Mr. Brittain (Photo: Twitter)

Craig Brittain, owner of the revenge porn hub Is Anybody Down, has borrowed a page from fellow revenge porn proprietor Hunter Moore.

Yesterday, in a tweet laden with remorse, Mr. Brittain announced that he is shutting down Is Anybody Down. After a number of self-pitying follow-ups on Twitter, he changed his bio to the rather emo, “Say good night to the bad guy.”

But, as we conjectured, it appears that Mr. Brittain was lying the whole time. On the same day that he announced he would be ending IAD, Mr. Brittain registered the domains ObamaNudes.com and ObamaNudes.net and transferred all of IAD's content over to them.

Getting Victims of Revenge Porn to Pay for Removing Images

On Is Anybody Down, Mr. Brittain offered a paid content removal service called "Takedown Hammer," which he claimed was run by an independent third party. However, investigations by the legal teams of the women suing him, as well as those by CBS News, revealed that Mr. Brittain and Takedown Hammer are one and the same. (Emails from both parties repeatedly come from the same I.P. address.)  ObamaNudes.com appears to be the same sort of racket, with a new ad to pay $300 for Takedown Hammer's services (up from $250).

In addition to the investigations conducted by CBS News in Denver, a Betabeat source posed as a victim of revenge porn and asked Takedown Hammer to remove her photos. The source embedded a code that tracked the IP addresses of where the emails were opened, and concluded that Mr. Brittain and the Takedown Hammer operate from the same location in Colorado Springs. The Daily Dot also reported something similar.

Why would Mr. Brittain start a whole new site after working so hard to establish Is Anybody Down? Perhaps because with the onslaught of news stories about him, IAD has landed him in a lot of hot water recently. Mr. Brittain may believe that by switching to a new domain, he can start fresh.

Hiring Men on PlentyofFish to Obtain Nude Images for the Site

A source alerted Betabeat to the fact that Mr. Brittain may have been actively hiring posters to obtain nude photos to populate Is Anybody Down. On September 21, 2012, an ad appeared on IAD for a "content acquisition specialist." The ad reads:

This is a commission-based position where you will be involved in the acquisition and submission of content to IAD as an independent contractor. No experience is necessary, we will train you. You must be 18+ and have valid identification information. Your information will be kept confidential. If you are or have ever been a member of law enforcement, any federal agency, etc. you are ineligible for this position and cannot contact us. For more information and to apply, please contact jobs@isanybodydown.com

One victim, who spoke to Betabeat under condition of anonymity, believes that this is how her photos ended up on IAD. She met a guy on PlentyofFish.com, whom she spoke to and hung out with for three weeks before he asked her to send him nude photos of herself.

"I of course wanted to make him happy, so sent him some topless pictures," the victim told Betabeat. "He ended things shortly after and on March 6th, almost a month after i sent him the pictures, my phone was beeping rapidly with new text messages all from numbers I didn't know." The photos that she had sent exclusively to the man she had been dating from Plenty of Fish had ended up on Is Anybody Down, and strangers who had seen her photos on the site began harassing her by calling both her cell phone and her work number.

"I answered the phone and a man was asking to speak to me and asked me if I knew there were nude pictures of me on a website called isanybodydown.com?" she continued. "I had just found out through all the texts messages and now men were calling my job looking for me. They asked my coworkers if I was attractive and if they wanted to see me naked."

The source believes that the man was hired by Is Anybody Down to court women and coax them into sending him naked photos. Once he obtained them, he abruptly ended the relationships and uploaded them to IAD.

The Legal Ramifications

Revenge porn hubs regularly invoke section 230 of in the Communications Decency Act, which states that website owners aren't responsible for user submitted content, to excuse their practices. But if IAD was paying posters to obtain nude photos from women and publish them to the site without their consent, Mr. Brittain may no longer be able to claim immunity under section 230.

Perhaps by switching to a new domain, Mr. Brittain believes he can escape potential legal consequences (one source told Betabeat a civil case is in the works against Mr. Brittain), but victims' rights advocates are hopeful that mounting media pressure will thrust him into the spotlight just enough to spur a police investigation.

"Perhaps Craig is going to pull the plug on IAD, but we certainly haven’t seen the last of Craig," said "Sarah," the anonymous woman behind victims' rights group End Revenge Porn. "As for the new domain that he created last night, Obamanudes.com, here’s hoping that it will draw the president’s attention to the issue of revenge porn!  Though I’m doubtful that it will, I’ll continue doing what I’m doing to bring awareness to this issue and to help its victims achieve justice."

Mr. Brittain (Photo: CBS Denver)

Update: Even As He Promises to Close ‘Is Anybody Down,’ Craig Brittain Covertly Plans a New Revenge Porn Site

This afternoon Craig Brittain, the proprietor of revenge porn platform Is Anybody Down, announced on his Twitter feed that the site will be shutting down. In a series of tweets, Mr. Brittain wrote that the site, which allows scorned lovers to upload intimate photos of their exes without consent, will shut down entirely within 24 hours. "The website, Is Anybody Down, will completely end," he tweeted.

Mr. Brittain said he would provide more information soon and that the site is not being shuttered because of outside pressures, but instead because he "made a personal decision to end Is Anybody Down."

Is Anybody Down cropped up as a copycat of Hunter Moore's notorious Is Anyone Up, after Mr. Moore sold off IAU as a prank. The site has landed Mr. Brittain in a lot of hot water recently. Is Anybody Down purports to have an independent partnership with Takedown Hammer, a service that will strip your naked photo from Is Anybody Down for a $250 fee. Several sources have told Betabeat that they have definitive proof that Takedown Hammer is also operated by Mr. Brittain. CBS News Denver employed a security researcher to do an investigation, who determined that the emails from Mr. Brittain and the person supposedly running Takedown Hammer were sent from the same IP address. Mr. Brittain denied the findings.

Another investigation conducted by CBS Denver found that Mr. Brittain had posed as women on Craigslist in order to collect naked photos of women to populate Is Anybody Down.

Mr. Brittain has historically been rather flip about his practices--"I call it entertainment," he said recently of the site--but his tweets seem to indicate that he's had a change of heart. "A number of reasons contributed to my decision to end Is Anybody Down. Mostly my personal feelings," he tweeted, adding, "The realization that my life is empty without love and friendship is really the biggest motivating factor behind the change."

He continues:

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319917883931103232

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319918047160827904

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319918320067420160

https://twitter.com/CraigRSBrittain/status/319918463500034048

Though the tweets seem sincere, they're worth taking with a grain of salt. Mr. Moore, whom Mr. Brittain has modeled himself after over the last year, also appeared to have a change of heart before enthusiastically diving back into the revenge porn industry.

Mr. Brittain also updated his Twitter bio:

Just a boy who wanted to be loved, but never was. The last of my kind, they don't make people like me anymore. Say good night to the bad guy.

Mr. Moore (Photo: Showclix)

In 2012, it seemed like revenge porn king Hunter Moore might have had a change of heart. He sold his prominent revenge porn empire Is Anyone Up to James McGibney, the owner of anti-bullying site Bullyville, and wrote a letter claiming that he was no longer interested in facilitating the proliferation of revenge porn. Of course, like most of what Mr. Moore does, it was impossible to take at face value. The whole thing turned out to be a massive troll, fueled by copious amounts of cocaine, as he said in our December 2012 feature.

Though he did sell Is Anyone Up, Mr. Moore was certainly not sorry, and did not intend to take a stance against bullying. In fact, he quickly turned on Mr. McGibney, calling him a pedophile and accusing him of owning child pornography. Mr. McGibney, a former marine, was not about to take this sitting down and filed a suit against Mr. Moore for defamation.

Though Mr. Moore was served the suit, he never responded to the complaint. Because of this, Mr. McGibney was awarded a "default judgment." Yesterday a Nevada judge finally issued a ruling on the case, proclaiming that Mr. Moore must pay Mr. McGibney $250,000 in defamation damages, as well as pay his legal fees.

We reached out to both Mr. McGibney and Mr. Moore and will update when we hear back.

Update:

Here is a statement from Mr. McGibney:

"this judgment is the least of Hunters worries.  It just helped to pave the way for the class action lawsuit already in the works against him.  He thinks these young girls have forgotten what he did to them; think again.  And when you threaten to rape my wife while my kids watch, you've earned my undivided attention.  Never forgive, never forget.  #expectus"

James McGibney vs. Hunter Moore by Betabeat

Mr. Brittain

When Hunter Moore shut down Is Anyone Up, the web’s most notorious revenge porn site, a host of copycat sites quickly cropped up to fill the void, though none have come close to generating as much traffic as Mr. Moore’s.

One called Is Anybody Down, however, goes a step beyond humiliating people by posting their naked photos without consent. The site claims to hold an "independent" partnership with another site that charges a $250 fee for the removal of photos. Now several women in Colorado are speaking out against its founder, Craig Brittain, and these extortionist policies.

CBS News reports that two women have agreed to come forward and speak about Is Anybody Down with the hopes that other women will begin to talk about their experiences with similar sites. Their statement comes two weeks after Hollie Toups and 23 other women filed a class action lawsuit in Texas against Texxxan.com and its host GoDaddy in an attempt to break the stigma for victims of revenge porn.

“I call it entertainment,” Colorado-based Mr. Brittain, the site's proprietor, told CBS News. “We don’t want anyone shamed or hurt we just want the pictures there for entertainment purposes and business. I would say our business goal is to become big and profitable.” So far, he said he makes about $3,000 a month off of ads hosted on the site.

Marc Randazza, a Nevada-based lawyer who has made it his mission to defend victims of revenge porn, claims that in addition to posting non-consensual intimate photos of women, Is Anybody Down also flirts with a form of thinly-masked digital extortion.The site offers a partnership with an “independent” organization called Takedown Hammer, which purports to scrub your photos from Is Anybody Down—but only if you pay them $250.

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.

Mr. Randazza told Betabeat in December that he 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 Mr. Brittain and the owner of Takedown Hammer, he said that the two sites are definitely both run by Mr. Brittain.

“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 Down,” Mr. Randazza told Betabeat. “Unless Craig and David Blade were sitting in the same room at the same computer and then they just switched places at the keyboard within seconds of each other, these guys are the same person.”

CBS News employed a computer security investigator who also determined that the emails from Mr. Brittain and Mr. Blade came from the same IP address. Mr. Brittain denies the allegation, though said he could not produce contact information for Mr. Blade.

Though posting private, naked photos of people and then asking for $250 to have them removed sounds an awful lot like digital extortion, because courts have never dealt with revenge porn sites before, there isn’t a legal precedent set for how to navigate such a situation. But with more and more women speaking out and taking site profiteers to court, that may soon change.

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

Mr. Moore (Photo: Showclix)

Hunter Moore, the web's vilest revenge porn entrepreneur, announced on Twitter early this morning that a television show he has been working on has been picked up. Mr. Moore is notorious for running the revenge porn hub Is Anyone Up, where scorned people submit racy pictures of their exes without their permission. The site was shut down last year, but Mr. Moore has been planning to launch another site, HunterMoore.TV, for the last few months.

There have been murmurs about a Hunter Moore TV show for some time. Back in April, Mr. Moore told the BBC that he was working on a TV show with a "major U.S. network." Now, according to Mr. Moore, the show has officially been picked up, though he declined to give further details to Betabeat by email.

https://twitter.com/Huntermoore/status/292168550209183744

It's unclear which network has picked up the show, although postings for several events Mr. Moore has hosted over the past year point to MTV. "MTV WILL BE HERE TOO [sic] SHOOT HUNTER MOORE's new TV SHOW RIGHT HERE," reads an event listing in Atlanta from June 2012. Another event posting says that the tour Mr. Moore did this summer, called the IAU Forever Naked Tour, marked the beginning of the show's filming.

"My show got picked up todayyyy," Mr. Moore wrote in a note on Instagram. "My world takeover is beginning."

If true, the move is likely to anger victims' rights activists, lawmakers and hackers who have been fighting to stop Mr. Moore and his revenge porn empire.

As with all things Mr. Moore says, it's probably best to take this with a grain of salt. We've reached out to MTV to confirm if the show will run on that network, and will update when we hear back.

Update: A rep for MTV said that there's "not anything at MTV" involving Hunter Moore, though it's worth noting the network does tend to keep mum.

“I was so coked out,” Mr. Moore told Betabeat, as we made our way from the lobby of his hotel to a Broome Street bar called Lolita. Tall and thin with ink-colored hair and eyes to match, wearing a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, Mr. Moore sipped a rum and coke as we slid into a booth toward the back. Black tattoos reached like spiders across his arms.

Mr. Moore is the proprietor of Is Anyone Up, which until last Spring was the web’s most prominent revenge porn hub, a site where spurned exes post embarrassing images of former lovers. Deemed The Most Hated Man on the Internet by Rolling Stone, Mr. Moore revels in his position as a professional antagonist, gleefully flinging around his favored retort—“I really don’t give a fuck.” He doesn’t sleep well at night, but not because his day job haunts him: he’s an insomniac. As for guilt, he absolves himself by reasoning that it’s not him submitting the photos. He’s simply providing a platform for others to do so.

“Why should I care?” Mr. Moore said, taking a sip of his drink. “It’s not my life. It’s literally just a business. It’s stupid not to monetize it.”

Mr. Moore has built a lucrative career off of other people’s naked pictures, and he’s amassed a veritable army of fans in the process. Comprised primarily of young women who tweet him nude photos, and star-struck bros who wish they too could get paid to see girls naked, Mr. Moore boasts close to 100,000 Twitter followers eager to angrily and passionately defend him should anyone challenge his activities.

Prior to starting Is Anyone Up, Mr. Moore said he did party promoting and lived off of money he claimed he got from a lawsuit after he was sexually assaulted at 19 years old while working a retail job. "That’s some crazy shit you sue over," Mr. Moore said of the incident. "Not some shit like you fucking stuck your fingers in your ass and sent it to some cute boy you met on the internet and then you wanna sue me for that?"

Last spring, following an incendiary Village Voice cover story on his empire, it appeared for a moment that Mr. Moore had had a change of heart. He sold Is Anyone Up to James McGibney, the owner of Bullyville, an anti-bullying site, and wrote a letter claiming that he was a changed man, no longer interested in facilitating the proliferation of revenge porn. It may have been his slyest provocation yet.

“I literally had a half pound of cocaine on a fucking table with like 16 of my friends and we were busting up laughing taking turns writing this stupid letter,” Mr. Moore said of the incident. “I think bullying is bullshit and it’s just a soccer-mom fad.”

Now, Mr. Moore is launching a new project: a revenge porn site called HunterMoore.TV, that will include all of the old content from Is Anyone Up, in addition to new material. Perhaps most astoundingly, he told us, the site will now allow contributors to post the address of a target along with the scandalous photos. HunterMoore.TV will then display the nudes on a map, showing exactly where the subjects of the pictures live.

“I know—it’s scary as shit,” Mr. Moore admitted, noting that the site’s new feature will go live in the coming month.

He checked his iPhone, which had been lighting up with text messages all night. His “friend/drug supplier,” was calling, and Mr. Moore asked if he could bring him “a little somethin’.” Betabeat took this to mean cocaine, which he told us on multiple occasions was his current drug of choice.

After he hung up, we swung back to the topic of the victims of his site and whether or not he feels badly for them. At the word “victim,” Mr. Moore made a motion with his hand to signify masturbation and rolled his eyes.

“In a perfect world there would be no bullying and there would be no people like me and there would be no sites like mine,” he explained. “But we don’t live in a perfect world.”

***

On an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, while eating lunch alone in a local restaurant, Sarah, a consultant then in her mid-twenties (she asked to use a pseudonym), received an email that would fundamentally alter the course of her life. Sent by an anonymous tipster, the email included a link to a website she’d never heard of, along with the message, “Someone is trying to make life very difficult for you.” When she clicked the link, Sarah was horrified to find nude pictures of herself filling up the screen alongside personal information, including her full name and a link to her Facebook profile.

“My stomach just dropped,” Sarah told Betabeat. “I froze, immediately asked for the check, and then everything that happened after that is just a blur.”

Throughout the harrowing weeks that followed, Sarah learned that a scorned ex-boyfriend had taken intimate pictures that she had sent to him in confidence and uploaded them to a slew of websites. For months afterward she continued to receive harassing emails from revenge porn aficionados who had seen her pictures online.

The nature of Sarah's photos are typical of the revealing imagery that shows up on these revenge sites. She was in a long distance relationship at the time, and she had taken some nude photos at her then-boyfriend’s request; others had been taken by him while the two were engaged in sexual acts.

In addition to uploading the photos to hundreds of revenge porn sites, Sarah’s ex also sent them to everyone she worked with from an email address he had rigged to appear to come from her. “In the end, I decided to leave my job there because the pictures were all up in association with my position and the company,” she said. "I continued to receive harassing emails at my email address there, and honestly feared that sooner or later I would be physically stalked at work. There were some nights that I was working late and alone at the office, and would jump at every little sound.” Sarah says that despite the fact she never considered herself a gun-toting kind of gal, she bought a stun gun and never left the house without it; she also anticipates that “Santa will leave a gun under the tree for me this Christmas.”

Because her photos are on hundreds of revenge porn sites, Sarah also said that she’s constantly worried that people recognize her on the street. “I just feel like I’m now a prime target for actual rape,” she said. “I never walk alone at night, and I get chills when I catch someone staring at me. I always wonder to myself, ‘Are they staring because they recognize me from what’s on the Internet?’”

One of the fundamental truths of the Internet is that once an image is uploaded, it’s almost impossible to permanently scrape it from the web. When Sarah Googled her name, the first 10 pages of results were all links to her naked photos. She tried for months afterward to expunge her photos from the hundreds of revenge porn, regular porn and torrent sites that had picked them up. The police were of no help: they told her that because she was over 18 when the photos were taken, what her ex was doing was technically legal. Furthermore, because they were in his possession, they told her the photos were technically his property.

Unable to afford expensive legal fees that would allow her to file a civil suit, Sarah researched other options that could rid the web of the photos that haunted her. She filed Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests claiming that her ex was engaging in copyright infringement and battled with foreign webmasters who knew that because their servers were hosted elsewhere, they were beyond U.S. jurisdiction. None of her efforts worked: to this day, her photos are online. She even had to change her name because of it.

“It’s just horrible,” she added, the pain in her voice palpable. “I don’t think that society really realizes how rampant it is. And right now, there’s not a lot that victims can do about it.”

***

Mr. Moore (Photo: Nate Igor Smith)

There are several ways your risque snaps could end up on a revenge porn site without your consent like Sarah’s did. The most popular is that they’re submitted, along with links to your social media profiles, by a spiteful ex whom you once trusted with such intimate material. Some posters are men who feel rejected and punish one another’s exes out of a twisted sense of duty and brotherhood. Unlike spray-tanned, airbrushed porn manufactured by studios, revenge porn offers a rare, voyeuristic window into the private lives of couples, revealing how they see and lust after each other. It’s amateur porn in its purest sense, which is likely a generous part of its appeal. But revenge porn doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and even if you put aside issues of consent, there’s also a disturbing subtext that perhaps women deserve to be punished for trusting their male partners.

But both men and women, of all ages, have been victimized by revenge porn, and with HunterMoore.TV’s imminent launch, the number of people impacted by it will only grow.

To date, hosting and disseminating revenge porn is a legal grey area, though victims have sued on a host of legal grounds, including copyright infringement, privacy and publicity statutes, and even laws that require pornographers to maintain written records of the ages of their subjects, put in place to keep children out of the porn industry. Nevada-based copyright lawyer Marc Randazza is currently representing a client who is suing Mr. Moore on copyright grounds, after her photos appeared on Is Anyone Up and Mr. Moore declined to honor her takedown request. He’s also representing Mr. McGibney, the Bullyville founder, in a defamation case against Mr. Moore after he publicly accused Mr. McGibney of being a pedophile.

There are some federal cyberstalking laws created to protect victims like Sarah from retaliatory exes. “Under criminal law, state and federal law there exist cyberstalking laws that cover the very activity that [Sarah’s] perpetrator is engaged in, which is repeated online behavior designed with the intent to cause substantial emotional distress,” said University of Maryland law professor and cyberstalking expert Danielle Citron. “That kind of behavior is covered by federal cyberstalking law as well as her state’s stalking law. The key problem is that it’s not enforced. So often cops say, ‘Oh, just turn off your computer, you’ll clean up your online search, boys will be boys, they’ll just forget about you.’”

“Cops are fucking useless,” Mr. Randazza agreed.

"We need to educate law enforcement and the courts on the importance of bringing and prosecuting these cases and give them the resources to do so," said Erica Johnstone, a lawyer at a firm in San Francisco that focuses on IP and privacy law. "Right now we have laws, but don’t have resources to prosecute them." To help promote legal awareness about cyberharassment, Ms. Johnstone helped found Without My Consent, which "provides knowledge with tools about how to reclaim your reputation."

Meanwhile, proprietors of revenge porn sites like Mr. Moore are currently protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that websites are not liable for content submitted by users. “No one can do shit and I don’t give a fuck," Mr. Moore said. “I have a legal team and we’ve never even heard of these fucking people [suing us].”

Because courts have never dealt with revenge porn sites before, there isn’t a clear legal precedent. But Mr. Randazza, who specializes in copyright law, is so determined to destroy sites like Is Anybody Up that he’s waiving legal fees for any victims who have appeared on the site. On his blog, he argued that more consensually taken naked photos of women would make the world a better place.

“The fact that guys will do this makes it less likely that any woman will send you a naked picture of herself,” Mr. Randazza said. “Just from the perspective of not being a douche, any guy who meets anybody who runs one of these sites should punch them in the face."

“And if you do, I’ll represent you for free,” he added.

***

A few days after meeting with Betabeat, Mr. Moore told a reporter at Salon that he was so coked out and drunk that he didn’t even remember our interview. He claimed that HunterMoore.TV would not include an address submission field, and only he would be posting the addresses of people who had burned him. But his backpedaling may have been for naught: Mr. Moore had riled the Internet’s most notorious sleeping giant, the hacker collective Anonymous, which immediately launched an operation to destroy his revenge porn empire. Along with a foreboding video and a call to arms for all members to take Mr. Moore to task for his behavior, Anonymous published extensive personal information about Mr. Moore, including his home address and the names of his family members.

It seemed strange that Anonymous, which has been known to publish the personal information of its targets—much like the vengeful lovers who flock to Mr. Moore’s site—would go after someone who is effectively guilty of the same crime. However, a faction of the group has recently taken to punishing bullies, and helped to track down a ring of pedophiles that allegedly blackmailed 15-year-old Amanda Todd, who committed suicide following the cyberharassment. And KY Anonymous, the Anonymous operative who launched the campaign, reasoned that Mr. Moore’s willingness to harm the blameless makes him a worthy target. “We won’t stand by while someone uses the internet to victimize and capitalize off the misery of others,” said KY Anonymous. “We are all about free enterprise, but we are not about the things that Hunter Moore and other revenge porn sites are guilty of.”

The collective’s move raised some thorny questions: Is it possible to protect people from revenge porn while also supporting an open Internet, free from censorship and unnecessary government interference?

Charlotte Laws, an NBC commentator and California city councilwoman, believes it’s possible to create legal protections for revenge porn victims while also valuing a free web. She’s working to put tougher laws in place, a campaign she began after her daughter was the victim of a hack that led to her private photos being uploaded to revenge porn sites.

“Like a traditional rape victim, my daughter just balled up and didn’t want to face it or talk to anyone,” Ms. Laws recalled.

“I don’t think a minor legislative change regarding revenge porn would hamper that ‘freeness and openness’ of the Internet in any serious way,” she added. “My goal is only to limit speech when it comes to non-consensual graphic sexual photographs and videos. Nothing more.”

Ms. Laws pointed to 18 USC 2257, a law created for the pornography industry that requires commercial porn websites to index anyone who appears nude alongside a copy of their driver’s license proving that they’re 18. She argues that if a website operator like Mr. Moore had to produce a 2257 form and driver’s license for every person submitted to his site, “he would basically be limited to publishing ‘self-submits’ or photos approved by the ‘actor’ or ‘actress.’”

Meanwhile the University of Maryland law professor, Ms. Citron, suggested that more states adopt video voyeurism laws like one currently on the books in New Jersey that criminalizes publishing what she calls “pictures that are sexual in nature and naked pictures of sex acts without the person’s consent.”

“We’re working on what would be the best avenue for hopefully tweaking one of the current laws or making an amendment,” Ms. Laws added. “It’s really insidious and in some respects there’s components that are even worse than being physically attacked or bullied or harassed, because you have that component of the anonymity.”

***

Despite Mr. Moore’s defiant attitude, HunterMoore.TV’s potential new mapping feature--which may or may not come to fruition--could be the fatal blow to his invocation of Section 230. Ms. Citron argues that by encouraging users to include addresses with their submissions, he could be facilitating stalking. “If he is putting up fields with someone’s address and a field ensuring that there’s a map to facilitate stalking, I think there’s an argument to be made that he is engaging in cyberstalking under federal criminal law,” Ms. Citron told Betabeat. “Section 230 explicitly does not immunize federal criminal law violations.”

Sarah, the victim in her late-twenties, is also working with Ms. Laws to pass more stringent legislation. She started End Revenge Porn, an online hub for victims to congregate, share their stories and take action. The group is currently collecting signatures for a petition that seeks to halt revenge porn.

“People call it cyberrape, and it absolutely is,” Sarah said. “That’s why we’re pushing to have the law make it a felony. It equates to just how much damage this does to someone’s life.”

She added, “Once those pictures go up, they never come down.”

A version of this story appeared on A1 of the New York Observer.

(Photo: Vimeo)

It was only a matter of time before Anonymous, the hacker collective known for being protectors of the free Internet, jumped into the revenge porn fray. Last night they announced #OpHuntHunter, an offshoot of the group's anti-bullying operation that seeks to "hold Hunter Moore accountable for his actions."

Mr. Moore enraged and frightened privacy advocates (and anyone who has ever taken a nude selfie) last week when he told us that his new site, HunterMoore.TV, would include an address submission field where users can submit addresses alongside naked photos of their exes. Though he's since gone back on that claim, Anonymous has taken it upon themselves to dox Mr. Moore, publishing personal information such as his home address and the name of his parents. They've also published the personal info of Andrew Myers, the proprietor of Is Anyone Back, a copycat site of Mr. Moore's first submission site, Is Anyone Up.

It's worth noting, however, that Mr. Moore told Betabeat that his personal information has been available online for a long time. And last week, Charlotte Laws, whose daughter was a victim of Mr. Moore's site, tweeted his address. She told Betabeat that she's been giving it out to victims hoping to serve him lawsuits for months.

In the release, Anonymous writes:

This is a call to all of anonymous. We Will hold hunter moore accountable for his actions, we will protect anyone who is victimized by abuse of our internet, we will prevent the stalking, rape, and possible murders as byproduct of his sites.

Operation Anti-Bully. Operation Hunt Hunter engaged. We are Anonymous, we are Legion, we do not Forgive, we do not Forget, Hunter Moore, EXPECT US.

Anonymous has been known to “dox," or publish personal information, about its targets in the past–much in the same way Mr. Moore’s new site will. But given the collective's powerful anti-bullying campaign in the wake of Amanda Todd’s suicide, it's interesting to see Anon's "hacktivist" impulses once again triggered by the powerless.

We've reached out to Mr. Moore for his reaction to Anonymous' news, and will update when we hear back. We also interviewed KY Anonymous, who launched the attack on Mr. Moore, and will be publishing that interview later Monday.

Anonymous Message to Hunter Moore from kentucky anon on Vimeo.

(Photo: HunterMoore.TV)

Remember Hunter Moore, the 26-year-old porn proprietor whom the Village Voice wrote "makes a living screwing you?" Mr. Moore's site, Is Anyone Up, served as a platform for scorned exes and bored hackers to submit nude photos of people without their consent, along with links to their Facebook or Twitter profiles. After disappearing from the revenge porn circuit for awhile, he appears to be back in action with a new site, HunterMoore.TV.

The site is bare bones so far, with a Hunter Moore logo and two buttons, "Submit" and "Advertise." [Update: The new site will map photos to people's addresses.] A welcome message penned by Mr. Moore himself outlines what the next iteration of Is Anyone Up will look like:

My name is Hunter Moore and I created Is Anyone Up.com when I was 24 years old. I was broke and sitting on my parents couch in Sacramento, California with -$124 in my bank account. It was for me and my friends to post pictures of girls we were fucking at the time & somehow someone found it and it became what it was. I sold it because i hated what the media turned it into and it could never be what i wanted it to be and always wanted to troll the lame and boring fad that soccer moms love and thats "bullying". We had too many hackers too much overhead and way too many legal problems. This time I am doing it right. We are going to start off by launching with all the old IAU content and all new content. The submission page has only been up for five full days and we've done over 7,000 submission within that time. I am creating something that will question if you will ever want to have kids. I am making something very scary but yet fun. If you remember the old IAU you will have it back but with a mobile APP to go along with it and a very strong social networking site of our community. I hope you are all as excited as i am.

Mr. Moore rose to infamy by publishing the nude photos of others, but soon after the Voice ran its cover story on him, he turned the site over to Bullyville, an anti-bullying group. Since Is Anyone Up relied on anonymous submissions of photos, it was near-impossible to keep underage content off of the site, and Mr. Moore tweeted that he was "just done dealing with little kids getting submitted." The FBI then opened an investigation on Mr. Moore after a private investigator named Charlotte Laws discovered her daughter's computer had been hacked and nude photos posted to the site.

After turning the site over to Bullyville, Mr. Moore did seem repentant for his actions. In a note posted to Bullyville, he wrote:

I might do some writing on bullyville.com to help people who have been bullied; I've been on both sides of the fence. I am putting this message up on Bullyville.com to stand up for underage bullying. I think it's important that everyone realizes the damage that online bullying can cause.

But soon after turning Is Anyone Up over, Bullyville's founder James McGibney said he became a target of Mr. Moore's wrath. He claimed that Mr. Moore went back on his promise to speak out against underage bullying within 72 hours of turning the site over, and began harassing Mr. McGibney on Twitter, accusing him of being a pedophile. In a post published to Bullyville in August 2012, which IsAnyoneUp.com directs to, Mr. McGibney wrote:

And then came the straw that broke the camel’s back. As if accusing me of pedophilia wasn’t bad enough, Hunter Moore threatened to rape my wife while my kids watched. He has now been served with a defamation lawsuit and has restraining orders filed against him in two States.

Since then, Mr. Moore has been writing music and maintaining an active Twitter account, with over 90,000 followers.

Many people scorned by their exes breathed a sigh of relief when Is Anyone Up shut down, but HunterMoore.TV promises just as many sleepless nights and privacy fears. It will start by republishing all of the old content that populated Is Anyone Up before its shuttering.

HunterMoore.TV isn't officially launched yet, but some content is accessible via Google. One post on the new site revolves around a girl Mr. Moore met online. When he saw her at a party in New York, he was dismayed to find that she had a “man jaw.” The post is accompanied with three sexually explicit photos she sent him. Another post is about a tryst Mr. Moore had with an “elderly” woman. That page also features three nude photos.

IsAnyoneUp's Twitter account announced the new site last week, and told all of its followers to follow Mr. Moore's personal Twitter account. @IsAnyoneUp, they tweeted, was being shut down for "legal bullshitt."