Live from Austin!

Ironic quote:

You are sending me direct contact information that is sensitive. I protect your privacy in the following ways: (1) I will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever; (2) I will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides e-mail in the regular course of business; and (3) Your information is stored behind network address translation and a software firewall.

That’s Jason Fortuny’s privacy policy, as stated on his web site before his prank.

At least one marriage has been ruined by the prank. I’m not going to name or link to the victim, for obvious reasons. Again, if you really want to know, read Fortuny’s web pages; he seems delighted, as it turns out it was someone who had thrown him out of an online community for previous anti-social behavior.

Lots of people seem to be focusing on a few of the victims who were married and cheating on their wives, like that justifies humiliating all the others.

Meanwhile, Fortuny has started scrubbing his contact details from his web site, removing references to past clients and employers, and deleting his résumé from the web. Perhaps he’s worked out that a reputation for hoaxing people and posting private e-mail to the web isn’t the best career move for a system administrator.

It also seems to me that Fortuny’s posting of sexually explicit photographs on the web places him squarely under 18 USC 2257 record-keeping requirements. Clearly he hasn’t complied with the law and obtained 100+ model release forms, and that could result in up to 5 years of jail time if the authorities choose to make an example of him.

I’ll end with another nice quote from his LiveJournal:

“I’m just going to quickly and quietly say that the refugees in New Orleans are human trash who don’t deserve to live.”

—Jason Fortuny

It’s nice to know the TrollJournal abuse team are so relaxed about the whole thing. Publishing public information may be grounds for dismissal, but linking to illegally published private information from your journal is just fine, apparently. If only I’d known, eh?

A few days ago a web developer in Seattle called Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad to the Seattle Craigslist. He apparently lifted the text from a personal posted to another city’s Craigslist.

The ad was a sexually explicit one, from a submissive woman seeking BDSM sex. Fortuny posted it using the Craigslist e-mail anonymizing option. He then collected the responses—178 or more, with at least 145 photos.

Then he published everything on the web. Every single response, unedited, including all the personal information and photographs that people had sent him.

You’ll find threads about it all over the place if you do a few searches. I’m not going to link to any of it, and I’m not going to give any clues to where the personal information was posted. Go search if you really feel you must know; I don’t feel the need to make the victims’ problems even worse by increasing Fortuny’s pagerank scores.

There are a few things I find interesting about the reaction I’ve seen.

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