What an inspiring listen. As a victim of online harassment and violation of sexual privacy herself, lawyer Carrie Goldberg has made it her mission to combat the advent of "revenge porn" or non-consensual photography that often gets posted online by disgruntled ex-lovers. Perhaps surprising to some, her clients range from young teenage girls to high-powered executives and VCs. Intuitively, harmful conduct exacted upon another person online seems markedly different from when those harms occur in the real, "physical" world. Perhaps this is due to the Internet's exceptionalism as construed against the real world: that is, its unique ability to magnify and scale up exposure of harmful content as well as dramatically elongate the shelf life of that content by making it easily searchable.
Below are parts of the interview I found particularly compelling:
- Question @3:24: Despite these very real threats to your security, you say the thing that felt most out of control was what might happen online, not in the real world as it were.
Goldberg's Answer: Right. And I think that has to do with the fact that there is legislation, there are laws that are supposed to protect us physically. You know there are laws against assault and stalking and harassment, but there were no laws that protected some of the threats and the online stuff. And also [the reason] the online conduct felt so uncontrollable is that the Internet is so big and uncontrollable and abstract and unwieldy--I mean, how do you control the Internet?
- Question @4:43: How did that situation end?
Goldberg's Answer: . . . [I]t was at that day in family court when my life path had made this big pivot because that was when the judge told me that, even though he could restrain my attacker's physical conduct towards me and he could issue this order that says he can't contact me, he can't assault me, the judge said, "but I cannot restrain him from his First Amendment right, his right to free speech . . . You've got a constitutional problem here." . . . "A constitutional problem? What are you talking about?" This judge claimed that this was a free speech issue, and the offender had the free speech right to express himself through my naked pictures. And from that moment on I was like, I need to research this. There's just this no-brainer assumption that, that no it's not legal to send naked pictures of other people. We all know it's not legal to share medical information, and there are criminal laws against sharing commercial information and trade secrets and other types of very private information. And so it was shocking to me to learn at that moment that there were no similar restrictions when it came to sexual privacy.
- Question @6:28: So when the judge said to you, "You need to get a lawyer." You thought, well, I'll be that lawyer.
Goldberg's Answer: Yes. Eventually, I did became that lawyer. I wasn't prepared at that moment to be that lawyer. I sort of assumed that I'd be able to find a lawyer who did have that expertise, you know who did understand that intersection between privacy law and Internet law and domestic violence and criminal law, and I could not find that lawyer, that lawyer did not exist. And so I became that lawyer!
Her last point strongly resonates with how I feel about the legal lag behind tech: Threats to civil liberties on online platforms have not yet been addressed by law or regulation to the extent necessary, and people are greatly suffering for it.