The Leslie Jones hack [racists] used all the scariest tactics of Internet warfare at once

WashPost

What happened to Leslie Jones happened quickly: In an instant, hackers infiltrated the actress’s personal website and replaced it with a public invitation for online abusers to try to destroy her.

Their call to arms began with a racist insult, and then came the pictures of identifying documents, phone numbers and passwords that appeared to belong to her. They stole nude photographs and posted those too. The Department of Homeland Security is now investigating the matter.

But what happened to Leslie Jones has been happening online for a long time, long enough that each of the tactics used has a name: doxxing, revenge porn, hacking. What is slightly unusual about what happened to Jones is that every single one of these tactics was used against her at once.

“It was everything they could do to her,” said Shireen Mitchell, the founder of Digital Sisters and Stop Online Violence Against Women and an expert in online diversity and safety. “It was every tactic in the playbook.”

What happened to Leslie Jones can happen to anyone, experts say. But the danger of it happening to you — and what it will look like if it does — isn’t the same for everybody.

“Women of color are the canaries in the coal mine. They get both the racism and sexism,” Mitchell said. “Online, almost every vocal woman of color I know has been attacked and harassed in some way.”

Two days later, we don’t know who doxxed and hacked Jones, or why the Department of Homeland Security — and not the FBI — are the ones investigating it. But two things are clear about the people who did this to Jones: First, they were extremely motivated to do the worst they could possibly do to her. It was not a casual act. And second, the stated justification for what they did is, essentially, they were angry about a tweet: the hacked page displayed a screenshot and a link to one of Jones’s tweets, where she told one of her trolls she was going to “retweet your hate” for all her followers to see and respond to.

Jones was no stranger to being a target of racist harassment online, but the release of the “Ghostbusters” reboot in July seemed to inspire a new wave of vitriol from those who hated the film, and hated that she was in it. Jones began to retweet and screenshot just a small sample of what was coming her way, including a wave of comparisons to Harambe, the gorilla who was killed in the Cincinnati Zoo this summer. Her hackers repeated that racist, menacing comparison, embedding an image of Harambe at the top of her website when they took control of it.

It takes very little time to write and send a menacing or threatening tweet. What happened to Jones took dedication and skill, but not enough of either to be a deterrent for someone who is motivated to destroy someone online. With enough time, anyone can steal, collect and distribute private information and photos about their enemies to try to ruin their reputation or shame them off the Internet. “Being able to aggregate people’s personal information is very easy,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and legislative and tech policy director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, said. “We put pieces of ourselves online without really thinking about it.” [MORE]