Revenge Porn Is Being Uploaded From U.S. Government Computers

Top U.S. government computers have been linked to Anon-IB, a hotbed of revenge porn.

The Capitol Building
Getty

Image via Getty/Brendan Smialowski

The Capitol Building

The nonconsensual release of nudes and pornographic images fuel a sad, disgusting part of the internet where intimate photos are shared like trading cards. Though known colloquially as revenge porn, most of this distribution has nothing to do with revenge, and everything to do with the culture of creating a dehumanizing spectacle of women’s bodies. In forums like the infamous Anon-IB, users from all walks of life share "wins," or nonconsensual nudes, and a recent release of data revealed that some of those users are doing so on top U.S. government computers.

According to data obtained by TheDaily Beast, posts on Anon-IB can be traced back to computers from the offices of the U.S. Senate, Navy, and even the Executive Office of the President. Though users can be traced to these offices, it’s nearly impossible to know who is posting from these computers. As TDB points out, these offices include several agencies such as the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology policy. Still, the data cache reveals some horrific posts that could be coming from people who work in different levels of the government.

“Looking for wins of [redacted],” someone connecting to from the U.S. Senate IP address wrote last August. “She used to send nudes to my friends all the time. Would love to see more.”

The information was shared with The Daily Beast by Norwegian security analyst Einar Otto Stangvik, who works for the newspaper VG. “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,” Stangvik told The Daily Beast.

The danger of revenge porn isn’t realized solely through exposure of nonconsensual nudes, but coupled with the fact that users of these forums often expose the identities of victims, their social media accounts, work contacts, and sometimes their location. This isn’t the first time an official U.S. institution was the center of a revenge porn scandal. Major leaks from the military led to the Marines and Navy banning revenge porn after it became known that nonconsensual images and rape threats were circulating on secret Facebook groups.

Of course since it’s not easy to figure out who is connecting to Anon-IB, it’s possible the individuals are guests or non-government affiliated visitors. It’s also possible that users could also be routing their traffic through government IP addresses. Though the Navy made moves to ban revenge porn, several posts in the cache came from Navy computers in the past year. “A lot more where that came from!” someone wrote in November 2017, along with a photo of a woman’s exposed breasts while connecting from an IP address registered to the U.S. Navy.

The cache of data exposes the breadth of very real and dangerous community of image sharing—one that could be connected to what should be the most vetted offices in the country. If people in the government are using computers to participate in a culture of online abuse and harassment, it begs the question of if we can seriously expect lawmakers to protect women. “I fear that failure to deal with the problem will normalize online abusive behavior and sexual harassment,” Stangvik said. “And that this will further nourish victim blaming and dismissal of the abuse as ‘to be expected.’”

Latest in Life