A number of IP addresses tied to users of a prominent revenge porn website have been traced back to several government offices, including the US Senate, the Navy, and the Executive Office of the President.
Some of the users had posted message to an imageboard, know as Anon-IB, inquiring after nude photographs of women, while others had asked fellow users edit photos of women to make them appear nude.
The discovery, reported by The Daily Beast on Thursday, follows last year’s massive revenge-porn scandal involving hundreds of US Marines. The data reveals that the Pentagon’s efforts to crackdown on servicemembers non-consensually sharing sexual images of current and former partners may not be going as well as officials hoped. It further shows that the misconduct extends beyond the US military.
The Daily Beast reports that a security analyst at a Norwegian newspaper, VG, learned from a source how to uncover the IP addresses of users who post on the Anon-IB imageboard. The data was shared by the analyst, Einar Otto Stangvik, with Daily Beast security reporter Joseph Cox, who in turn tracked numerous posts back to US government agencies, including one back to the Executive Office of the President. That user shared an image of a woman, along with her name, and asked for other users to do the same in return.
A user whose IP address was traced back to a US Senate computer requested images of a woman he knew from a college he identified, writing that she “has the best tits I’ve ever seen.” Someone who connected from the Senate requested nude photographs of another woman, whom he said had shared photos of herself with a friend. “Would love to see some more,” he wrote.
An Anon-IB administrator reportedly shared an IP address with Cox—apparently to verify that the data was legitimate. The IP address did match an entry on the list, Cox wrote.
In late November, Senators Kamala Harris, Richard Burr, Amy Klobuchar, and Jackie Speier introduced a bipartisan bill—the ENOUGH Act of 2017—aimed at making revenge porn a federal crime. The bill was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, to which Harris, a California Democrat, was named earlier this week.