Revenge-Porn King Hunter Moore Indicted by U.S. Attorney
Moore and an alleged accomplice Charles “Gary” Evens are indicted on 15 counts, including conspiracy, seven counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information and seven counts of aggravated identity theft
Context & Ripple Effects
With no dedicated federal revenge-porn statute on the books as of January 2014, U.S. Attorney prosecutors reached for the tools they had: the 15-count indictment against Hunter Moore and alleged hacker Charles “Gary” Evens is built on conspiracy, seven counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer, and seven counts of aggravated identity theft — framing the case around how images were obtained, not merely where they were posted.
The story landed hard across both mainstream and technical press — Wired, Ars Technica, CNET, The Verge, Gigaom, PandoDaily, Betabeat and ABC News all picked it up the same week — reflecting its position at the seam between hacking prosecutions and the privacy fight over non-consensual imagery that TIME and others had been tracking.
First-order effects
- Moore and Evens now face a federal criminal docket — including paired unauthorized-access and aggravated-identity-theft counts — converting what had been a reputational controversy into personal legal jeopardy for both men.
- Because the charges target acquisition of the images rather than their publication alone, the indictment tests whether a site operator can be reached criminally through conspiracy even where the hacking was allegedly done by another person.
Second-order effects
- Operators of comparable sites lose the practical shield of having never touched a keyboard themselves: the conspiracy count gives prosecutors a template for tying publishers to whoever sourced the material.
- Hosting, payment, and advertising intermediaries serving such sites face rising exposure, since a federal indictment makes continued service to an indicted operation a visibly riskier business decision.
Third-order effects
- If this charging pattern holds, non-consensual-image cases migrate from civil takedown disputes toward felony computer-crime prosecutions, with identity-theft statutes absorbing work that purpose-built legislation has not yet done.
- Enforcement of this corner of online privacy will be shaped by which existing statute prosecutors can reach for — an interim equilibrium that persists until legislatures close the gap with dedicated laws.
The trend: Non-consensual intimate imagery is being prosecuted through pre-existing hacking and identity-theft statutes while purpose-built revenge-porn legislation still lags behind.