Jennifer Lawrence has described the “tragic'trauma” of having nude photos leak online. The Hunger Games star revealed to Vogue that she had obtained a “digital safe-harbor” for her personal information and documents after a hacker stole it. “Anybody can go look at my naked body,” she told the magazine. “But I think it’s important that I have the right to.”
Lawrence said she had felt “violated” after the leak in 2014, but she said she had managed to deal with it in ways that she thought of as “able-bodied and not a victim”.
Lawrence was not the only star affected by the hack in 2014. In the same year, dozens of female celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Hayden Panettiere, Kate Upton and Victoria Justice, all lost thousands of private photos to hackers after a campaign of hacking known as “Celebgate”. FBI investigations into the hack were launched, as was a New York state prosecutor’s investigation into how celebrities were targeted.
The process by which images and videos were released on the internet was the most difficult to solve, Kevin Downing, the assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, told the Guardian at the time. “The intrusion of this technology is probably greater than anything we’ve encountered.”
The FBI director, James Comey, has said the FBI is looking at how Chinese hackers may have gained access to celebrity email accounts. “It takes attention away from the bigger picture,” he said at a security conference in 2014. “We just have to pursue criminal investigations that will take us to where the bad guys are and then go to the authorities where we can indict them. And not be bogged down in the technical details.”
The attack was described by Nunes as “clearly another form of a crime against the American people,” and he said that hackers “tapped into the computers of people, mostly women”.
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Chelsea Manning has also spoken out about having her emails hacked and images stolen in the wake of the celeb-revenge campaign in 2014. Manning, who was jailed for leaking the military cables called the Collateral Murder video, has claimed her emails were hacked through her internet service provider. In a press conference in May, she said: “It was breaking news for celebrities.”