SAN DIEGO, Calif. – A few years back, an odd subspecies of internet troll suddenly appeared on the web scene: homo sapiens extorticus, a creature distinguished from its peers in the genus by its profound arrogance, an utter lack of ethics and an unyielding faith in the comprehensive breadth of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Apparently not satisfied with the revenue potential of operating so-called “revenge porn” sites which maintained some modicum of plausible deniability with respect to the profligate harassment and cyber-stalking such sites facilitate, members of the extorticus subspecies paired their revenge porn websites with corresponding “take-down services” which the sites’ victims could pay in order to effect removal of the offending images.
One such buffoon, Kevin Bollaert, is about to stand criminal trial in San Diego. It’s not the first round of music Bollaert has faced in connection with the revenge porn site YouGotPosted.com, as he was among a handful of defendants who saw a civil judgment for $385,000 entered against them last year, in a case handled by adult industry attorneys Marc Randazza and Louis Sirkin.
As many attorneys have noted, Section 230 has been quite effective in shielding corporate entities like search engines, internet payment processing providers and classified ad sites from liability in cases involving everything from intellectual property claims to pandering prosecutions. Maybe it’s not such a surprise the extorticae collectively thought they were their scam was immune from prosecution.
“If you’re a layman, not all that bright, and you hear about section 230, it’s not unreasonable to think it might protect you” when you set up a scheme like Bollaert’s, Randazza told me during a recent phone interview.
Randazza noted where the extorticae go wrong is in directly managing and controlling the content of their sites, instead of merely inviting visitors to take the initiative in being a terrible human being. Had they merely encouraged others to post pictures and monetized their traffic by some other means (or even by way of a more carefully executed extortion scheme), the extorticae might have been able to have their revenge porn cake and profit from it, too.
Really, though, the problem for extorticae like Bollaert boils down to hubris.
I encountered several of them on message boards back when they first cropped up, and they were so confident in the hermetic tightness of their “bulletproof” scheme, they didn’t even bother to do a convincing job pretending the revenge porn websites and related take-down services weren’t operated, managed, edited, and populated with content by themselves, directly.
It didn’t take a legal genius, or even a lawyer, to figure things weren’t going to end well for dickheads like Bollaert or Hunter Moore. So far as I’m aware, Craig Brittain, another prominent extorticae, hasn’t been prosecuted for anything, but he sure has been revealed to rival Moore and Bollaert in sheer douchebaggery.
It wouldn’t be a good story if there weren’t another side to it, though. Lurking in the background of the happy scene of these assholes getting their varied comeuppances are thornier questions, like whether revenge porn laws are Constitutional, and whether other statutes applied in some of these cases are applied properly.
I know I should care about these questions, particularly as someone who purports to support lofty (if somewhat amorphous and subjective) principles like free speech, proportionality of punishment, the importance of legal procedure and all that other high-minded crap.
At least for today, though, I’m not going to trouble myself with legal nuance or questions of what constitutes sound public policy. Today, I’m just going to revel in the misfortune of the extorticae and not feel one iota of ambivalence as I do so.
I’m going to recall first encountering a couple of these fuckwads on the boards a few years back and reading in mute disbelief as they publicly sowed the seeds of their own eventual demise and smile like a passenger on Ken Kesey’s bus as I savor the memory.
I’m going to pull up all the different articles about the travails of the extorticae, one by one, point at my monitor and bellow HA HAH at the top of my lungs.
I’m going to crank up Led Zeppelin’s “Your Time is Gonna Come” and chuckle like a stoned hyena at the image of these stupid bastards trying not to look terrified and choking back tears while sitting in a holding cell with members of MS-13. Yes, I’m indulging in this vision even though there’s clearly no way that shit ever happened. It’s my Schadenfreude Party and they’ll cry if I want them to!
In other words, for just one glorious day, I’m going to let others consider the “big picture” while I laugh myself silly taking in the mug shot.
