Greenville man arrested under ‘revenge porn’ law

A California middle school music teacher was arrested on Friday on the suspicion of having a three-year-long sexual relationship with a student and then blackmailing the victim with nude photographs, authorities said. Samuel Neipp, 34, started the relationship while the middle school student was 13 and it continued for three years, police said. Authorities found out about the alleged relationship after Neipp allegedly threatened to post nude photos of the victim. The alleged threat prompted an investigation by San Jose Police Department’s Internet Crimes Against Children and Child Exploitation Detail. It is unclear whether the student or someone else reported Neipp to authorities. “Neipp used his position of authority to exploit the victim into a sexual relationship,” a statement issued by the police said. Neipp was detained on Friday and is being held in Santa Clara County Jail without bail on suspicion of sexual acts with a minor under 14,…

Sen. Al Franken is urging the FBI to more quickly and aggressively pursue and prosecute revenge porn, marking a rare burst of attention on a controversial topic about which Congress has typically been quiet. In a letter to FBI Director James Comey, the Minnesota Democrat asked for more information about the agency’s authority to police against revenge porn, or the act of posting explicit sexual content online without the subject’s consent, often for purposes of humiliation and extortion. Its popularity has ballooned in recent years, and victims are disproportionately women. “The digital age has brought many benefits for free speech, commercial activity, and the sharing of information, but new technologies can pose significant threats if bad actors are not held accountable to our nation’s laws,” Franken wrote in his letter. “As technologies rapidly advance, it is our responsibility to ensure that our nation’s laws keep pace with those technologies. But…

  The bill would not only have made the nonconsensual dissemination of sexually explicit images a misdemeanor, but it would have also helped victims sue web platforms for failing to remove the offending images. It’s that last part that appears to have lured Google and web-hosting sites into the fray. According to the New York Post, the Internet Association—the self-proclaimed “voice of the internet economy” and a lobbying group that works on behalf of Google, Amazon, and many other tech giants—lobbied hard against the bill. What the Post calls its “11th hour campaign” led the state Senate to take no action on the bill before leaving for summer recess, effectively killing the legislation until next year. The bill had already passed the Assembly, and New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, had pledged to sign it, which is why advocates for its passing are understandably frustrated by the loss. “Big Tech, especially Google,…

  Back in 2010, most people weren’t familiar with the term ‘revenge porn’. It hadn’t yet entered the pop culture lexicon, but over the next eight years it certainly would as everyone from high school students to A-List celebrities fell victim to one of the digital age’s biggest downsides. Arguably the first place the phenomenon was birthed was the website Is Anyone Up?, founded by Hunter Moore. The high school dropout, former band manager and sometimes DJ originally started the site as a type of chat forum, however, its specialty quickly shifted to revenge porn. As shown in the documentary Hunter Moore: The Revenge Pornographer the site soon exploded from a niche portal shared among scorned lovers, to something Moore claimed grew from 50 hits a day to 100,000. And then, millions. Yet it was one of Moore’s victims, Kayla Law, who realised something was off. Well, besides the fact…

  WASHINGTON (AP) — More than a year after a nude-photo-sharing scandal rocked the Marine Corps, the service has investigated about 130 individuals for online misconduct, ranging from sexual harassment and bullying to revenge porn. Nearly 60 faced some type of punishment. Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller told reporters Wednesday that he’s trying to create a cultural change in the Corps, but he acknowledged the challenge. “Are we where we want to be? No,” Neller said. “It’s been a year. We’re trying to change a culture that didn’t start a year ago.” Neller’s comments came on the heels of a Pentagon report that said sexual assaults across the Marine Corps increased by nearly 15 percent last year, compared to 2016. The news came on the heels of a Pentagon report that said sexual assaults across the Marine Corps increased by nearly 15 percent last year, compared to 2016. He noted…

ST.LOUIS, MO-  Missouri lawmakers unanimously approved a bill banning Revenge Porn.  The proposal would make distributing a sexual image of someone without their consent a felony. It also outlaws threatening to make the image public in order to prevent someone from doing something or to gain something of value. The proposal was in the works long before Governor Eric Greitens was charged with a felony for allegedly taking a partially nude photo of his ex-mistress. Source link

  This week, Google quietly dropped its defining motto, “don’t be evil.” The move comes as Google recently entered into a deal with the Pentagon to develop better artificial intelligence for facial recognition in its killer drone program. That Google is using its massive research capacity for military applications should make citizens and legislators around the world shudder. We have come a very long way from those heady days of the early digital revolution when edgy startup companies like Google sold us a vision of a democratic digital commons, where people around the globe were brought together by access to knowledge and ease of communication and connectivity. Google even talked about creating the greatest library the world had ever known. What we didn’t know was that library was our own personal lives — and the beneficiaries were Google’s investors, not the general public. Nobody paid much attention to how Google…

VICTIMS of revenge porn are suffering in silence in the UK, new research has claimed. Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan commissioned an anonymous survey of 92 victims who were asked about their experiences. Only 4% successfully prosecuted their offender, 76% did not report their crime to the police. 75% of those who responded said they did not tell anyone as they felt embarrassed or ashamed, and 90% said they would have reported it to the police if they were assured of anonymity. Mrs Mulligan said the report showed “stark and irrefutable” evidence that “the government, police and criminal justice system are collectively failing victims of revenge porn”. She said: “With just 4% of victims who responded to our survey achieving a successful prosecution, there is no question in my mind - the law is not fit for purpose. “The lack of anonymity is key to victims concerns and…

  “Just because the victim is a man and the suspect is a woman this time, the country is investigating the case differently,” wrote one petitioner, according to the JoongAng daily. “Remember the cases of women who were victims of hidden camera crimes and went to the police for help?” wrote another. “They would be told, ‘Well you had it coming to you, because you didn’t dress modestly’ or ‘We can’t catch the culprit. It’s too hard’.” For years, South Korean women have been victims of what was described by the Korea Expose website as a “spy-cam porn epidemic”. They have been secretly filmed in public bathrooms, changing rooms, or a camera has been pointed up their skirt on an escalator, and the footage is then posted online. In 2016, the police closed down Soranet, one of the most notorious websites for hidden camera footage of female body parts, and…

  A local man was arrested early Sunday morning after he was accused of posting revenge porn online. Around 2 a.m., Paris police officers were sent to the 3500 block of N.E. Loop 286 in regards to a security check. Paris Police Lt. John Berry said when officers arrived, they found 23-year-old Nicholas Brown, who had an outstanding warrant for publishing/threatening to publish intimate material. Berry said the warrant stemmed from an incident that was reported on Jan. 18, 2018, wherein Brown had allegedly posted intimate images of another person online. Source link

  Just 12 people were convicted of sharing revenge porn in the West Midlands last year. It became a criminal offense to disclose private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress in April 2015, but numbers of prosecutions and convictions resulting from the new law are still low. The founder of a helpline for victims, which is receiving thousands of calls each year, said poor responses from police, as well as victims fearing reprisals or people finding out, may be behind the low number of convictions nationally. In the West Midlands police force area, there were 13 prosecutions for revenge porn in 2017, leading to 12 convictions. This was down from 24 prosecutions and 22 convictions in 2016. Of those prosecuted in 2017, five were men aged 25 or over, three were men aged 21 to 24, one was a man aged 18 to 20, one was a…

  Ongoing concerns that the Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association, with its intimate understanding of boarding school pressures, was left off the Queensland Anti-Cyberbullying Taskforce, continued to be voiced strongly at the recent state conference in Winton. These were originally raised by ICPA’s state council in the wake of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s announcement of the taskforce in February, saying at the time that ICPA’s omission from the 14-member taskforce was short-sighted and made no sense. Charleville Branch of the Air representative, Deirdre Williams, offered the strongest possible support motions from various branches that ICPA Queensland continue to provide their voice to the taskforce. “A lot of our children go away to school at the age of 12, and they all respond in different ways,” she said. Students, including these from the Longreach School of Distance Education, were a constant feature of conference presentations. The motion’s explanation noted that if ICPA Queensland couldn’t…

A defendant in the Waco biker shooting has filed a motion claiming prosecutors distributed “revenge porn” against him and his wife. On Thursday, Houston defense lawyer Paul Looney, known for hosting press conferences with a lit cigar suspended from his lips and a Lone Star bolo-tie affixed to his white shirt, announced a motion to remove the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office from the case of former biker Cody Ledbetter. Looney is asking that a special prosecutor be appointed to the case. In front of the scenic Waco courthouse Looney accused the district attorney’s office of “gratuitously, tortuously, and criminally” attaching photos and videos of Ledbetter and his wife having sex to the discovery process, which was then distributed to all 155 defendants in the massive shooting case. Ledbetter is one of 177 people who were arrested on May, 17, 2015, after the melee at a Twin Peaks restaurant in…

An article about the website Anon-IB recently garnered national attention when dozens of male Marines posted nude photographs of their female colleagues. Anon-IB—short for Anonymous Image Board—is one of many “revenge porn” websites that encourage users to post explicit photos of their exes, without the exes’ consent. Anon-IB receives 50,000 individual visitors each day and its page views can average 170,000, according to the New York Post. The site’s categories include “drunk/passed out,” “peeping toms” and “up-the-skirt” photos. Some material depicts molestation and rape, with many of the girls pictured below the age of 18. Users can post teenage girls’ pictures, as long as the tag does not contain their age, according to the New York Post. Revenge porn epitomizes the failure of legislators and policymaking to catch up with the rapid progression of technology. Georgia resident Brandon Lee Gary, for example, had been convicted for taking up-the-skirt photos of…

  Dr Liam Hackett, CEO of the anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label, shares his advice. By Lisa Salmon. I think my 12-year-old daughter is being bullied online. She hasn’t said anything but I’ve seen her in tears looking at her phone, and one of her friends hinted that she might be being cyberbullied. What should I do? Dr Liam Hackett, anti-bullying activist and CEO of Ditch the Label (ditchthelabel.org), says: “One of the biggest reasons young people don’t talk about any negative issues or cyberbullying they’re experiencing online is because they’re embarrassed or scared of getting told off by their parents. Therefore, first and foremost, try and reassure her that you love her unconditionally and that she can talk to you about absolutely anything that may be bothering her. “Another way to get her to open up to you could be by spending some quality time together, as mother and…