Jennifer Lawrence, Nude Photos, And The Law

October 7, 2014

Jennifer Lawrence, Nude Photos, And The Law

Jennifer Lawrence recently spoke out about the celebrity nude photo scandal, in which nude photos of numerous celebrities (including Lawrence) were stolen and distributed by hackers. In her statement, Lawrence suggested that the laws need to be changed to protect her and others like her from this sort of behavior:

“It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime. It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change,” she said. “Just because I’m a public figure, just because I’m an actress, does not mean that I asked for this.”
Lawrence added that she nearly released a statement when the leak happened, but everything she came up with made her too upset.
“I started to write an apology, but I don’t have anything to say I’m sorry for,” she said.

First, there’s no question that Jennifer Lawrence was a victim here. But she raises two interesting points: (a) What type of crime was actually committed here, and (b) are there laws against it?

The answer to the first question was, I think, properly answered in the comments section of the article linked above.

Photos are data. We all have data that we store on devices, with the expectation of privacy. Whether it’s your Social Security number, your checking account balance, your medical records, snapshots of your children, or a photo of you relaxing in your home while undressed, you have the right to share that information or keep it private. To say that private photos of Jennifer Lawrence, nude or not, are any more or less valuable than your SS# is ludicrous. Stealing data of any kind and posting it without permission violates many laws. These celebrities didn’t share them, then wish they hadn’t. This is intellectual property theft and copyright infringement.

As another commenter notes, the man who leaked nude photos of Scarlet Johannson was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was indicted on nine counts of computer hacking, eight counts of aggravated identify theft, and nine counts of illegal wiretapping. In that case, he hacked into e-mail accounts rather than cloud data. But legally speaking, this doesn’t make a huge difference—e-mail data is also stored on third party servers, so it’s still “cloud data” in the relevant sense. It probably doesn’t qualify as a sex crime, but it does violate numerous laws against theft and invasion of privacy, which can result in a very long prison sentence.

I bring this up because I worry that Lawrence’s call for a new law will lead an enterprising politician to offer up a bill which creates yet another criminal statute that federal and/or state prosecutors can use as ammunition against people in the Defendant’s chair. As I’ve discussed many times on this blog, prosecutors often overcharge people with crimes they know they can’t prove in order to scare people into taking plea deals, even if they’re innocent. A new law would give prosecutors an extra building block to stack charges against defendants who may be innocent, but don’t want to risk getting found guilty at a trial. There’s no need to do that when we already have quite a few criminal laws on the books to protect people in Jennifer Lawrence’s position.

In short, we already have laws on the books that protect people who have had intimate data stolen from them the way Jennifer Lawrence did. I think Lawrence was calling for the laws to be changed because she thought that what happened to her was legal, but it’s not. It’s already quite illegal. Authorities just need to enforce the laws that are already on the books.

4:38pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnx1ScKkIR

(Notes: 38)