The theft and leaking of huge numbers of private images of various female celebrities last weekend, with Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence (above) the most prominent victim, is a thoroughly modern story.
For one thing, the theft was enabled by cloud technology, which is in its relative infancy, but in a larger sense, it is a collision of the invasive cult of celebrity and the online hacking subculture, and highlights the virulent sexism that is common to both (the victim-blaming in the wake of the leak was another manifestation of that pervasive sexism).
In a very real sense, then, this episode raises lots of important questions that we have never really had to contemplate before. Among the most far-reaching is what this means for the very notion of privacy itself.
The indications are that the theft was the work of a highly sophisticated celebrity hacking and image trafficking ring operating on the “darknet”, an alternative internet invisible to most browsers.
The hackers predominantly targeted Apple’s iCloud service, which backs up photographs and other data from a user’s iPhone.
It appears the leak began when one of the ring attempted to sell some of the images, causing a rush of further leaks from other members of the ring.
Apple has insisted its iCloud service was not breached, which is technically true – hackers didn't attack Apple's servers and find a way to decrypt the data.
However, there is significant culpability on Apple’s part, because the method used to steal this information – essentially obtaining enough information about the victims and guessing their passwords – might not technically be a breach, but it’s certainly evidence of a very big weakness in the iCloud system.
The problem though isn't strictly about Apple's security measures for iCloud – the very notion of our data remaining private is being altered by cloud computing, in which our data is backed up on to vast servers run by the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon and Dropbox.
The “cloud” is powerful because it allows our data to be shared and synced between our various devices and ensures we have back-ups of that data.
When most people only had a desktop computer, syncing between different devices wasn’t an issue, but now that we all carry smartphones and tablets, having access to our data at all times is a huge convenience. With that convenience comes a necessary security trade-off.
The solution to this problem can’t be “don’t take photos you don’t want anyone else to see” – this story is about the female celebrities whose privacy was so grievously violated – but we all have private lives and we all deserve to have that privacy preserved.
It remains to be determined though to what degree our privacy can even survive in the age of cloud computing.
In a comprehensive blog post on the topic, the information security expert Dan Kaminsky illustrated the risk by quoting an old Soviet saying: “If you think it, don’t say it. If you say it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t be surprised.”
It is of deep concern that such a stark warning can be so resonant once again.
