The Fappening; Or How We Got All Upton Snowden
UNCENSORED NUDE CELEB FAPPENING PHOTOS!!!!
Now that I have your attention, here's a long-winded word from our sponsor (me). First things first, to catch those of you who aren't aware up on the news:
Due to the recent release of hacked celebrity photos, many people are outraged. It's been dubbed "The Fappening". The FBI is involved in tracking down the perpetrators of the hacks, and many celebrities are suing. Just whom they're suing isn't clear yet. As as far as I know, the perpetrator(s) haven't been tracked down yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some internet photo hosts, including Apple's iCloud, are included.
A cloud that looks vaguely like an eye. Litigation via Apple pending.
Why are these suits and uproar a problem? The simple answer is that they're not. The furor is a perfectly reasonable response to citizens having their private lives violated by those unscrupulous enough to hack individuals, no matter how famous those individuals might be.
I tried playing devil's advocate for the hackers, arguing that the riches and fame of celebrity entitle these people to less privacy than the rest of us, and utterly failed to convince anyone. Including myself.
I failed because we can all imagine ourselves in the same crosshair. A faceless villain who silently assaults us; who steals our dignity and our privacy. All the while, we have no inkling of what's going on. We blithely proceed on our merry way until a friend asks "Hey, why'd you share that photo of you naked on a hay bale at your parent's farm that I took of you when we were teenagers? I thought you said that was for your private portfolio."
Hypothetical bale for a hypothetical scenario.
Perhaps when we realized our hay bale photo went public, we'd realize two things:
- We're not as safe or as private on the internet as we thought.
- We were never going to submit that hay bale photo, ever. The lighting wasn't even that great.
All joking aside, invasion of privacy is a serious crime. In fact, it's so serious that one guy, after trying to report government privacy invasions to authorities multiple times, whistle-blew despite knowing that he'd have to flee the country to avoid jail time. He did it anyway. He had to flee despite campaign promises from Obama to reward/support whistleblowers who reported on those who were committing illegal acts. I'm talking, of course, about Edward Snowden.
He looks sad because he's all snowed-in. Get it? Because he's in Russia.
Why am I mentioning this? Because Snowden saw the federal government (specifically the NSA) doing the same thing that we're so outraged about happening to everyone in the United States. And some in other countries. Oh, and when asked about it, the Director of the NSA, James Clapper, lied. (Edit: Government officials assert that Clapper didn't lie, but stated that his statements were"inaccurate" and the statements couldn't be corrected because it concerned classified materials.)
Now, you can definitely argue the scope and breadth of data collected. Although it's hard to argue about things that are classified. As Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently argued "...there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know." We didn't know anything about a spying program before Snowden, so all we can say about what's truly being collected is that it's an unknown unknown. Would we have ever known about any of it unless Snowden had stepped forward? Very doubtful. His reward? Sentencing under 1917's Espionage Act if he ever steps foot back in the country.
Where does that leave us?
On one hand we have the FBI tracking down an individual/individuals who broke into the accounts of up to 100 celebrities and released nude photos. On the other, we have our government prosecuting an individual who let us know that, in one form or another, the same thing was happening to us without our knowledge.
I know that there will be those who argue that it's for national security, and that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. If we accept those statements, though, then we have to think about the inverse of those statements:
- How does it make me secure by making me (AKA my privacy) insecure, especially without my knowledge?
- If those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear, why did the NSA hide the program?
- People don't want to post their yearly salary, name and location every time they post on the internet. Are they up to no good?
Even if you wish to ignore those questions, or don't agree with them, there's another thing to take into consideration. Despite the size of the NSA's new data center in Utah, computers can't do all the work. They analyze data, but if it fits certain metrics, it'll be forwarded on to a human for further analysis. Some scenarios:
Maybe you were talking to your dad via cell phone about how much ammonium nitrate fertilizer to bring home.
Maybe you were texting your wife to tell her that your baby just blew up his diaper at Lincoln Center.
Maybe you were sending death threats to the dude who leaked your hay bale photos.*
*One of these is hypothetical
In some of those cases, your messages would be flagged and forwarded on for review by a real live person. Not a computer. A squishy, meaty fallible human being! Who'd probably share nude photographs, given the chance. After all, a TSA agent recently spilled the beans about the behaviors regarding nude scanners, and those weren't even hot text messages to your girlfriend.
Imagine what could happen to a flagged text message from her that also happened to contain a "private" picture.
McKayla Maroney sees where this is going.
Only two paragraphs left, so stay with me!
We, as humans, have a tendency to sympathize with an example of something rather than an abstract. That's why we donate to a kid in our hometown that contracts cancer instead of giving that money to the ACS. But that doesn't mean that a large violation of individual privacy is less offensive than a small one. So while we're riled up, we need to take a look at what we can do.
What can we do? We can write our senators, we can write our congressmen, we can vote. We can contribute to organizations that help promote our civil rights and liberties. We can have sympathy for individuals harmed by invasions of privacy. We can ask our President to actually support whistleblowers instead of trying them under a law made in 1917.
I hope we do. Channel your outrage into positive change.
P.S. In case you're wondering why I posted all this here instead of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram...well, it's long. I'm long-winded. But I also wanted (if you still have the energy) to read back through this blog. I wrote it in my early twenties. I'm thirty-two years old now, married with three dogs (and maybe a kid some time soon!) Reading this makes me at times embarrassed, amused, facepalm, or just rueful at how little I knew. But I keep it online because it reminds me that we live in the digital age. An age where very little is private, and what we say online lives forever. Delete an insensitive tweet or a risqué picture, and chances are someone's already taken a screenshot. We're going to be pretty busy explaining ourselves to our kids in 20 years. Let's not let anyone, not hackers, not the government, take away what little privacy we have left.
