And specialize inside online puss, stalking and revenge porn and is set on the path with her frightening experten with an exbody. She represents victims who have had their lives turned upside down by expartners and scorned lovers usually in revenge, whether it be real or conceived. This behavior is too common. Im sure many of you in the room have your own story. I know i do. Nobody is victim is a book that gives the sufferers of the crimes a face and a name and an identity. When for so long they have been shrouded in darkness. Goldberg gives uss like that of a 15yearold girl who was sex lull eye assaulted at school and then suspend when she report what happened to her. Theres also a woman owhose exmade fake bomb threats in her name and a man whose former boyfriend post evidence his information on dating app, inviting strangers to his home and work for sex. This book is an analysis of victims rights in a time where digital harassment it getting worst and a warn us call for what is to come if we dont take action now. Moderating tonights event is Margaret Talbot, an essayist. Please help me welcome Margaret Talbot and carrie goldberg. [applause] this it great to be here with you carrie. Did a profile of carrie for the new yorker magazine and get to spend time in her office and with her wonderful crew, and i have to say that though she does work on some really grim and frightening cases, she brings a real vibrance and fun and the people would work wither are so committed and it is actually it was strangely fun story to do because it was so great so spend the time with you and your group. But one of the things i learned that was knew to me when i started the story was i mean a lot of things. Ed opened my eyes and one was that revenge porn, term that people use is actually a misleading porn, i is nonconsensual pop is their more accurate term because one motivation for distributing intimate photos that may have been shared in the context of a relationship, is revenge, by an angry ex and thats a common scenario there are people who do this kind of thing just for profit or some kind of sadistic laugh, and there are variety of motivations unfortunately that you have come into contact with. So that is one thing i learned. The other thing i learned which was a shock is the extent, the vicious extent and persistence with which some of these campaigns harassment by trolls and others are carried out online, and so i just wonder if you could actually tell a story from one of your clients just to give a little more detail and put a little more kind of put this a little more into context what were talking about, i. Yes. First of all, thank you everyone for coming. This is like it is so surreal this thing is in the world and people are coming to listen to conversations about it and margaret being with margaret was a life changing experience for me, and when she i first got an email from you saying you were considering doing a profile on me, my mom was, like i think how many words it was long. What does that mean . What is she talking about . Thanks, mom. Having you there and you were like, just think of me as a fly on the wall, and it was impossible because you brought such a joy to our office, and i was always having to yell at adam, stop talking to margaret, get back to work. That was a direction she had to give to adam, a young man whose run of miss jobs wag look was looking at nonconsensual porn. Lets talk about a story, and in the book we kind of i kind of create this its flippant but its we have kind of four main kind of categories of offenders we see over and over again, and its almost like theyre acting from the same playbook, and so one type is what we call the psycho who will stop at nothing to destroy his targets life, and i use a male pronoun because usually these offenders are male. And theyre not afraid of cease and desist letters or order of protection or the law, criminal law even, and its one of the mose pernicious types of issues we have to resolve, is somebody who is completely lawless and usually they use the internet as a weapon. So, one case we had was a young woman who was a server at a restaurant, and i actually got the call from a College Friend of mine who said that this woman she worked with was viciously harassed, and she when we first connected she was so scared that actually i was the offender. That she we had to do these things to prove that this my website wasnt created by him, and that my phone number wasnt his and i wasnt and she was she had every reason to be terrified. She met this man when she was posting an ad looking for a roommate. She lives with three people and they needed a fourth roommate, and this nice guy from an academy came to look at the apartment, and little did she know that her computer was on while he was looking and she was out of the room, and in that to the fuse communities he gained access to her entire online life and they accepted him to be a roommate and then life started getting really crazy for her. Her online diary was suddenly being sent to everybody in her social circle. Her medical records relating to abortion she had had was sent to hundreds of people were getting the details of her most traumatic moments, but then it just continued, and she she knew that it was this roommate but she thought, okay, im just going to leave. And so the moved back home, and then suddenly her father, her mother, was getting hacked. Her fathers email was being impersonated and looked like he was sending child upon nothing porch until aography speak has creating collages with our clients person and then sending them from impersonates accounts and he was tech savvy we got the feds to come in but he was really good at log soft marry no anonymize himself. The vpn to mask his ip address and different kinded of overseas email services, and even like the the most sophisticated detective couldnt find proof that he could and. Was she going to the police during this time. She had been to the police, and then he and it was so allconsuming, and then she started impersonating him like Juan Thompson and sending bomb threats and he started to just targeting the hell out of this town and sending bomb threats to the schools on an almost daily basis, completely absorbing is a though they were her and anonymously. He was blogging so, swatting is a thing that happens to clients and to a lot of gamers and stuff where somebody basically makes a 911 call saying that, oh, margaret is holding up her family hostage and she has semiautomatic weapons and is going to kill everybody and creates this emergency and then people the Law Enforcement come with guns drawn, to your home, and its really dangerous because people have gotten shot and killed from Law Enforcements responding to those situations. And it happens a lot on streaming platforms where somebody is playing a video game and then somebody else s. W. A. T. S them and then it plays out in real life. So, this is just a scorched Earth Campaign on our client, and ultimately we found a few chinks in the armor and he got arrested and actually he was sentenced to 17 and a half years for cyber harassment but it was cyberharassment pornography, is not judges dont give big sentences for that. And really it wasnt this wasnt really her like, i so many cases, when it was just one woman under attack, it really wasnt a big deal but when communities became the whole town. The town start erred getting targeted, then it got taken more seriously. It was in massachusetts. Yeah little. So thats a case where the guy did debt get a long sense and you were able to help the client in a very real way, bring summon to justice but very often thats quite difficult to do and there are a lot of reasons for that. A lot of obstacles to Holding InternetCompanies Accountable to holding individual accountable, to getting the Police Involved because police often dont social are local officers dont understand the forensics are not able to do the forensics involved in tracing these anonymized people and so on. One of the big ones for you is section 230 of the Communications Decency act. A big obstacle you have to deal with and im sure there are anymore this room, because were in washington, dc, who know what that is but maybe you can explain what it is do those who dont and or may not be familiar and what obstacles its puts in your way. Okay. Thank you for asking. Its important. So, how many people know about deal with section 230 or Communications Decency act . This law that went into effect in 1996. This law that went into effect in 1996, and it was 26 word law that basically says that Interactive Computer Services are immune from liability for information content provide by a third party. So basically it was used when the biggest threat on the internet was defamation. Like on prodigy or come pew serve people were tacking trash but somebody elses business, saying your rugs have bed bugs in it, and rather than suing the defamer, instead the plaintiffs would also sue the platform. And so in at the time lawmakers were discovering the threat of pornography on the internet and read it could become this big issue, and there was the law that passed that basically banned pornography from the internet, and the law included this little phrase. And the following year in 1997, the pornography law you may have noticed theres pornography everywhere. That was found unconstitutional, but what survived was section 230 of the law. And so over the years, like in the last 23 years, this little law that was really intended to protect companies from publication torts like defamation and on cenni. Was so bloated by courts that basically any company that has any sort of relationship with the internet seems to be able to seek protection from liability under it, for any kind of lawsuit. And its really scary because it basically meanses that these companies which over the years have become the most dat data rich, omnipotent, wealthy companies in he history of the universe and basically beyond the reach of the court system, and people always make fun of how facebook and google are more powerful and wealthier than governments, but in some ways they are that sovereign, where our courts cant even touch them, and ill talk but harris v grinder. I talk bows it in this book and real life and nonstop. But our client, matthew harris, in 2016, he was recently out of a relationship with an abusive, controlling man, who went on a scorched earth attack and decided he was going devote his life to destroying matthews, classic psychobehavior and his weapon was dating apps and would create on grinder and scruff and jacked, profiles of matthew with matthews picture and then say that matthew was interested in really hard core sex and had rape fantasies and drugs to share, and then impersonating matthew he would set up sex dates at matthews holm and job and men came in real life to matthew, to have sex with him, and it wasnt once or twice. Is was 1200 times. And it was just showing up at his work and house at all hours of the day and night and eventually he put up a sign on hisfront door saying this is a fake profile. Grinder patrons, leave me alone. But didnt work. People thought he was resisting as part of the game. The exboyfriend was like, im going to say that its part of the game. Im going to say that its somebody impersonate me but when i tell you could come away, come back five minutes later. And it was really, really frightening. And the offender would get more and more clever, sometimes he would be homophobic on grinder and racist and people would want to come and kick his ass or sometimes he would set up sex date friday the bathroom at work so matthew into go to the bath room and somebody would follow him there. And matthew did what anybody would do went to the police, and 12 times done marsh 14 and they told its a different kind of humiliation and dismiss simness because we women have our own optical when were reporting but he was told to just deal be a man. Take care of it. What is wrong with you . He said, hoping just dealing with a guy. Man up. And he got an order of protection, and nothing was working. This guy was on a just a rampage. And so really grinder was at exclusive position to help. They controlled the goddamn app. Theres geolocate can technology that driving people to nights home. When the people coming were not too scary he would ask to see their phone to take pictures of the Text Messages so we could use it as prove proo and it would show on the app, 200 feet away, show the distance between matthew and the offend sore there is would Technology Used in to exploit the grinder technology and he. And he was contacting grinder and asking him to remove these. Yes, yes, and so finally he came to me. I was like i had just worked with facebook and twitter and google on their revenge porn policies and i thought i was really, like, this knight in shining armor and call up the general counsel at this company and get solve this problem for him, and it was go away, a couple hours, and they ignored me. They sent cease and desist letters and so we sued them, and i said i was aware of this law, the Communications Decency act, and i was like but im going outsmart. The its not going sue them for anything he says. Im going sue them for negligence and for their product design, and so when grinders attorney finally went to court, they told us that they didnt have their client grinder did not have the technology to identify and ban users, which that is insane. Theyre a dating app that deal with online on that basis they can locate people, the point of it. Yes, sophisticated stuff, and so theres certainty if you have dating app that facilitates real life encounter that certainly from time to time its going to be abusedly rapists and child predators and if you didnt design into your app a way to control for that, you have released intimate commerce, something thats dangerous and defective, and so this is a case about a Product Liability, and youre not immune from liability for that. And the judge thought we were full of shit and dismissed it and did it early on, grinder didnt even have to plead anything, dent have to submit any papers. The judge just said, this an information an Interactive Computer Service and its immune from liability because this is all thirdparty content. And so because of this section 230. They used section 230. I think by far the most expansive reading of section 230 ever because this this was not a publication tort. We werent suing them for their capacity as publishing third party content. Wasnt like they were a website and this is just words somebody had posted. And so is anyone working to get rid of section 230 or rethink it. Im glad you asked that. We just keep appealing and appealing. My cocounsel who is here, tor eklund, on august 7th we submitted a petition to the sprem court and and this whole issue was booted up, ready to go and just needs to be one of the 80 or 90 cases out of 9,000. Fingers crossed. And then theres some action on it. Theres some draft legislation, some like i dont support that but theres right now over the last six months, theres so much more conversation about it. I cant even keep up with it on twitter. Really agrees with me. People are like, oh, my god, with he lose section 230 then free speech on the internet dead forever and what i that next theres no indication of that. Sometimes people bring up that allergy; argument some of these form of harassment constitute free expression. What do you say to that . When if did this article i interviewed First Amendment lawyers and theyve said, no, you can carve out important exceptions by writing good lauds. What do you say. I think this is an issue about access to justice, not about free speech. So, its like we as individuals are the ones who lose out if we cant hold accountable somebody or something, and so tort this is all about, like, being able to sue an entity, and so when you sue an entity you already have to show that entity caused the harm, that there were damages, and so thats a really high burden already. But i know that most of us dont plan on waking up tomorrow and suing facebook or twitter or google, but this is really important for all of us because, like, pressure and fear of being sued is actually what creates what motivates companies to devote safety features. Its why Car Companies put seatbelts in our cars and air bags. Its because of the pressure from Product Liability tort. So much of the safety features around us, like in every domain, is cribs or carseats, is because of lawsuits and if theres no pressure from if these companies have no fear that we could that we users could hold them accountable they have no rope to give a shit about the way their companies could be weaponized, and it starts with the level of the Angel Investor and the venture capitalist, because these they dont have to ask the companies, what are you doing to protect women and people from abuse on your platform . Because the company doesnt its really exceptional. Theres no other industry anywhere that gets that is outside the reach of our courts. And these companies defend that. Its a subsidy. They dont deserve it. [applause] thank you. I will Say Something. This is a different legal arena where there has been progress made. How many states have laws out nonconsensual porn. 46. New york final he pass thread and have federal legs, the shield act, pending in d. C. When first start mid law firm there war have to states that had it. Its one area where its really wonderful how the activity of it was a relatively few number of activists working on the issue, and just swept the nation, and five years ago, everybody was, like, oh, its aclu and its free speech, going to freeze all she speech on the internet if you criminal ize revenge porn. And that has changed. At attitude has changed. Thesive Rights Initiative and people working on the issues have pointed out that, no, its not going to break free speech and break the internet but will protect people from terrible forms of harass i want to ask you and then we have questions from the audience which i will move on to but i wanted to ask you also, when i was reporting the piece it was in 2015, and it was before the election, and i know that i wonder how much of your work has taken on somewhat more political cast . I know you have done some work with people who are being sort of harassed by white nationalis and others, and i wo