dangerous was that it was organized by location. Although most of the women posted didn’t have a last name to go along with it, it was easy to narrow it down when a school or town goes along with it. Bradley wasn’t the only college listed. There were numerous colleges all across the country with forums. Bradley has between five and six thousand undergrad students and there were 20 replies. The larger universities had hundreds of replies dating back since 2014. For example, Florida State University had 220 replies since early 2016. Roughly 90 of those replies contained images of either requests or porn. Judging by how long these images were online before Anon-IB was taken down, it can be assumed a majority of these women didn’t know their pictures were online.
As it turns out, this problem is bigger than most people think.
The organization known as Battle Against Demeaning and Abusive Selfie Sharing (BADASS) works to help victims and get photos off the internet.
“We have helped about 1000 people so far,” said a spokesperson for BADASS. “I’d say about 25% are underage in which case we always advocate getting the police involved.
BADASS was founded in August, 2017. They’ve only been around for nine months.
A few city-focused outlets reported on the site and a handful of petitions had been started demanding that the site be taken down on the grounds of child porn. This website had forums for every state, numerous countries, and various categories for different people. It wasn’t until the site was finally shut down by Dutch police that many technology outlets began reporting on it. Yet Anon-IB had been allowed to run since at least 2013. It wasn’t until 2017 that an official investigation began after a woman claimed she had photos stolen from her account and posted online. She wasn’t the only one.
As it turns out, although the servers were based in the Netherlands, nonconsensual porn isn’t against federal law in the United States.
Lieutenant Savage of the Bradley Police weighed in on his experience with these cases. Despite the number of Bradley students on Anon-IB, he’s only dealt with one case in the 2017-2018 school year of someone threatening to post their ex’s explicit pictures online. It also wasn’t a specific website, it was an Instagram account.
“A majority of the cases I worked with were at my previous employer down in Alabama where I was a sheriff’s deputy for seven years. That’s where a majority of my experience with those kinds of cases come from,” Savage recounted. He also said that he never heard of Anon-IB before it was shut down.
“With these cases, I don’t think I’ve encountered one that didn’t warrant an investigation. A lot of times what you see is cooperation. Unfortunately, a lot of these suspects don’t believe they did anything wrong.”
Unfortunately, Lieutenant Savage is correct.
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative is a non-profit organization that helps thousands of victims who’ve had pictures of themselves posted online without their consent. A spokesperson for the organization said a majority of perpetrators don’t feel like they’ve done anything wrong until they’re actually threatened with a lawsuit.
Carrie Goldberg works with CCRI as an attorney in New York and New Jersey where she specializes in removing nonconsensual porn from the internet. “The first thing we do is schedule a short intake call just to get a little more information from them and then we move forward with the process of discussing their case,” her firm said.
Due to client-attorney privilege, the firm was unable to discuss how many of their clients were underage or go into the specifics about the cases they deal with. A majority of the time, the lawsuits go through unless the pictures are taken down.
One of the most effective strategies in getting pictures taken down is to file a copyright claim. As it turns out, that is what one college student did when she found her picture on her high school forum.
“It was humiliating. I don’t know who or how many people saw it. When I saw it online it was like my stomach shrunk down and I was carrying a heavy weight on my shoulders,” she said.
For anonymity’s sake, she’ll be called Cathy from now on. Cathy found out about Anon-IB after NBC Chicago posted their article on Facebook. When she saw that her high school was listed, she decided to check out the website herself. What she saw was disturbing.
“My face wasn’t in the picture, there’s a recognizable tattoo partially obscured. But anyone who knew me knew it was mine.”
Like many others, Cathy’s first name was posted along with her last initial and graduation year. She was eighteen when she took the picture. She confronted the person she sent it to, who admitted that he had shared it with “a few other people.” When she sook help from the police, they recommended she go back to the site and report the picture for copyright violation. It was taken down the next day. According to her, it was the most stressful situation of her life. Just taking it down was all she wanted at that point and she didn’t want to pursue it any further.
As it turns out, it’s not uncommon. A handful of victims would rather take them down and move on.
“The issue is a lack of understanding about what consent is and is not. I’d say it’s 50/50, but many think victims deserve this fate and in turn validate their actions,” said a spokesperson for BADASS.
The particularly disturbing aspect of non-consensual porn is that it’s out on the open internet. It’s not even hidden on the dark web, it’s primarily out in the open. Another popular site is 4chan, whose design format is almost identical to Anon-IB. According to the Alexa rankings, of the hundreds of millions of websites on the internet, 4chan is the 217th most popular website in the world. There are several message boards on 4chan, mostly entertainment related. But 4chan nonetheless continues to allow the explicit boards to operate. They have between eight and 18 million monthly visitors. Social Media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit all have strict policies against nonconsensual porn. Even pornographic websites such as Pornhub have strict policies against photos and videos on their site that someone didn’t authorize.
This is an open secret, and according to the CCRI, 38 states and Washington D.C. have laws against revenge porn. Most of them are low-level felonies, other times it’s considered a misdemeanor. They’re usually punishable with either several months in prison or several thousand dollars in fines.
“It’s much more common in the regular internet,” said Jack Furman, a computer programmer in California. “You have to be careful about what you view on there. Most of the porn on the dark web isn’t stuff you really want to be looking at. Most revenge porn websites don’t get shut down unless they’re configured in a stupid way.”
Without going into too much graphic detail, Furman said most of the content on the dark web is stuff that’s clearly against federal law. If Anon-IB is any indication, they don’t want to keep it a secret. They want to share it to as many people as they can.
Passing a federal law against non-consensual porn has been a grey area.
The First Amendment guarantees the government can’t arrest anyone for anything they say, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Since the internet is still a relatively new tool in society, there’s still much debate in how to regulate it. Many activist groups such as the CCRI work effortlessly to get a federal law passed, but other organizations like the ACLU work against it.
In 2016, the ACLU worked tirelessly to prevent Rhode Island from passing a revenge porn bill that, according to them, would have a “chilling effect on free speech rights.” As a result, the Rhode Island governor vetoed said bill.
“Any criminal prohibition of nonconsensual pornography must require intent to cause harm to the victim.” according to an ACLU spokesperson.
Although some victims have claimed emotional distress in court, the most effective way to take down nonconsensual porn has been copyright claims, not the actual posting of explicit images without consent.
A majority of websites are allowed to continue to operate because they declare they’re not responsible for what others post to their site. Even though revenge porn sites exist strictly for this purpose, it’s similar to how Facebook and Instagram can’t be shut down because of what others post online, and they’re only removed because it’s against their terms of service. CCRI is fighting to give victims a chance, and other organizations like the ACLU are arguing that it’s not up for the federal government to decide.
4chan was the only notable nonconsensual porn site that had contact info. They were reached out to and asked why they were okay with allowing these specific image boards to continue operating. They didn’t respond.