Ms. Toups (Photo: Twitter)

John S. Morgan, the lawyer helping victims of revenge porn site Texxxan.com launch a class action suit against the site and its host GoDaddy.com, announced today that two more women have signed on to the claim. Unlike Hollie Toups, the 32-year-old Beaumont, Texas resident who came forward in order to encourage others to confront their struggles with revenge porn, these two victims are allegedly underage. New allegations of child pornography further muddle the already complex case--the most aggressive legal action taken against revenge porn thus far.

The release says that the women have filed an amended cause of action against Hunter Thomas Taylor, the 24-year-old proprietor of Texxxan.com, as well as his parents, whose Internet connection (and occasionally their credit card) was used to maintain the site. The claim also names Austin Ray Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan described as the site administrator.

Mr. Morgan said he has found at least two underage victims whose photos were uploaded to the site. The victims have signed onto the suit along with their parents. Mr. Morgan is working with the FBI to report the instances of underage pornography that he says he's encountered while building the case. "I'm a civil lawyer," he told Betabeat. "We enjoy the opportunity to work with law enforcement because this is such an important issue, but ultimately the FBI makes its own decision on how it handles criminal investigations. My indications are that the FBI is taking this very, very seriously and is going to do a very thorough and excellent job prosecuting people for underage photos."

The case will be pursued under state law instead of federal law, as the victims and proprietors are all located in Texas. Mr. Morgan argues that uploading and hosting photos on the site without subjects' permission is "invasion of privacy, unauthorized use of name or likeness and what we call negligence or gross negligence: that their actions were completely negligent because they didn't think about the ramifications."

Mr. Morgan also said he is going to continue to add defendants to the case. "I'm going to try to start listing the people who have uploaded the photos as defendants and start listing the subscribers once we attain that information," he said.

According to Mr. Morgan, Mr. Taylor lives with his parents in Orange, Texas, and was the anonymous "James Smith" who called in to the Anderson Live two week ago in a segment about revenge porn. Little other information is known about Mr. Taylor.

Ms. Toups, however, said that she knows Mr. Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan said was the Texxxan.com web administrator. "Austin used to date a friend of mine so that's how I met him," Ms. Toups told Betabeat. "He's been around me and that makes it a little bit more disturbing." Ms. Toups said she lives about a 15 minute drive from where both Mr. Ponthieu and Mr. Taylor reside in Orange, Texas. "The only thing that separates us is a body of water and a bridge," she added. "I talked to some of the other girls and you just assume it's some creep that lives far away."

Ms. Toups and the other women involved in the Texxxan.com suit have served as a lightning rod for the controversy, encouraging other women to discuss their struggles with revenge porn. Last week, two women in Colorado spoke out against Craig Brittain, the founder of the website Is Anybody Down.

"It's kind of like the beginning of a healing process because for so long of course they've been hiding and kind of controlling our lives from the shadows," Ms. Toups said. "To be able to know who it is, it's kind of like forcing them to be held accountable for their actions. I know people have said before that we made the choice to take the photos and to deal with it. Well, they made this choice, so now they have to deal with the consequences."

Below is the press release and the updated claim. We emailed an address for Texxxan.com and calls to a listing for a home number for Mr. Taylor were unanswered.

Texxxan.com Lawsuit - Press Release and Amended Complaint by Adam Steinbaugh

Ms. Toups being filmed for a video news segment about her experience with revenge porn. (Photo: Instagram/h0lliewood)

“I don’t think that society really realizes how rampant it is,” Sarah, a victim of revenge porn, told Betabeat in a feature we wrote last month about the effort to put a stop to sites that take intimate photos of women and publish them without their permission. "And right now," she added, "there’s not a lot that victims can do about it.”

Last week, however, several women--some affiliated with Sarah's organization, End Revenge Porn--joined a class action lawsuit with the hopes of taking down a prominent revenge porn website.

Hollie Toups, a 32-year-old resident of Beaumont, Texas, has publicly come forward to discuss her painful experience with revenge porn in an effort to encourage other victims to do the same. Ms. Toups is now one of at least 23 women who have signed on to a class action lawsuit that seeks to prosecute the owners of Texxxan.com and its hosting company GoDaddy for invasion of privacy and mental anguish. Texxxan.com hosts intimate photos of women living in Texas that have been submitted without their consent.

"I live in an extremely small town and the website was flooded with people that I knew," Ms. Toups said. "Those of us on there go to the grocery store and everybody recognizes you. Not everybody says something, but you get a lot of like, 'Hey, do I know you?' or, 'I recognize you from somewhere.' But then you also get people that will just come out and say it."

Like many victims of revenge porn sites, Ms. Toups told Betabeat that some of her photos appear to have been uploaded by an ex-boyfriend, while others she says she never sent to anyone and may have been lifted from her phone or computer. The photos had been uploaded along with a link to her Facebook profile and real name, so she received harassing messages for weeks after her photos surfaced on the site.

"GoDaddy is profiting off of it," said John S. Morgan, Ms. Toups' lawyer. "The reality of it is at some level this issue of revenge porn has to become a public discussion and a legislative discussion and it raises issues of corporate responsibility. Why would an organization like GoDaddy want to give its name to this type of website?" (We assume Mr. Morgan hasn't seen GoDaddy's ads.) GoDaddy told us, "We don't comment on pending litigation."

Considering the numerous repercussions that keep many victims silent, Ms. Toups' decision to join the lawsuit under her real name is brave. Many revenge porn victims--including Sarah--are forced to remain anonymous or else face the wrath of vengeful exes who find renewed motivation to post their pictures on porn websites. Because of the intimate nature of the photos, many women are also embarrassed to publicly admit that they were victims, and others are afraid of cyberbullying from the passionate fandoms revenge porn proprietors attract.

Ms. Toups said she was "in a straight panic" for days after discovering the photos, and emailed the site's owner to try to get them taken down. "They replied and said they would be happy to remove the pictures for me if I would enter my credit card information," she said. "I went from being depressed and embarrassed to being really pissed off."

Texxxan.com isn't the only website allegedly engaging in this sort of blackmail enterprise. Other revenge porn sites also benefit both from posting photos and removing them. Is Anybody Down, a copycat site of Hunter Moore's infamous Is Anyone Up, has a relationship with a third-party website called Takedown Hammer that will scrub your photos from Is Anybody Down, but only for a fee.

Is Anybody Down features ads for Takedown Hammer across its site, and a link called “Get Me Off This Site!” takes you to a post about Takedown Hammer’s success in removing its clients’ photos from Is Anybody Down. Takedown Hammer claims to be operated by a New York-based lawyer named David Blade, III, but no such name appears in the New York State Unified Court System’s attorney database.

Nevada-based lawyer Marc Randazza, who is representing Bullyville founder James McGibley in a defamation suit against the revenge porn proprietor Hunter Moore, has conversed extensively with the profiteers of Is Anybody Down. After studying the IP addresses associated with the computers of Is Anybody Down’s owner Craig Brittain and the owner of Takedown Hammer, he told Betabeat that the two sites are definitely both run by the same person.

“I have clear and convincing evidence that the exact same IP address is being used by both emails from the Takedown Hammer and Is Anybody Up,” Mr. Randazza said.

Ms. Toups (Photo: Twitter)

Ms. Toups is unfortunately well-acquainted with this new form of digital extortion, but initially struggled to find a lawyer willing to represent her. Many revenge porn victims want to sue, but only anonymously, which makes it much more difficult to launch a successful class action suit.

After several lawyers turned her down, Ms. Toups found John S. Morgan, an attorney in Southeast Texas. With the help of Mr. Morgan and Sarah, Ms. Toups reached out to victims in her area to see if they would be interested in joining the suit. The class action suit petition was filed in Orange County, Texas on Friday.

"To anyone affected by this, I stress to you, you are not alone! It’s not your fault, and you did nothing wrong!" Ms. Toups wrote in a statement representing the women involved in the suit. "You don’t have to face this alone anymore.I know the emotions you’re feeling and what you’ve been going through, and don’t have to feel ashamed! Hold your head high."

"I think 99 percent of victims get told no [by lawyers] so they give up," Ms. Toups said by phone. "I apparently was born with a hardheaded trait that came in handy for once, and I refused to accept the fact that there was nothing that could be done."

Many proprietors of revenge porn websites claim they are protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that websites are not liable for content submitted by users. Mr. Morgan argues that because these sites knowingly post photos without the subject's consent, and advertise their sites as such, they aren't protected by this law. He also noted that because Texxxan.com only posts the photos of women living in Texas, he is pursuing the case under state law instead of federal law.

Mr. Morgan also intends to sue all those who signed up for a subscription on Texxxan.com, paying a monthly fee to get access to more personal information of the women in the photos. After news of the suit broke, Texxxan.com became viewable only to its members.

As for Ms. Toups, who's studying criminal justice and currently works for the state as a mentor for kids, she's decided to turn her experience into a vehicle for her to positively impact the lives of other victims.

"Hollie reached out to me to see how she could help with the cause," Sarah told Betabeat. "I'm working closely with her and the woman behind Women Against Revenge Porn to reach out to victims, letting them know about our petition and our sites." (Sarah said that any lawyers interested in helping victims can submit their contact info via the Legal Contacts page on End Revenge Porn.)

"I've been trying to figure out why this happened," Ms. Toups said. "Maybe it happened to me so I could help someone. Several of the girls that I’ve been in contact with have been suicidal and I feel like if I had reached them sooner they would not even have attempted that. I’m one of the older ones--most of them are younger--so I felt somebody has to start it. And I knew that once I did even the ones who were scared would end up coming out."

Ms. Toups said that since going public on a local Texas TV station on Thursday night, other girls have contacted Mr. Morgan hoping to join the suit.

Despite mounting pressure from revenge porn victims, hackers and lawmakers, the web's most notorious revenge porn entrepreneur, Hunter Moore, is still at it. Last Friday, Mr. Moore tweeted that his TV show had been picked up, though declined to say for which network.

Class Action Suit Against GoDaddy.com and Texxxan.com

In a letter sent to GoDaddy customers Wednesday, interim CEO Scott Wagner said GoDaddy owed customers "a big apology" for the service outage, which the hosting provider insists "was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."

Mr. Wagner did take a moment to defend the company before making the big announcement:

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services.

As a result of this disruption, your account will be credited for the value of 1-month of service for each of your active/published sites.* This credit will be available to you for the next 7 days. Please click the button below to redeem your credit.

Mashable's Zoe Fox noted that for many GoDaddy customers, the credit doesn't actually amount to much. Ms. Fox writes that for anyone who bought a $12.99 dotcom domain name from GoDaddy, Mr. Wagner's generous offer "adds up to roughly $1."

Ms. Fox isn't giving GoDaddy due credit for its guilt-driven generosity--one free month at that rate actually adds up to $1.08. Which will totally buy you a 12-ounce soda, if it's on sale.

GoDaddy, back up and running (Screengrab)

GoDaddy has issued a statement saying the outage that took down several thousand websites for a good portion of the day on Monday was caused not by any sort of hack or Directed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, but "internal network events that corrupted router data tables." TechCrunch posted GoDaddy Interim CEO Scott Wagner's statement about the outage. Mr. Wagner acknowledged the outage and wrote:

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

@AnonymousOwn3r, the Brazil-based hacker who claimed credit for the outage, responded via Twitter to GoDaddy's denial:

whooa @godaddy is denying that it was hacked by me! they don't wanna show their cybersecurity is badthis way they would lose customers !

— Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) September 11, 2012

AnonymousOwn3r threatened in a second tweet "to bring down godaddy.com again, so this way they would admit instead of hiding the attack."

We're not popping the popcorn yet, but the hacker does claim to have the power to bring down an entire nation's Internet service, so we'll sit back and watch for falling nations.

Screengrab

A Brazilian hacker with the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r has taken credit for a substantial cyber attack against domain host GoDaddy. Millions of web pages hosted by GoDaddy and even domain names simply registered through the service were affected.

As of 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time Monday, the attack was 5 hours old. The New York Times's "Bits" blog gives some idea of just how much trouble this epic attack has caused:

Go Daddy customers vented their frustration on Twitter and elsewhere. Bob DeLuna, director of public information at the United Hospital Fund, a nonprofit health organization, said four domain names it had registered with Go Daddy had been down for three hours. He said that when he contacted GoDaddy’s customer service line, a representative said that 750 people were waiting in line behind him. She told him that during service outages, the typical wait list was 20 people.

For his part, @AnonymousOwn3r seems to be enjoying the chaos, tweeting multiple links and chatting with angry and admiring fellow tweeters. He appeared to explain his motives in a response to a question from a follower:

@film_girl I'm taking godaddy down bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now

— Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) September 10, 2012

AnonymousOwn3r has also claimed responsibility for a Facebook outage in May. In tweets posted at the time he said he'd attacked the social networking site because Facebook was "blocking google crhome," (sic) for which he gave them "a #tangodown."

AnonymousOwn3r appears to have made a habit of posting snippets of contentious IRC chats with other hackers on Pastebin.com.

If the conversations posted on Pastebin are to be believed, AnonymousOwn3r often appears to use the nick "Own3r-anon" in IRC. In this exchange published on May 17, 2012, the hacker wanted to know why he was not part of a hacking group calling itself @AnonATeam.

Addressing at least three others in the chat, AnonymousOwn3r wrote, "you guys can't do nothing without me." Two fellow hackers agreed but after one told him, "Own3r-anon your ego is amazing," another said, "our team is noobs and kids [...] we dont deserve u."

Eventually AnonymousOwn3r wrote, "I have power to down a entire country."

A fourth hacker responded, "Thats the prob Own3r. You do have the power. you are a great member to have on the team. but just cause you have the power doesnt mnean you have to use it."

On June 7th, this tweet appeared on @AnonAteam's Twitter account:

This profile has been hacked by: Own3r!

— AnonAteam (@AnonAteam) June 7, 2012

Meanwhile, GoDaddy has posted a message on its home page acknowledging the outages and stating that service to many sites was restored by 5:45 p.m. In bold it asserts that "At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised." GoDaddy further states it will provide another update "within the next 24 hours."

GoDaddy was also accused of delaying some of the domain transfers in the wake of the SOPA debacle.

As we've seen with hapless Wisconsin rep Paul Ryan, whose mere lack of opposition to SOPA was enough to put him in anti-SOPA advocates' sights, civically-inclined citizens of the internet are not satisfied with a "do not support." The bill, which would allow for government intervention if a website is hosting copyrighted content, even if that content comes from users, has been the cause of much handwringing. Internet users see it as a case of big media and Hollywood co-opting Congresspeople who then immediately reveal their utter ignorance of how the internet works during Congressional testimony.

An amendment introduced earlier this month stipulated that the bill only applies to foreign websites. The bill also provides immunity for financial institutions and online ad networks. According to the Judiciary Committee, the bill has strong support. SOPA's supporters including committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) have been pushing their message hard in response to accusations that the bill would "break the internet," saying critics' claims are unfounded or "lies."

The vote will be scheduled in early January.

Domain registrar GoDaddy, previously a supporter of the much-derided SOPA, or Stop Internet Piracy Act, suddenly pulled it support for the bill earlier today, after widespread Internet outcry and calls for a boycott.

In a conversation with Betabeat, brand-new GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman credited "the sum of feedback from various sources," including emails from customers, stories in the technology press, feedback from Internet leaders, and anti-SOPA blog posts, as being the impetus that forced them to take another look at the situation.

"In it's current form, it's not ready," Mr. Adelman said of the bill. Mr. Adelman also cited his short term in the CEO role - he's been there only a week! - for giving him the flexibility to take another look at the bill and GoDaddy's corporate support for it.

But withdrawing its support for the bill doesn't necessarily mean that GoDaddy will put its political muscle towards stopping it, at least right now. "We're going to observe and see what others propose," Mr. Adelman said, noting that GoDaddy was not precluding trying to actively prevent the bill's passage in the future, but, at this time, they were content to let "others" take more of a leadership role around this bill.

So, what was the straw that broke the camel's back? Mr. Adelman insisted that GoDaddy was responding to the outcry in the aggregate, and that there was not one particular person whose feedback was the tipping point. When asked whether support for a boycott from actor-slash-Internet investor Ashton Kutcher had affected the decision, company spokesperson Elizabeth Driscoll remarked "With all due respect to Ashton, we were well underway with creating the news release" by the time he expressed his opinion.

And how effective was that boycott, organized by a user on Reddit to convince people to move their domains from GoDaddy? While Adelman did not know the number of cancelled GoDaddy accounts off the top of his head, he did not that the company "didn't see any statistical change" in the number of accounts.

The full statement from GoDaddy:

Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA

Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Develop Legislation We All Support

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

@aplusk just tweeted out: "I am moving my domains off of @Godaddy due to their support for #SOPA. Paul Graham is also doing the right thing (cc @paulg)"

We all know what a tweet from Ashton can do to promote a brand, but can an Ashton sanction pull it under?

According to the post, self-prodigy claims to have already transferred 51 personal domains and 300 professional ones in his/her capacity as IT director. Go Daddy, the perpetrator of those tacky spokesbabe Superbowl ads, has more than 50 million domain names under management, and is currently largest domain name registrar worldwide.

GoDaddy previously released a statement supporting SOPA before the House started hearings on the act, near-universally loathed by Internet natives. Despite the fact that GoDaddy opens itself up to potential liability under SOPA, the company writes that, "Go Daddy has a long history of supporting federal legislation directed toward combating illegal conduct on the Internet."

As self-prodigy notes, the call for action has already gotten attention beyond just Reddit. Today, GoDaddy posted its statement of SOPA support dated October 28, 2011 in response to customers asking about the company's position. In bold font just above the statement, the company writes, "Online copyright laws won’t prevent a flourishing Internet." Sorry, dudes, bolding it doesn't make it true.

The post also garnered interest from competing domain registrars including Name.com and HostGator, which offered discount codes under the name NODADDY and NOSOPA. I believe this is what they talk about when they talk about the free market.

UPDATE: Note from the field, CheezBurger Nation CEO Ben Huh, tweeted out, "We will move our 1,000 domains off @godaddy unless you drop support of SOPA. We love you guys, but #SOPA-is-cancer to the Free Web."