A popular message board for revenge porn, where users upload, share and trade nude or compromising non-consensual photos of women, has been frequently accessed by people in government offices. The shocking revelations come from data obtained by The Daily Beast, which showed users on the site were posting from IP addresses associated with the "U.S. Senate, Navy, and other government computers, including the Executive Office of the President."
The site does everything it can to protect the identities of the individuals, making it nearly impossible for victims and law enforcement to track down the people who are uploading the explicit images. Users who post on the site are all identified as “Anonymous,” followed by a string of characters."
To help pull back the curtain on the users who hide behind the anonymity, Einar Otto Stangvik, who works a security analyst at Norwegian newspaper VG, managed to pull IP addresses from the site using an inside source and multiple computer scripts to download the cache of information. While the IP addresses do not identify the individuals who use the site, they can be used to track where users are posting from. Despite the limitation, Stangvik hopes to "better understand who spreads the abusive imagery."
The data we’re currently working with was obtained and analyzed to better understand who spreads the abusive imagery, and to show that abusers should have no greater hopes of invisibility than their victims
The revelation that people are connecting and sharing personal and illicit photos from government computers comes as the Senate is working on a bill to combat the rampant spread of revenge porn, which could make revenge porn a federal crime. The military is also dealing with the fallout from a recent scandal where members were caught sharing and commenting on nude photos of women.
Stangvik is worried that if something isn't done to curb revenge porn now, it "will normalize online abusive behavior."
I fear that failure to deal with the problem will normalize online abusive behavior and sexual harassment, and that this will further nourish victim blaming and dismissal of the abuse as ‘to be expected.