Sophos Cloud Optix
California Highway Patrol (CHP) cops have allegedly been stealing women’s photos and passing them around in a nude-photo “game” that included making juvenile comments about their victims’ looks, one officer has admitted.
It’s been going on for years, CHP Officer Sean Harrington, 35, of Martinez, California, told Contra Costa County prosecutors, according to SFGate.
Harrington admitted to forwarding photos from the mobile phone of a woman he had arrested in a driving under the influence (DUI) case, sending them to his own phone, and then sharing them with at least two other CHP officers, according to a search warrant cited by the news outlet.
Harrington, who works out of the Dublin, California office, confessed to stealing explicit photos from two Contra Costa County DUI suspects and forwarding them to at least two other officers.
He’s said that he’s played this “game” “half a dozen times in the last several years”, and that he learned how to find and steal explicit photos while working for the Los Angeles CHP department.
The Contra Costa Times reported on a similar stolen-photo incident at a CHP office in Los Angeles two years ago – a case that Chief Avery Browne acknowledged.
SFGate reports that one of Harrington’s alleged victims is a 19-year-old woman, identified in court records only as Jane Doe 2, who had been involved in a DUI crash in Livermore on 7 August.
Harrington allegedly stole photos of her in a bikini from her phone as she was undergoing X-rays following a crash.
Harrington allegedly sent the photos to fellow Dublin CHP Officer Robert Hazelwood with this text:
Taken from the phone of my 10-15x while she’s in X-rays.
“10-15x” is reportedly police-speak for a female arrestee.
According to the affidavit, Hazelwood allegedly responded:
No f— nudes?
The alleged photo thefts were discovered after the 29 August arrest of a 23-year-old woman in a San Ramon DUI case.
After getting out of jail, the woman, identified in court papers as Jane Doe 1, realized that six photos of her in various stages of undress had been forwarded from her iPhone while she was in custody, investigators said.
Harrington also exchanged text messages with Hazelwood less than half an hour after Harrington had allegedly stolen the six photos, the affidavit says.
Hazelwood apparently wasn’t satisfied with the photos of Jane Doe 1. He allegedly responded:
Nudes are always better with the face.
Harrington made a crude comment about the woman’s face, authorities said, after which Hazelwood allegedly asked to see her driver’s license photo.
Harrington said he’d send it when he got back to the office, along with her mug shot from the Martinez Detention Facility where he had taken Jane Doe 1.
Authorities said that Hazelwood commented that her “body is rocking though”.
This is far from an isolated case. Police have been accused of similar stunts several times over recent years, including:
- In 2011, after her arrest on suspicion of public drunkenness by a Morgan Hill police officer, Casey Serrano alleged that a corporal found a nude photo stored on her phone and uploaded it to her Facebook profile while she was in custody. Serrano said another officer accessed her phone and deleted photos of his patrol car, according to court documents and her lawyer, Oakland attorney and mayoral candidate Dan Siegel. Serrano filed a claim against the city and received a $75,000 settlement, Siegel said. The corporal was demoted, and the officer who deleted the photos was fired.
- In May, a Long Island woman, Pamela Held, sued a New York police officer and the city of New York, alleging that 20 nude photos and 5 risque videos of her and her boyfriend were forwarded from her iPhone to her arresting officer’s personal mobile phone while she was in custody. According to the New York Daily News, she gave a female cop her iPhone and its security code but became worried when the officer left the room with it.
- A patrol officer in Houston, Texas found nude photos on the mobile phone of a woman whom he arrested for DUI in 2005. He allegedly downloaded them and later showed them to other officers and attorneys at a courthouse, according to the Houston Chronicle. Houston patrolman Christopher Green was fired, as well as his partner, Officer George Miller, who allegedly called the woman’s house to ask her on a date, according to the paper. Green, however, was reinstated soon after, given that there weren’t rules against what he’d done at that point.
The allegations against Harrington have shocked law enforcement and privacy experts, particularly following a June Supreme Court ruling forbidding police from searching a suspect’s mobile phone without a warrant.
Know your rights
When Jane Doe 1 was pulled over under suspicion of DUI, she handed over both her phone and her password.
Did she have to do that? Are we in fact required to hand over passwords when police arrest us and seize our phones or other devices?
No, we are not – at least not in the US. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, US citizens’ rights against unreasonable search are covered by the Fifth Amendment, which protects us against giving self-incriminating testimony – including passwords or encryption keys, courts have generally agreed.
Of course, it should go without saying that all your devices should be secured with a password or encryption key. Otherwise, an arresting officer wouldn’t even have to demand that you unlock your phone – you’ve made it a moot point.
Why make it that easy for anybody who picks up – or steals – your device to see your selfies, your videos, or whatever other private information you’re carrying around in your pocket or purse?
Image of California Highway Patrol licensed under Creative Commons
Never mind what the cops here did, cops generally think they are above the law, they drive drunk and if they happen to get caught, they get let off. But what is the fascination with taking nude photos of yourself with a device that connects to the unsecured Internet. If you must take nude photos of yourself, go out and buy a cheap digital camera with an SD card.
She had pictures of herself in a bikini on her password protected phone, and your blaming her because an officer decided to take her phone, go through her pictures, and forward them to other people…? By that same logic it’s her fault for having her body under her clothes where anybody could get at it.
Well, then, how about all the other cases in which the pictures were nudes?
Wow! I can’t believe blaming the victim for taking innocuous selfies is the first thing that people think of.
Answer me this: If a woman is raped, do you lay the blame on her choice of wearing a short skirt? If she’s is eve-teased, do you tell her to change her attire? Or do you make sure the perpetrator is punished for the crime?
How is this any different? Instead of blaming the victim for their actions, why not make sure the people behind these shameful acts are punished for it.
If someone commits a crime especially rape, the blame should always be on the person committing it, not the victim. However if I left a million dollars next to an open window in my house and someone stole it, wouldn’t you all be calling me an idiot for leaving something so valuable on display like that?
As I said the person committing the crime is the guilty party but that doesn’t stop people using common sense as well.
Or how about this instead: Rather than blaming the victims, we shift into the mode suggested recently by Bennett Haselton in his brilliant Slashdot piece, “The Correct Response To Photo Hack Victim-Blamers”, in which he points out that, as nude photo-theft victim Jennifer Lawrence pointed out, there are benefits to taking nude photos, making it a calculated risk.
From the article:
“To begin with the benefits: Jennifer Lawrence explained bluntly in her Vanity Fair interview why she took the photos: ‘I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.’ (Considering how easily she could have gotten away with some platitudes about how ‘deeply hurt’ she was, and how she ‘thanks all her fans for her support in this difficult period’ — doesn’t a quote like that make you think she’s decently cool?) OK, so that’s the benefit. To her boyfriend at the time, a pretty big benefit.
“As for the risks, whenever someone takes a risk of a bad outcome and the bad outcome does happen, it’s tempting to think that they misjudged the risks. (I’ll bet that a psychological experiment could demonstrate this easily — have test subjects read stories of people who took a risk that was known to be small, but who got unlucky and fell victim to the bad outcome anyway, and see if the test subjects incorrectly judge the risk-takers to be foolish.) But out of the millions of nude photos that are probably sent between cell phone users every month, a vanishly small proportion of them get stolen in security breaches of cloud storage. (Usually the far greater risk is that the recipient will forward the image to other people until it gets out of control.) There’s no reason to think that Jennifer Lawrence and other victims of the hacking scandal underestimated the risk of the photos being stolen from the cloud. If anything, most users are probably over-estimating the risk today, while the news of the breach is fresh in their minds.
“In cases where the benefits of an action clearly don’t outweigh the risks, that’s when “victim-blaming” might be appropriate, even if we don’t call it that. If someone leaves their car unlocked and leaves a valuable item in plain view in the front seat, we might feel less sorry for them if they return to their car to find it stolen. But it’s a logical error to blame the victim just because they took a risk; the real reason to blame them is that there’s no counterbalancing benefit to leaving the car door unlocked, or failing to move the valuable item into the trunk.”
That’s just a brief excerpt from a well-reasoned argument against victim-blaming. And as he notes, it doesn’t exactly fit in a Tweet. 😉
I think in the same article, Jennifer Lawrence suggested that those who looked at the photos should also be guilty of “handling stolen goods”. Something to ponder before searching online for nudes of a celebrity.
Yeah. It sure sounded like the two copsmin the article were let off!
There are so many apps out there that store and lock photos and other sensitive information in highly encrypted and secure files on your phone. Keep those types of photos in there and even if they get your password they wont find anything. Even if they do they would have to know the separate password to your secure app.
Tom is missing the point. People love to show off their latest partner’s anatomy to their friends in order to get the thrill of envy and/or approval. Personally, I think it is a symptom of personal psychological insecurity. But then I’m a boring old fart who is happy with his lot, and who could not give a toss for voyeurism, which is frankly what it boils down to. Cops are not law enforcers, that is a job for the courts, not the cops. Or has “To serve and to Protect” taken on some new strage meaning?
Not everyone “shows off” as you suggest. A coworker showed me a few photos of his wife, stating she approved of the cinematography and bashfully approved of sharing.
Although he never explicitly stated, I suspect he hoped I’d reciprocate. After a handful† of display sessions, it never happened again–I suspect he tired of awaiting tit for tat.
† (rimshot)
The fascination is convenience. It’s easier to take that photo and send it from a mobile connected device then to go through the process of connecting the camera, downloading the image, then transferring it to the medium of delivery.
I’m in agreement with you. But I would also add, there are programs out there that you can get for your mobile devices that secure photos, videos, etc. that you don’t want people getting. Also there is a delete function that is apparently not in use.
Lastly, I stick by the adage, if you don’t want it on the internet, don’t take it. Period. (that one is more common sense then anything.)
I don’t blame the victim; police routinely go beyond their legal authority. This is first a know your rights issue. I am not a legal expert but my guess is that police really need a warrant to search your phone. I would think that people who use this site understand that you need to use REALLY good passwords for data stored in the cloud or on their devices. I don’t have much sympathy for people (celebrities) who take nude photos on their iPhones where the phones content is stored on iCloud and then use 1234 as their password. Just because they are famous does not mean they understand how the Internet works ( as far as I can tell most people do not understand how the Internet works). I give classes in Internet security and I begin every class with Robert Morris’ comment about computers and security: “The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it.” If anyone can prove to me that the Internet is truly secure, I would enjoy hearing it. I guess I have to expect a certain amount of sympathy from users of this site in regards to people who take nude photos of themselves; after all the name of this site isn’t Clothed Security.
phone and password please (no i do not need ID just your photos)
i never hand my unlock code on my phone to police unless court order generally its to prove that you was on the phone when driving which i have hands free voice dialing so does not prove anything
i have data only phone (3 the one Plan that you cant get any more) in the car that i can press the settable panic button to tell 4 or more people to lock me phones or/and come to my location (need help SOS basically)
So you “never hand your unlock code to police unless they have a court order”?
You arrested very often then?
@beenie
Glad I wasn’t the only one to notice that
:,)
Wow! I can’t believe blaming the victim for taking innocuous selfies is the first thing that people think of.
Answer me this: If a woman is raped, do you lay the blame on her choice of wearing a short skirt? If she’s is eve-teased, do you tell her to change her attire? Or do you make sure the perpetrator is punished for the crime?
How is this any different? Instead of blaming the victim for their actions, why not make sure the people behind these shameful acts are punished for it.
No-one should ever be nude. Period.
I sincerely hope this is a joke…
The work culture of the police, unwarranted searches & abuse of power is the real issue here.
Not passing blame on someone for bikini pics being taken.
True, but would you store photos that you don’t want other to see in a place where anyone can get to them.
“Where anyone can get to them”. No, where a thief or voyeur intent on stealing them can get to them. A casual passer-by sees nothing.
My mother never drew the curtains in her bedroom. The only way anyone could see into her second-story bedroom would be to climb a tree, or use binoculars. She felt the obligation was on them not to be a peeping tom, not on her to draw the blinds. If she lived on the first floor on a busy street, that would be different; then she would have an obligation not to inadvertently shock any passers-by.
No one accidentally comes across the contents of a cell phone. And forwarding a private photo without permission is theft. Period.
It is prudent to lock a door, to use a password, to encrypt data. But lack of prudence is not criminal behavior. Stealing is.
claire, people can most assuredly come across the contents of a phone on accident. The percentage isn’t high, but it can happen. Whether work/home or wherever.
And in this articles’ case (which explodes semantics to me) I go with the law of statistics. Meaning if you have to put photos of yourself on your phones people, do it with your clothes ON.