Nick Carter is freaking out. Around a conference table with the other adult members of the Backstreet Boys, he is out of his chair, stabbing a finger in the direction of Brian Littrell, yelling coarsely and without self-control: "You shut the fuck up, you shut the fuck up, I swear to god. Don't talk to me that way." The other people at the table try to calm him down but he is resolute in his anger.

This is one of many revealing scenes in the forthcoming Backstreet Boys documentary, Show 'Em What You're Made Of, and it only captures two or three minutes of the complex and complicated relationships that spawned from the boy band's twenty-plus years in the music business together. The five men, whose mean age in 2015 is 39, are brainstorming which songs deserved to go on their ninth album, and tensions are high. Preparations for a lengthy world tour have been strained, and there is concern that on this latest go-round that they won't even make it past the starting line.

Carter spirals into mania, yelling things like, "Don't be a fucking dick like everyone knows you are." Kevin Richardson, sitting patiently next to him, attempts to intervene. "How about we all act like men?" he asks. Carter stands back and rages further at Littrell, bringing up his co-vocalist's singing problems. But Richardson's face hardly changes: "How about speaking from a place of love and not a place of anger?"

When Littrell finally reacts to Carter, it's to say, "You take the good with the bad, dog. We're a group."

Show 'Em What You're Made Of is not, by any stretch, the first pop documentary to show the troubling downsides of pop stardom. In Katy Perry's Part of Me, the viewer watches as Perry breaks down in a makeup chair when her husband files for divorce while she's on a world tour. Even douche prince Justin Bieber has an emotional moment in Never Say Never after his vocal chords fail him. But unlike the glitzy performance-driven PR projects before it, Show 'Em What You're Made Of asks several uncomfortable questions about fame, the rapidly evolving pop machine, and the complicated nature of adult male friendships.

For the Backstreet Boys, whose star has been dimming for a few years, there is little left to gloss over; instead, there is an active chipping away at the lacquer. What exactly happens to you when your whole life goes out of style? Do you know yourself well enough to move forward? What business does an adult man have being in a boy band? Unlike other documentaries that push stars into greater notoriety through a fantastical, glossed portrayal of reality—like Perry's and Bieber's—this one deals with the actual consequences of years working under that illusion.

In a scene where the group goes hiking in the Kentucky hills near Kevin Richardson's hometown, 37-year-old A.J. McClean lingers behind: "This is really shitty for my knees."

The documentary was filmed around the time the Backstreet Boys made their most recent album and as they prepared for a big tour. While watching creaky men in their late thirties and early forties attempt complicated dance routines and write non-cliché pop hits together in an aerated London townhouse should be entertaining for anyone, the real appeal comes from a decently submerged storyline. In Show 'Em What You're Made Of, the five men travel around in a white passenger van on planned visits to each other's childhood hometowns. This is where repressed male emotion is shoved aggressively into frame.

In the valley of a hill in Lexington, Kentucky, Richardson cries while his four friends gather around him. His father had died of cancer in a cabin not far from where they were standing, just before the singer was given the chance to join the Backstreet Boys. The scene occurs not even twenty minutes into the documentary and interspersed with Richardson's tearful confession are photos of him with his father, as well as a few of him working at Disney World in Orlando. The shot is starkly intimate because it shows how men who are supposed to be close friends—"brothers"—react to Richardson baring unfiltered emotion. Howie Dorough hugs him mid-story; Brian Littrell cries himself. Nick Carter, in sweats, looks distant and uncomfortable. A.J. McClean is solid and silent. Their varying levels of resistance to connectivity are palpable.

Richardson is now 43 and the most mature of the group. In the film, there is meaningful exposure to unforgiving realities, and Richardson reacts most often with a level head, recognizing that the documentary could be a bookend to the boy band's legacy. In the trips the group takes to their old schools, community centers, former homes, and places of significance in their lives, the viewer gets a sense of Christmas Carol-esque repentance and nostalgia. These places are worth revisiting together in an effort to better understand each other, but to watch it feels voyeuristic and morose and pointing toward some sort of end for the group. In one scene, they end up at Lou Pearlman's abandoned mansion in Florida.

Pearlman, the billionaire manager who took the Backstreet Boys on as a project in 1993, is in jail now, serving a 25-year sentence for running one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in American history. According to their interviews, Pearlman gave them everything. "The first time I've ever seen two women kissing each other was on one of Lou's videotapes," Dorough admits after explaining the unlimited access the boys had to anything they dreamed of when they first started out.

In the scene at Pearlman's lemon-yellow mansion, Carter, panicky like a school boy dared to go into a haunted house, refuses to trespass. Richardson, Dorough, and Littrell all enter to find it empty and stripped to wood beams in some rooms. To imagine that only ten or fifteen years earlier, the up and coming Backstreet Boys were having birthday parties, album release parties, and early bonding moments there together—porn included—is very creepy indeed.

Both Carter and McClean have had battles with addiction, and both of them have thanked Kevin Richardson, the group's reasoned father figure, for helping them achieve sobriety. But while McClean appears to have come away with many likable qualities: self-awareness, perspective, and a warm sense of humor, Carter, throughout the whole documentary, seems on edge, standoffish, and aggressive, which reveals itself massively during his petulant breakdown at Brian Littrell.

"I'm not afraid of you anymore." Carter's baggage comes from being in the shadow of someone older than him in an industry he could barely understand. He describes Littrell as his brother in another scene in the movie, and their fight, though tainted with likely unresolved tensions, is a familiar fight between two family members. He seems somewhat unhinged and the scene is difficult to watch but it's the whole documentary's telling lynchpin.

The appeal of Show 'Em What You're Made Of is multileveled. I took interest because the Backstreet Boys were one of my girlhood fascinations and my first ever concert. For nonfans, it's a slightly-crafted, voyeuristic look at the longterm effects of puppeted fame. But most of all, it's a peek inside the hard-to-unpack mystery of adult male friendship and all that it entails. Addiction, infighting, marriage, children: how do these brotherly bonds prevail in the face of life's disruptions?

One leg up in sweats and a T-shirt, A.J. McClean sits in the living room of his house. "We were gods, in a twisted way."

[Image courtesy of Gravitas Ventures]

I. "Hey Anna, do you like pizza?" I was just sitting down to dinner one evening this past November when I looked through some new Twitter notifications on my phone. My night, I realized regretfully, was about to get very, very stupid.

The Twitter user was named "Davidkalac69," the photo a white egg on a purple background. Over the next few minutes, he tweeted at me a few more times:

"Are you vegan/vegetarian?"

"anna please respond these questions are very important"

"for gods sake anna I'm not asking much"

And finally:

"lets trigger some bitches"

A few minutes before the tweets started, I had gotten an email from Domino's, letting me know that my pizza order was ready, payable with cash upon delivery. I'd shrugged it off as a glitch in their ordering system. I hadn't ordered a pizza, and the address listed on the order was an apartment I hadn't lived in for a while.

Now I looked at the Domino's email again. It was completely nuts: Two large pies, one with triple cheese, triple sausage, triple salami, triple barbecue, hot sauce, half onions and half pineapple, the other with no cheese and triple sausage, plus a large bottle of Coke. Nothing I—or anyone with functioning taste buds—would ever order. The total was nearly $50.

I snorted with disbelief: I was being 4channed.

At this point, you've almost certainly heard of 4chan, specifically /b/, an anarchic message board and troll haven known for pulling pranks. Sometimes they're pretty funny: hijacking a Mountain Dew poll to name a new drink "diabeetus," gaming an online contest to send cheesy rapper Pitbull to Alaska. (Important note: while 4chan appears to have contributed to the voting on that contest, the actual people who came up with the prank, Boston Phoenix writer David Thorpe and Something Awful's Jon Hendren, are in no way affiliated with 4chan). Sometimes they're cruel: /b/ users famously mocked the family of a kid who'd committed suicide, sometimes calling his parents pretending to be him and taunting them: "Hi, I'm Mitchell's ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?" Sometimes they're dangerous: In 2012, their pizza-pranking led them to send a delivery person to where Chris Dorner, the ex-LAPD cop on a killing spree, was barricaded.

And sometimes they're criminal: 4chan is where hacked nude photos of various actresses were posted this summer. It is also where a Washington man confessed to murdering his girlfriend this past November and posted pictures of her nude, garroted body.

The name of that confessed killer was David Kalac—the name the pizza lover had chosen to tweet at me.

It was a blog post I'd written earlier in the day that drew /b/'s attention. Its users had been flooding Time magazine's annual reader poll of words that should be banned, voting for the word "feminist." I'd written up their ballot-stuffing efforts and called the board (gently enough, I thought) "the Internet's home for barely potty-trained trolls."

So now I was getting to see them in action. In a few minutes, someone who wanted to warn me sent me a link to where the 4Chan crowd was rowdily discussing their plans for my evening. (Over the course of the night, they kept nuking their threads and creating new ones, three or four before the night was over.) They were racking up food orders: sushi, Chinese food, Middle Eastern, orders usually totaling $60 or $70, all of them payable on delivery. Many people posted their receipts.

A lot of the food had bacon or ham in it. I'd wondered why, then realized I've tweeted in the past about being Jewish. (I'm not observant and pork products don't shock me, but they didn't know that.) When the food orders got boring, /b/ considered other ideas: Should they send me vacuum cleaners? ("That's not even a shit gift," someone complained.) Sign me up for tons of mailing lists? How about rape?

One of them decided he should post a Craigslist Casual Encounters ad, to get people to come to my house for sex, preferably "large black men."

"Tell them she's into serious rape roleplay," someone suggested.

"I would seriously rape her," another volunteered

"Actually raping her is a little much, anon."

It was good to know they had a floor. Not much of one, though. Pretty soon, they settled on their favorite idea yet: swatting. That is, they wanted to make a fake distress call to get the police, the fire department or—best of all—an entire SWAT team called to my house, expecting an armed confrontation.

"Someone from NY, send the police her address (say she is planning to shoot a school to support feminism) and make it snappy."

"Someone said they called the PD from a payphone in California and they just laughed at them."

"We need to get sand nigger food to her house first. We want the cops to freak out and start shooting."

I emailed my editor and Gawker Media's lawyers, who suggested I call the police. I called my local precinct in Brooklyn, who told me I'd need to come in to file a report. I was most worried about the people living in my old apartment and asked if someone could do a welfare check there, but an officer told me that wasn't possible. I checked Twitter accounts for the police scanner and the FDNY a few times to make sure there was no major disturbance in that neighborhood. Seeing nothing, I decided to leave going to the police for the next day.

I also checked Craigslist briefly for posts about giving an unwilling Jewish writer the raping of her life, but didn't see anything there either. By this time, someone had jumped into a thread pretending to be me: "I have some friends who know their fair bit about hacking. Get ready for your IPs to be backtracked and sent to the Internet Police."

An hour passed. 4Chan started getting restive.

"More then 2hours and no tweet about all the shit weve [sic] done," one complained. "Is the bitch dead?"

"Probably buried under a pile of pizza boxes," someone else suggested.

Around midnight, they gave up. I went to bed, waking up in the night to reach for my phone and look at my Twitter mentions one more time.

"I'd like to rape you" a new message read, from another egg. Half-asleep, I took a screenshot, blocked him and went back to sleep.

II.

At this point, so many female writers have been threatened online that it's spawning its own new type of journalism; call it "harassment lit." There's Amanda Hess, who was vacationing in Palm Springs when a man tweeted that he had a previous conviction for manslaughter, and was coming to her house to "rape you and remove your head." There's Rebecca Watson of the science blog Skepchick, threatened by a commenter who lived three hours away and had a previous conviction for domestic violence. There's feminist journalist Jessica Valenti and programmer Kathy Sierra. There's former Jezebel writer Lindy West, who recently interviewed one of her most vicious trolls on This American Life, and Gamergate target Anita Sarkeesian, who recently posted just one week's worth of her Twitter mentions, a cavalcade of cruel, violent, degrading insults and threats.

You don't even have to have written extensively about feminist issues: Kelsey McKinney, a reporter for Vox, started getting threats after she wrote one piece about the celebrity nude photo hacks. It's never really subsided.

"I am threatened with rape, mutilation, and physical harm more than ever thought I would be," she wrote in an email. "I get emails that describe how the writer wants to find, rape and murder me. I get emails that have my head photoshopped onto porn stars bodies, or dead animals, or brutally hurt women." She gets two or three a week, usually under innocuous subject lines like "Read your piece" or "Just saying hello."

Then comes the part of the harassment lit story where you go to the police and nothing happens. ("What's Twitter?" the responding officer asked Hess). McKinney called the cops after someone sent her a photo of the house she'd grown up in. "I haven't lived there for years and my parents have since moved, but it was terrifying."

It was not terrifying enough to interest law enforcement. "They told me they couldn't possibly know what the picture meant," McKinney said. "I told them it was obviously a threat meant to intimidate me. The officer on the phone told me to calm down. I could not calm down. Since then, I don't bother calling."

Now it was my turn to try the police. The morning after /b/ had deluged my old apartment in takeout, I went with Kavi Reddy, one of Gawker Media's attorneys, to the police station near our offices in NoLIta. I went partly out of caution, and partly out of curiosity: in situations like mine, what options did female writers even have? I brought a notebook and some screenshots of the 4chan thread.

Right away, the situation proved difficult to explain. "I think I've heard of 'em," Officer Rao, the NYPD officer who met us at the front desk said of 4chan. He'd heard about the naked actress photos. He frowned. "But do we know where they physically are? We need physical locations."

We didn't know where they were, we explained.

"Who's the perpetrator?" he asked, trying again. "Who's the one doing this?" He looked at my screenshots and shook his head. "What's the point of this?"

"To harass me," I told him. "And to prove they know where I live. To scare me."

Rao nodded. The situation, he told me, was difficult because "it's not cut and dried, like, you know, we dated, then I call her up and threaten her. There'd have to be IP addresses pulled."

We'd filed another report only a few months back at the same precinct, for another Jezebel writer. Reddy asked if Rao could pull it up. He turned on the computer and patiently waited for it to load. He searched the writer's name, waited some more. Suddenly, he reached over, grabbed the cords connecting the computer to the wall and gave them a hard tug.

"You gotta shake them every once in a while to make it work," he told us apologetically.

In the end, Rao told me I'd have to go to my home precinct in Brooklyn to file a report, since I had received the threats at home (That is, I'd been at home on my laptop when I read them).

"I don't want to take the report and have it get pushed aside," he explained. "It's stalking and aggravated harassment. But with an unknown perpetrator, we'd have to close it right away."

Reddy asked if he could call the precinct where my old apartment was located and make them aware of what was going on, something the NYPD has been able to do in similar situations with Gawker writers in the past. Rao said it would be better if we sent the new residents a letter.

I got to my home precinct around 8 p.m. that night. (I'm not identifying the precinct in the event that it might make it easier to find my address.) The station was empty except for two police officers at the front desk and a senior police administrative assistant in a side room, a woman in her 60s, who looked at me sourly when I tried to explain why I was there.

"Have you heard of 4chan?" I asked.

"No," she said. Her radio was playing an oldies station at top volume. She didn't bother to turn it down. She looked at me skeptically as I tried to explain what had happened, her mouth twisted. It occurred to me that she probably thought I was mentally ill. I handed her the screenshots I'd taken of the /b/ chatroom and pointed out the words "rape" and "swatting."

"I have to show these to a detective," she said.

"Okay," I replied.

"You can't come with me," she added sharply. I hadn't moved.

She was gone about 20 minutes; when she returned, she had a Detective Hunt in tow.

"This is, at most, harassment," he told me. "It doesn't take a genius to figure this out. It's more bark than bite. And anyway, these are Canadian phone numbers and we can't trace them." He was referring to some links embedded in the chat, which did sort of look like phone numbers, in that they were strings of numbers.

If anything else happened, Hunt said, "You can always come back and file more." In the meantime, he added, "Just don't go on those websites."

I asked if someone would be able to go to my old apartment and make sure whoever lived there was all right.

"They have to file their own report," Hunt said. He added that the officer who didn't want to take my report in Soho was "probably just lazy."

The administrative aide allowed me to fill out a report for aggravated harassment. She declined to give me her name, telling me it would be available in my police report. (I was able to find her name, but won't print it here—to protect my own privacy , not hers.)

I got my report last week; in my statement, I'd written about three-quarters of a page, detailing the food orders as well as the threatened swatting and rape. Here is what the administrative aide wrote down:

The victim stated that she had been receiving annoying and harassing messages via twitter, email and 4chan wedste [sic]. The victim was sent an order of food at her previous address.

Elsewhere on the report, my first name was misspelled.

III.

In the end, what happened to me wasn't a particularly big deal: it was a single night, and has yet to repeat itself. But there's nothing to prevent it from happening again, and when it does, my options will continue to be pretty bad, even with a powerful media company and talented attorneys behind me.

Technically, threatening someone online is just as illegal as doing it over the phone. But in practice, it's been hard for cops and courts to separate what constitutes a true threat online from what's protected as free speech. The Supreme Court is preparing to take up the case of Anthony Elonis of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who was convicted of making threats across state lines, a federal crime.

Elonis wrote a series of Facebook posts—"rap lyrics," by his account—in which he fantasized about killing his ex-wife. One said he "wouldn't rest" until she was dead, "Soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts." Later, after she'd gotten a protective order, Elonis wrote: "Fold up your protective order and put in your pocket. Is it thick enough to stop a bullet?"

He also posted about being ready to "make a name for myself" by shooting up an elementary school. After a female FBI agent visited him at home about that one, he wrote a new lyric about her:

Little agent lady stood so close

Took all the strength I had not to turn the bitch ghost.

Pull my knife, flick my wrist, and slit her throat.

Leave her bleedin' from her jugular in the arms of her partner.

Elonis appealed his conviction, on the grounds that he had merely been expressing himself. Although he only started claiming his Facebook rantings were "rap lyrics" after the FBI got involved, his case still captures the knotty questions about online harassment: What is free speech? What's an actionable threat? How do we draw the lines to protect speech, but also allow some legal recourse for people who are being terrorized?

The best overall guide we have is the "true threat doctrine," which defines threats as statements that "a reasonable person would interpret as a real and serious communication of an intent to inflict harm." But that's vague, to put it mildly, and it has been inconsistently applied by different courts. Danielle Citron, an attorney and law professor who has called for better enforcement of online harassment laws, says she hopes the Elonis case will clarify what a "true threat" actually means.

"We bend over backwards in the United States—and we should—to protect and provide breathing space for free speech of all sorts: offensive, profane, irritating," she says. "We want to provide breathing room for public conversation. But when it comes to expression whose raison d' etre is to silence other people, to ruin reputations, to terrorize, we should be less anxious about silencing that."

What counts as being terrorized? The culture around 4chan is willfully obtuse on that point. Sending pizza is a prank, right? A prank that demonstrates you know (or think you know) where your online target lives in real life. Then you choose to send the pizza under the name of someone accused of an actual murder—someone who was a participant in your own online community. The victim was sent an order of food. The real David Kalac apparently had believed the audience for lulz would appreciate seeing his girlfriend's dead body. What did the fake David Kalac believe?

At some point, you have to consider the numbers. I'd been working in alt weeklies for years before I came to Jezebel in October 2014, and nothing had prepared me for the volume of harassment that comes with joining "women's media." Individual writers and the Jezebel staff as a whole get both threatened and deluged with foulness on a regular basis; Gawker Media redesigned our commenting system last year to deal with an onslaught of violent images in Jezebel's comments, many of them involving female corpses and depicting unspeakable violations.

So most of the abuse is online. Most of the incursions into offline life stop with delivery food. If you're not facing the harassment firehose, as most male writers aren't, it's easy to stop thinking about it there. Earlier this month, someone at Gawker Media leaked a copy of the office seating chart to the Awl—a little piece of media gossip, that, to the Jezebel staff, meant giving potential psychos a map to where we sit. (The leak was an even odder decision given that the men of Gawker Media have gotten their own share of threats.)

The police are particularly disinclined to view online threats as urgent. Even without Elonis being decided yet, there are pretty good harassment and stalking laws on the books in most states that could be used to prosecute people who make clear threats online. But something about the online environment makes police lose interest.

Brianna Wu, one of the primary targets of Gamergate, told me she has been showered with alarmingly specific threats. "They're saying who, what, where, why, when," she said. "They said I was going to be on the front page of your site when they murdered me."

"I had someone last week that made a video talking about how they're going to murder me," Wu added. "This is not just, 'I'm going to kill Brianna,' this is like a multi-minute rant about why they want to murder me, how. Their face is visible in the video. I have their name and testimony from the people who know them and how unbalanced they are. This person lives 15 minutes from my house."

Wu called the police, which she's had to do numerous times since Gamergate blew up. To her amazement, even this particular threat hasn't resulted in an arrest.

"This is what I want to emphasize for you—as much as you can have something going for you with death threats, I do," she said. "I have a very high profile case. There's so much media attention. I have the ear of the police. They have every reason to want to solve this crime, but at the same time nothing has happened, even giving them as much as information as I have."

Zoe Quinn, the game developer who was the original focus of Gamergate's outrage, has had similar experiences. "Think GG is hard to explain to a friend?" Quinn wrote in a recent blog post:

Try a legal system that doesn't really understand what the internet is yet— it's like trying to push cooked pasta through the eye of a needle. Try explaining shit like 4chan to an officer who types with henpeck hands and getting handed a police report that makes you feel like praying the abuse away may be more effective. Law enforcement is prepared for familiar things like 'here is a death threat, here is someone violating a restraining order, here's where they openly discuss wanting to rape me,' but trying to convey how things work online is frustrating.

IV.

This is the usual lesson: The police are helpless in the face of the mixed signals and technological complexity of online threats. Except they aren't—especially not when the threats are against police officers.

After a Baltimore man killed two New York police officers in December, accompanying his crime with a spree of Instagram posting, law enforcement wasted no time before moving against online antagonists. The NYPD said it combed "hundreds" of online messages and 911 calls, eventually arresting nine men for threats.

Some of the men threatened officers in person or on the phone; one posted "pictures of weapons" to his Facebook page, according to police, and statements indicating that he wanted to kill cops. Another was arrested after he was overheard on his cellphone talking about wanting to kill police. A man in suburban New York was also arrested for posting images on Instagram and Facebook there threatening police.

In the same week, 17-year-old Fort Worth resident Montrae Toliver was arrested for making a terroristic threat after he posted a photo of a gun pointed at a parked police cruiser on Twitter. It bore the caption, "Should I do it? They Don't Care For a Black Male Anyways." The FBI arrested Jeremiah Perez of Colorado Springs for a YouTube comment which read, in part, "WE VETERANS WILL KILL RETIRED HELPLESS COPS."

The court documents relating to the arrest of Perez detail just how quickly law enforcement agencies can act when they want to: Google+ sent an emergency request to the FBI after seeing Perez's YouTube comment. The request read in part, "[T]here presently exists an emergency involving imminent death or serious bodily injury to a person or persons, and that immediate disclosure to you of certain information is required to avert the emergency."

In a matter of days, the FBI contacted Perez's internet service provider, started physically surveilling his house, ran his license plates, pulled his military records, executed a search warrant, and arrested him.

Local police are likewise able to move quickly when motivated: One of the men arrested for threatening NYPD officers was 26-year-old Jose Maldonado, who according to ABC news had posted "Might just go out and kill two cops myself!!!" on his Facebook, along with pictures of the slain officers and photos of a TEC- 9 and a MAC-10. He was contacted by police that day and surrendered at the precinct that evening.

In a statement at the time, the NYPD said they'd received about 40 threats and determined about half weren't credible, adding, "All threats against members of the NYPD are taken seriously and are investigated immediately to determine the credibility and origin of the information."

Last week, the NYPD made yet another quick arrest, of a 17-year-old boy named Osiris Aristy. They accused him of making terroristic threats against the police by posting gun emojis pointing at cop emojis, along with statements that reportedly included ""N***a run up on me, he gunna get blown down," and "Fuck the 83 104 79 98 73 PctKKKK." Here, the ambiguity of online communication was not a problem.

Even the anonymity of 4chan hasn't prevented local police from being able to arrest a threat-maker: in Harrisonburg, Virginia, police arrested 24-year-old Joshua James Mitri in October after he posted a message on a 4chan board saying he was going to shoot up an elementary school.

V.

Why is it that the police can fairly easily track down people threatening them in YouTube comments, but seem unable or unwilling to do so for other people being targeted?

Danielle Citron, the attorney who's pushed for better enforcement of harassment laws online (she's written an entire book about it, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace), pointed out that that shouldn't be the case, especially in New York and Los Angeles.

"LA has a threat assessment unit and NYPD has a counterpart," Citron said. "They have statistics they gather around aggravated harassment. New York City has awareness tools and fusion centers," meaning places where multiple law enforcement agencies share space and information—the NYPD, the U.S. Attorney, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"They're trying to go after terrorism and national security efforts," Ciron said. "You are the most networked and most surveilled city in the country. But it's mind-boggling that we can't turn any of these technologies to help people who are threatened, harassed stalked, terrified."

The NYPD and the FBI also teamed up earlier this year to form a federal cyber-crime task force, the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, pledging to monitor "modern day cyber threats." But it seems to be focused mostly on potential terrorism and threats to the public transportation infrastructure; it's pretty clearly not the right place to report a threat against an individual.

Citron argues that local police, not the FBI, are really the ones who should be enforcing harassment laws, and doing a better job of it.

"State and local police have always been the home of stalking and harassment laws," she said, and it's primarily state and local police who should be enforcing them better. "It's not that we don't have federal cyberstalking laws—it's fantastic, it could be a model for states." That's Section 2261, Title 18 of the U.S. criminal code, which bans interstate stalking, harassment and domestic violence.

"It's a very helpful statute," Citron said—that is, when federal law enforcement agencies choose to use it. "The problem often is that they often say, 'We're in the business of worrying about murder and terrorism, we don't enforce cyberstalking laws.' But when you look at FBI statistics, the most investigated crimes are drug crimes and larceny property, like when you steal someone's car. The idea that we're too busy at the federal level investigating terrorism and murder is untrue. The statistics belie that."

In a statement, FBI press officer Emily Yeh told Jezebel,

If someone feels they have been a victim of crime, or a target of a threat—whatever the method the threat was made—they can report it to any of the FBI's 56 field offices. There are several ways an individual can report the crime as well. They can call, email, or walk-in to their local field office; location, contact information, and hours, of all our offices are on fbi.gov. They can also report a crime to their local law enforcement. The FBI encourages those who believe they are a victim of a crime to report that crime.

The FBI will address each reported incident on a case-by-case basis, investigating the totality of facts and circumstances to determine if there is sufficient credible evidence to make an arrest and proceed with federal charges. Again, it would not be appropriate for me to provide more information at this time. If charges are filed, they will eventually become a matter of public record.

At the local level, the biggest problem, Citron said, starts with a lack of technical skills and training for law enforcement officers at the local level. "The police response comes from a place of intimidation. The technology just intimidates people, and when police officers are intimidated, they say, 'Turn it off and ignore it.'You have officers who mean well, but they do not understand the technology and they aren't well-trained in the laws."

There's also the fact that harassment laws that often require a threat to be made directly to the person, not on a third-party website, as happened to me and many others with 4chan and 8chan.

"There are laws on the books in, let's say, half the states, harassment and stalking laws, that cover abuse on third-party sites," Citron said. "But a lot of them require one to one communication. New York's aggravated harassment law, if a man puts a nude photo of his ex on Twitter and doesn't send it to her, it wouldn't 'harm' her," and he wouldn't be committing a crime."

Another issue, she adds, is the wording of stalking laws in many states, which Citron says "have become outmoded— a lot of them talk about 'lying in wait,' things that require a physical presence."

Your civil alternatives also aren't very good. "There are of course civil claims that individuals could bring if they could figure out who their harassers are and they had resources to sue," Citron says. If you're not a public figure, you can sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress (the bar is higher for public figures, or people who have been in the news—i.e. anyone whose name is mentioned in this story).

But besides the prohibitive cost of a lawsuit, Citron adds, the "the perpetrators are often judgment-proof"—meaning broke. "When you have very little to lose, you don't give a shit."

VI.

What options does that leave people who are being harassed? Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggests "surveillance self-defense," a system of keeping safe that involves "threat modeling"— running through potential threats to see how safe your information is and whether your device security is solid enough. It's a good way to make sure, for example, that you're not inadvertently telegraphing your physical location through social media.

And there's "counter speech," using the same online tools that are sometimes used to harass—like Twitter—to call attention to and condemn abusive behavior. "That goes to the strength of the internet," Kayyali said. "Part of the strength and weakness is what an amazing medium for communication it is. And sometimes that means an ugly vile message gets amplified much quicker. But it also means we can use that strength to respond."

Brianna Wu has employed a mixture of all these techniques to try to stay safe; she also recently started offering a $11,000 reward "for identifiable information leading to the prosecution of people sending me death threats." (We may see more law enforcement action soon: Earlier this year, journalist Michael Morisy filed an open records request with the FBI requesting its files on Gamergate and got a form letter back denying his request, because of an "pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding." FBI spokesperson Emily Yeh tells Jezebel, "In regards to Gamergate, absent the filing of formal charges or for a law enforcement purpose, I cannot confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. Therefore it would not be appropriate to provide further comment on this matter at this time.")

Wu doesn't really see Gamergate ever ending. "I think it's been discredited, but I think it's always going to exist. And that's the sad reality of being a woman in the games industry in 2015."

Quinn, too, says she's adjusting reluctantly to her new version of normal. "It's been trying to accept and internalize that, and then figure out how to fight back and make sure this doesn't happen to anybody else," she says.

Quinn recently launched an anti-swatting task force called Crash Override, which seeks to help people protect their information to prevent doxxing and swatting, by helping them pull their personal information from online databases, by encouraging them to put in place things like two-step verification to make it harder to hack their emails, and to keep them physically safe and their information as protected as possible in the event that it does happen. She's also writing a book about her experiences.

"It's been really hard to accept that the life I had before this is over," she says. "But that's just the reality of the situation."

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

Newsfeed Dartmouth College to Ban Hard Liquor on Campus | Defamer Marshmallow Tycoon: It's "Frustrating" to Be the Uncle of a Prince | Internet The Silk Road Trial Is Treating Emoji as Evidence http://gawker.com/how-to-read-ga...

A new day dawns, and with it, a new detailed report laying out exactly how garishly unequal our national economic situation has become. Behold the bitter fruit of America. This is what we do here.

Today's report comes from the CFED. Here are its broad outlines, which have not changed in some time, except to get worse, and worse, and worse:

• A full 25% of jobs are considered "low wage," an increase of more than 4% in a single year. The American poverty rate stands at almost 15%, and one in eight workers is considered "underemployed."
• Forty four percent of U.S. households—including one in four middle class households—do not have enough savings to tide them over for three months if they lose their income. More than half of U.S. consumers have credit scores considered subprime.
• Fewer than two thirds of Americans own homes, a 20-year low. Fewer than half of workers have a retirement savings plan. Average annual income in 2013 fell below $50,000, a decline from the year before.
• For non-white families, the story is even worse: compared to white households, they have less savings, worse credit scores, and are less likely to own homes, own businesses, or have a college degree.

In other inequality news, the ongoing accumulation of wealth at the very top of the income chart is reshaping the entire national economy and driving businesses and services towards rich consumers and away from everyone else: "Demand bifurcated," one expert tells the Wall Street Journal, which means that demand grew among the rich and declined or disappeared among the middle and lower classes, due to the fact that their incomes are not growing a bit.

We will continue to bring you updates on how the above dynamics are getting worse in the coming years.

[Photo: Flickr]

Today is Oprah Winfrey's 61st birthday. Happy birthday, Oprah! At this point in her life, Oprah is a living legend. She can pretty much coast until death and her inevitable sainthood from Pope Whoeveritisnext. Even I would be fairly excited to meet Oprah. I bet she smells great, and wears really soft fabrics, and probably has some wise platitudes to sound off. She is a woman who has lived, and also knows how to live, and might give one a Pontiac at any time. This is how the world understands Oprah, and this will likely be her legacy.

But this was not always so. Like most women who come of age in the media spotlight, Oprah's rise was heavily scrutinized, not only because of her gender, but because of her race, her weight, her beliefs, and her general existence. She had a lot to overcome—much more than the average daytime talk show host. One could say that the journalism establishment did not want Oprah, an unapologetically outsize personality who seemingly rocketed to fame from nowhere, to succeed.

What grated people—read, journalists—about Oprah was her perceived entitlement to success, her up-from-nothing narrative, the fact that she felt entitled to success while coming from nothing. It's a familiar tale, but one worth repeating, and also one that is easily forgotten in favor of a more digestible narrative.

In December 1986, the satirical magazine Spy published a profile of Oprah titled "It Came from Chicago." The year was a significant for Oprah: besides earning fame for her daytime talk show persona, she had just starred in The Color Purple to much admiration and acclaim, including an Oscar nomination. The profile, by Bill Zehme, was originally slated to run in Vanity Fair, but Tina Brown, the magazine's editor at the time, killed it. It's fairly clear why upon reading it. Though it ran in a satirical magazine that traded in publishing profiles of famous people with counterintuitive points of view, the article is fairly racist and nearly every other word harps on Oprah's size. "Capaciously built, black, and extremely noisy, Oprah Winfrey is an aberration among talk show doyennes, and her press materials bleat as much," it reads.

Zehme focuses in on Oprah's obsession with money, and attempts to tease out contradictions between her thirst for riches and her desire to be a guru to the masses, both apparently distasteful aspirations for a woman in her thirties.

He writes, in one passage:

Call her a binge dreamer: 'I knew I'd be a millionaire by the time I turned 32,' she says, again and again. That dream was realized just over a year ago, when she was 31, the result of a chunky TV syndication deal. She told me this in the first hour I spent with her. By the second hour she had added, puffing up with purpose, 'I certainly intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul.'

Not a friendly caricature, but fairly typical for Spy pieces at the time; the magazine was no nicer to Hillary Clinton or Henry Kissinger. But what's more interesting is Zehme's treatment of Oprah's "realness," which is what set her apart from other talk show hosts:

I ask her to assess her talent.

'My greatest gift is my ability to be myself at all times, no matter what,' she replies earnestly, batting her lashes like a cartoon fawn. 'I am as comfortable in front of the camera with a million people watching me as I am sitting here talking to you. I have the ability to be perfectly vulnerable at all times.' ... 'I can assure you,' she continues, answering my unarticulated concern, 'that people who think accomplishment has gone to my head are the very people who, if it were happening to them, would have been blown out of the water. I don't want to be portrayed as someone who's gotten a little money and has gone bonkers over it. All I can say is, this is great living up here,' she says, waving at the barren expanse of her bedroom. 'The sun rises off the lake in the morning, right through this window, and it's a joy to my soul, really, But none of it defines who I am. I still haven't jumped up and down about becoming a millionaire. Money doesn't define me.'

But, I remind her, you're the one who yearns to be the richest black woman in the nation.

'It's something do,' she says.

The article drips with Zehme's skepticism—Who is this uppity black woman, who gets off on being 'real'? This was a time when famous moguls were born, not made, and everywomen were conscripted to watching daytime television and plotting revenge fantasies in their bathrobes to pass the time (see: She-Devil). That Oprah actually wanted to make something of herself, as herself—and was so transparent about it—was a bit of an affront to those in charge, not to mention a postmodernist dilemma. Who was Oprah, anyway, getting rich off of sad housewives' viewerships with her real talk? What was real talk?

Whoever she was, we weren't going to find out from the élites. From the wink-wink-nudge-nudge fringes of Spy, skepticism of Oprah began to leak out of the capital-E Establishment. Two-and-a-half years after Zehme's article, in June 1989, the much-respected journalist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote a cover story about Winfrey for the New York Times Magazine titled "The Importance of Being Oprah." It it, she slammed Oprah's "superficial quality" and warned of her ability to prey on vulnerable women.

In a racist society, the majority needs and seeks, from time to time, proof that they are loved by the minority whom they have so long been accustomed to oppress, to fear exaggeratedly, or to disdain. They need that love, and they need love in return, in order to believe that they are good. Oprah Winfrey—a one person demilitarized zone—has served that purpose.

The article did not sit well with Times readers, many of whom revealed themselves to be among Oprah's legions of fans. Carol Skolnick of Kew Gardens, Queens, wrote:

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's article ''The Importance of Being Oprah'' (June 11) was a bit harsh in its portrayal of Ms. Winfrey as a self-ordained New Age guru for the talk-show masses. If Ms. Winfrey toots her own horn—if she feels compelled to evangelize about her ''path''—it is understandable, given her triumph over a hellish childhood. Surely, she is as entitled as anyone else in the communications media to peddle her sometimes contradictory philosophies to those who wish to accept them. Ms. Harrison herself frequently writes for the sort of women's magazines that provide ''strategies'' for bagging everything from a hunky husband to a dream job while simultaneously paying lip service to feminism.

Others, however, remained steadfast in their hatred for Oprah, like Kathleen Marley of Bethlehem, Pa., who wrote: "I am thoroughly disgusted by Oprah Winfrey's arrogant and self-serving theory of 'the Universe.' Her claim that she was 'born for greatness' ideologically contradicts her convenient reliance on free will."

But perhaps no one was more deeply bothered by Harrison's article, and the racially tinged aspects of how it portrayed her, than Oprah herself. In her book Oprah: A Biography, Kitty Kelley reports:

"As a media darling accustomed to ribbons of praise, Oprah was irate... 'Oprah was furious about that article,' said Erica Jong, 'and she told me that she did not want anyone writing about her, especially a white woman for a white publication. 'I don't need a honky magazine to canonize me,' she said."

(At the time, Tina Brown was pushing Erica Jong to sweet-talk Oprah into a profile for the New Yorker. Oprah, wanting to be in control of her image, refused. This resulted in a decades-long, mainly one-sided feud between Tina Brown and Oprah, in which Brown attempted to get booked on Oprah's show, failed, and then made fun of Oprah in her various publications while Oprah completely ignored her presence on earth.)

Other references to Oprah in the Times were less atomic, and tended to focus, if in a slightly side-eyed manner, on Oprah's obsession with dieting ("Oprah Winfrey, the television star whose loss of 67 pounds on a liquid diet inspired thousands to try the same technique, is now a symbol of diet failure. No one talks about dieting without talking about her. As she has regained some of the weight, it has underscored the feeling that short-term strategies do not work," an article from Jan. 3, 1990 reads). An article from Feb. 1, 1988 pitted her against Phil Donohue: "Is the sexy, sassy, 34-year-old black woman really beating the socks off the salty, energetic, 52-year-old Irishman who has taken on every topic from Chubby Checker to Chernobyl?"

Oprah handled the press simply: she more or less stopped dealing with it, and created her own media empire. She decides to tell us what is real and what is good, from cookie mixes to sweater capes, and we love her for it. Of course, she has been ridiculed aplenty in the past three decades—for her various book club foibles, the controversy with her school in South Africa, her affinity for the book The Secret. And all of this is not to say that Oprah isn't deserving of media scrutiny: She is completely full of shit in many ways, as most famous gurus are. But as a black woman rising to power in hostile environment, she removed herself from the game. And she did not suffer for it.

[Photo via AP]

For a few minutes this week, Taylor Swift's official Twitter and Instagram accounts were being run by someone who is not Taylor Swift. She's back in control of her social media—but the hacker tells me he obtained private DMs—and nude photographs—and is attempting to sell them to TMZ.

Yesterday afternoon, Veri (I don't know his real name, but you can follow him on Twitter) spoke to me via Kik, the instant messaging smartphone app, starting with link to a tweet and a question: "How exciting is this?"

By the time I clicked, the tweet was gone. Veri—whose previous online accomplishments include pretending to be an agent of the Islamic State—claims it was a naked selfie by Taylor Swift censored only with a black bar.

Veri claims to be in possession of "around six" of Taylor's naked selfies, stripped from a full backup of her iPhone that he downloaded from her iCloud. Yesterday, when Veri's claims were first circulating, Swift immediately denied that any such pictures exist:

PS any hackers saying they have 'nudes'? Psssh you'd love that wouldn't you! Have fun photoshopping cause you got NOTHING.

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 27, 2015

It's easy to believe her: Swift is meticulous, well-behaved, and immensely careful, and throughout our conversation, Veri refused to show me any confirmation. ("I'm keeping that private for now, I shouldn't have tweeted it"). Even his excuse—that he's attempting to sell the images to TMZ, and has already turned down a sum he refused to disclose—is suspect: TMZ has long shied away from obtaining or publishing nudes and sex tapes (they passed on Celebgate, remember?).

But Veri has been able to back up every single other one of his claims, down to the DMs he told me TMZ also wants to buy:

Although Twitter rushed to change Swift's password on her behalf, Veri is still able to browse the cached messages on his phone. DM senders include celebrities and musicians like The 1975—the band whose lead singer Matt Healy is rumored to be dating Swift—and Lily Allen, actors like Zach Braff (who sent a photo) and Lena Dunham, and even gossip blogger Perez Hilton, and MSNBC host Ronan Farrow.

By way of proof, Veri sent us Swift's DMs with Dunham, whom the singer has called "her feminist role model":

But that conversation was all Veri managed to load before Twitter came to the rescue: "I got what I could," he told me. "[Swift] has a lot of useful contacts at Twitter and [Instagram], she texts employees actually."

But none of these friends in high and geeky places were enough to keep Swift's accounts safe to begin with. Veri said he cracked open her social media by way of her (very obvious) AOL email:

Veri claimed he was able to infiltrate this email account through an "AOL 0day"—a hacker term for a software vulnerability completely unknown to the target. From there, he was easily able to reset Swift's Twitter, Instagram, and iCloud accounts—if you have someone's email account, you've basically handed yourself a blank check. Veri said he wanted to help Swift before he hijacked her: "I tried contacting Taylor several times regarding her security and she didn't listen. I wish [she] cooperated with me, I could've helped her a lot."

I don't know why Veri hacked Taylor Swift, and I'm not sure he's totally sure. Why did he pick her? "She's the third most popular celebrity" (on what list, I'm not sure). So, if he's rejected TMZ's offer for the nudes, was this mostly just for personal fun? "I guess, yes." If he can't find a buyer for the pilfered shots, Veri says he'll "probably save [them] for the future," or just delete them altogether. That is, if they ever existed.

Photo: Getty

Death Row Records founder Suge Knight ran over a man, possibly killing him, during an argument on a film set where The Game, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre were filming, TMZ reports.

Suge Knight got into a fight on the set of a film project in Compton, and ran over a man and we're told the victim is dead.

We're told a fight broke out between Suge and 2 crew members. Suge got back into his car, took the wheel and threw the vehicle in reverse ... and ran over a bystander.

The website says Knight's claiming he feared for his safety from the crew members due to his "frail health" after he was shot six times this summer. Knight's also facing up to seven years in jail on another pending legal matter—he was arrested with Katt Williams in October for allegedly stealing a paparazzo's camera.

[image via AP]

As Sean Penn prepares to wed chilly ray of sunshine Charlize Theron, he took a moment to talk to Esquire about the previous Mrs. Penns, who are apparently doing okay and not great, respectively.

Penn's marriages to Madonna in the 80s and Robin Wright from 1996 to 2010 were—at risk of understating—fucking awful. But Penn says he's now on good terms with Madonna, who he once allegedly tied to a chair and beat for several hours. The other one? Not so much.

"I'm very friendly with my first ex-wife," he tells Esquire. "I would say that I'm on extremely good terms with the children I share with my second ex-wife."

Just to clarify, they're on worse terms than he and the woman who once had to call 911 to have Malibu police officers rescue her from him. But that's not even important, because Penn is finally awake and today is the first day of the rest of his life.

"You say I've been married twice before but I've been married under circumstances where I was less informed than I am today, so I wouldn't even consider it a third marriage, I'd consider it a first marriage on its own terms if I got married again," Penn says. "I mean, I like the tradition. A friend of mine wrote a line, 'Without tradition, new things die.' And I don't want new things to die."

[image via AP]

From a great (best ever?) YouTube compilation, babies in their finest state: abject terror.

Until the publication of the video, I had lived a false life, mournfully unaware of this hilarious tunnel reaction. Thank you for this gift, babies of the world.

[h/t Digg]

Secretary of State John Kerry might understand global diplomacy, but the neighborhood social contract? Not so much.

Now Kerry owes the City of Boston a pretty penny—$50, to be exact—for leaving his sidewalks a goddamn mess while he was "out of the country" at a "state funeral" for a "king."

He promised through a spokesperson to pay the fine right away, but then again, that's what they all say.

[image via AP]

Clam the psychic clam, the clairvoyant sensation known around the world for his (her?) stunning record of World Cup predictions, has emerged from the grottos of prophecy to predict the winner of this weekend's Super Bowl XLIX.

What does Clam augur? And why did Clam, on the cusp of taking true power on the world stage—power befitting its status as the true mystic of the Piscean Age—retreat to solitude when greatness was before it? Also, when does the Super Bowl start? Only one being, knowledge as vast and blank as the cosmos, can possibly know: Clam.

Video by Nick Stango.

In a recent interview in Time Out New York, Lena Dunham told her Girls co-producer Jenni Konner that she’d been moved to speak out against Woody Allen by the moral courage of her longtime mentor Judd Apatow. According to Dunham, the powerful Hollywood director was “one of the first people ever to speak out against Woody Allen.” But, uh—did he?

Here’s the relevant part of that interview, published earlier this month:

Konner: We’ve chatted about this plenty, but I thought we could talk for a second about the Bill Cosby controversy. One thing that I kind of wanted to talk about was how incredible Judd [Apatow]’s been during it—he’s our partner—the way he’s been one of the lone voices, and certainly one of the lone male voices coming out against Cosby.

Dunham: The lone voice, the lone male voice, the fact that Judd is such a comedy fan. Like Judd’s whole DNA is a commitment to other comedians. You know, Judd was also one of the first people ever to speak out against Woody Allen. Before any of this happened, he was like, Sorry, Woody Allen marrying his daughter is creepy and it’s stopped me from liking his movies. Judd—he’s not moralistic, but he has a strong sense of morality, especially as a father of daughters. He is the most deeply appropriate male I have ever engaged with.

One problem with Dunham’s account: We couldn’t find any evidence that Apatow has ever spoken out against Woody Allen, for any reason.

It is true, as Konner mentions, that Apatow has publicly condemned Bill Cosby, who stands accused of sexual assault by over two dozen women. But there is no similar record of Apatow publicly condemning Woody Allen, who stands accused of child molestation by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow.

It would have been impressive—and courageous—for a comic director of Apatow’s notoriety to loudly and publicly distance himself from Allen, so we checked out his past statements using Google, Nexis, and so on. All we managed to turn up were a handful of positive tweets—here he calls Blue Jasmine an “amazing film”—and interviews like this 2010 conversation with Vulture, in which Apatow declared his love for Allen:

I’m such a fan of Woody Allen that I don’t even reference him as someone I was influenced by because it’s just so deep in me. When the VCR was invented, the first movie we owned was Annie Hall and the second one we owned was Manhattan. And I watched all of his movies so many times, hundreds of times, that it’s beyond discussing as an influence, it’s just in me. ...

As much as I love Woody Allen, I wish he would tell me that things are going to be okay at some point. But I don’t think he's going to.

(In the same interview, he even compared Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture to a Woody Allen film: “It did in an odd way remind me of Manhattan, even though the subject matter’s completely different. There’s an aspect to her personality that echoed that.”)

We emailed Dunham and Apatow’s reps to see if they knew where Dunham had gotten the idea that Apatow was an early critic of Allen. Apatow’s publicist Matt Labov didn’t respond, and Dunham’s spokeswoman told us the actress “can’t remember the outlet” where Apatow denounced Allen.

So if you’ve seen Judd Apatow express his “strong sense of morality” with a condemnation of Woody Allen marrying his stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn, let us know. Otherwise Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow are due for a talk about the director.

Update: Two tipsters pointed us to a 2010 episode of Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast during which Apatow discusses Woody Allen. The harshest thing he says about the director is: “Maybe after I read the Mia Farrow book, I got a little creeped out, and my incredible worship and affection got dented.” He does not “speak out” against Allen or otherwise suggest the director’s creepiness has “stopped me from liking his movies.”

Email the author: trotter@gawker.com · Photo credit: Getty Images

Damn.

Don't forget: Gawker is posting less often to the front page. Happening across the blogs: Newsfeed Disgraceful Mick Foley Shows No Respect By Cheating in Philly Wing Bowl | Valleywag Real Conversations With Make-Believe Girlfriends And Boyfriends | Defamer Everyone Has to Sleep on a Boat at Johnny Depp's Spooky Island Weddinghttp://gawker.com/how-to-read-ga...

The former proprietor of one of the most notorious revenge porn sites on the web, Is Anybody Down, has been hit with an FTC judgment ordering him to destroy the site's archive of nude photos and barring him from putting them back online. Craig Brittain responded with a blog post apologizing for his past actions, then going on to deny or excuse most of them. Now he says he's turned his life around by joining GamerGate ("not a hate group") to fight the Mainstream Media, which he feels is just as bad and unethical as revenge porn.

Is Anybody Down was online during 2012 and 2013, springing up in the wake of the original revenge porn site, Hunter Moore's Is Anyone Up?, which popularized the model of soliciting private nude photos from jilted exes. Is Anybody Down mostly sourced its nudes from public Craigslist posts—Brittain denies the FTC's allegation that he used Craigslist to solicit photos himself, and claims "only about 50 posts in the history of the website were 'Revenge Porn' (an ex submitting private photos for the purpose of revenge)."

That's a pretty specific definition of "revenge porn," which in Brittain's mind doesn't include "self-taken pictures which were already publicly posted to other websites like Tumblr, Craigslist, etc. by the people pictured within it, which was then reposted/reblogged with additional information which had already been made public (like social media profiles, which are public info)."

About that "additional information": Brittain explicitly denies anyone ever posted a victim's address to his site. That may be true, but the FTC never claimed anything about full addresses. The complaint says Is Anybody Down posted information like "full name, town and state, phone number and Facebook profile." A quick look at an archive of the site shows a number of posts tagged with cell numbers.

The weirdest part of the Is Anybody Down saga is that the site linked to a helpful service called Takedown Hammer, where a lawyer, David Blade, promised victims he could get their photos removed for a $250 fee. Blogger and lawyer Marc Randazza did a bit of research and concluded that David Blade didn't exist and that Brittain was collecting money to remove nudes from his own site.

Brittain—shocker!—denies this, too. He says he only ever redirected takedown requests to DMCA.com, where copyright owners can file infringement claims. "When you hear 'David Blade, Takedown Lawyer, Takedown Hammer, etc.' they're really talking about the dmca.com redirect. All of these things are the same thing – the legal responsibility of the host server owner (not me) and the third party service (I have no affiliation with either)."

His claim that Takedown Hammer was just a redirect to a DMCA claims site seems pretty sketchy, though. Here's the "Get me off this site!" page from an archived copy of Is Anybody Down:

That page links to TakedownHammer.com. Here's an archived copy of that site, which doesn't exactly look like DMCA.com:

The FTC doesn't buy his story, either. Their complaint against him "alleges that he used deception to acquire and post intimate images of women, then referred them to another website he controlled, where they were told they could have the pictures removed if they paid hundreds of dollars."

Anyway, Brittain's days of engaging in revenge porn and (allegedly) being a fake lawyer are over. Now he's all about fighting something that's just as terrible as posting people's nude photos and personal information without permission: The Mainstream Media™!

"I strongly believe that the Mainstream Media uses revenge and shame narratives to exploit people and ruin their lives – not unlike what 'Revenge Porn' does," he writes. And that's why he's joined the most respected media ethics movement of our time, GamerGate, which is definitely a real thing and not just an excuse to harass and demean women.

Here's what he has to say about that:

I closed the website down in 2013 because I was personally conflicted (moral concerns, and the fact that 99% of the time I hated running the thing) and I wanted to use my skills to do something which I consider to be productive and positive in society, and that is why I contributed to GamerGate. I want diversity and ethical media, NOT "Revenge Porn". I want to atone for my previous mistakes. I love women and everything they contribute to society.

Most of the negative press I'm receiving now is due to my affiliation with GamerGate and calls for media reform. It's only logical that a person calling for reform will likewise be subject to the same reforms. Please understand that this is the catalyst for dragging up an issue from 2+ years ago. GamerGate is not a hate group. GamerGate is a call for the immediate reform of mainstream media. GamerGate is supported by countless minorities and women. Instead of centering articles about me and the stupid, idiotic, senseless things I did years ago, why not center articles around all of the positive contributions they have made?

Actually, the catalyst for "dragging up" Brittain's revenge porn past is the FTC decision against him, issued this week; GamerGate may very well meet the definition of a hate group; and its "positive contributions" thus far include scaring women out of their homes, sending a SWAT team to what they thought was a GamerGate critic's address, and trying to remove feminists from Wikipedia.

But Brittain doesn't think any of that is worth talking about. Instead, he believes Mainstream Media should "apologize for publicly shaming GamerGate supporters" by reporting on them, which, again, is "not unlike ... Revenge Porn."

[h/t Engadget, Photo: Is Anybody Down? via Internet Archive]

Black Dynamite is the best show on television. Since beginning its second season on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim back in October, Dynamite—an animated spin-off of the 2009 Michael Jai White blaxploitation send-up/homage movie— has depicted the following: Mister Rogers (you know, the army-trained killing machine-turned-children's show host?) using Waka Flocka Flame lyrics to train an army of child soldiers; Rev. Al Sharpton using the shocking content of Alex Haley's Roots ("I heard it was bad, but not THAT bad!") to convince the black community to enslave all white people in retaliation for not getting reparations; and Mr. Drummond from Diff'rent Strokes adopting a group of streetwise black children to compete in a Hunger Games-style tournament for an audience of bloodthirsty, affluent whites. Why are you watching Friends reruns again?

Black Dynamite is a superhero that's equal parts Shaft and Superman. As the central character, his motivation is simple: he likes to fight, he likes to fuck, and he takes exactly zero crap in the process. Alongside his team—the emasculated pimp Cream Corn, the always rhyming Bullhorn, and Honey Bee, the madam and caretaker of the Whorephonage (a combination of, well, a whorehouse and orphanage)—he defends the black community from villains ranging from President Nixon to the police.

Despite the show's no-fucks approach to subject matter and its growing relevancy, it has seen a steady decline in viewership since its debut in July 2012. Season 2 averaged around one million viewers per episode, down from an average of 1.6 million viewers throughout Season 1.

So, why is Black Dynamite so good and why should you be watching it? Let us help.

It's black as hell

Sharing a home on Adult Swim with non-traditional black shows like Loiter Squad, The Eric Andre Show and The Boondocks, Dynamite's solid writing staff (including all of the folks who wrote the film) has a freedom not bestowed to shows on other networks with heavy African-American influences. The message is clear: be as unapologetically capital-B black as you wanna be, and don't worry about the consequences. That alleviates the need to try and pander to wide audiences, leaving the focus on creating a quality product that is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Fair warning, though: a lot of jokes won't make sense to you if you have no affiliation or understanding of black culture. But that's okay! King of The Hill was, like, the 8th whitest show in history and I've still seen every episode. Getting out of your comfort zone is good.

It's topical

Even though the show is loosely set in the 1970s, Dynamite has creative flexibility that allows it to look back while remaining in the present. Viewers can expect references to Moms Mabley and Lil' Terrio. Nowhere is this more present than in two specific episodes: "Sweet Bill's Badass Singalong Song" where the team takes on Bill Cosby himself, whose vendetta against "negative" images of black people leads him to kidnap blaxploitation icons Rudy Ray Moore and Pam Grier. While Cosby's respectability politics have been commented on before, there's this line Black Dynamite casually throws out that conflates Cosby's complex legacy perfectly: "Bill Cosby? Wait, like Jell-O Pudding, date-raping Cosby?" A few weeks after that episode premiered, comedian Hannibal Buress made headlines for referencing the sordid past of Cosby, leading to a flood of renewed attention and dozens of women claiming Cosby had assaulted them over the years.

While the show has no problem pushing buttons, it usually manages to do so without going over the top. That all went to hell in the season finale, "Wizard of Watts." Odds are that the episode was more than likely a fun homage to the 1978 film The Wiz when it was originally written. Then the events surrounding the tragic deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and the country-wide riots happened. A recent interview with Dynamite executive producer Carl Jones revealed that the while the animations were completed ahead of time, the show's voice actors went back and added new lines. [FINALE SPOILER ALERT AHEAD] The Wizard, originally thought to be Magic Johnson, turns out to be disgraced Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who kicks off a series of events that reference present-day headlines. Sterling chastises Dynamite and the black community at large, claiming:

"We make sure you Blacks only see yourselves as 12 Years a Slave, Django, The Help and Pootie Tang, whatever the fuck that means...You think we're racists? We're ECONOMISTS! It's all about money! As long as Negroes make the least and spend the most, we'll always be on top!"

Post-monologue, Sterling is confronted by the now-enraged black community members, who have had enough of the unceasing police brutality. "Man, fuck this!" a furious community member says. "I refuse to be treated like a cigarillo-stealing, cigarette selling, syrup-sipping stereotype! We need to do something...We should all turn our shirts inside out!" (a reference to the Clippers players' method of protest after Sterling's racist comments were made public). A villainous cop, who's melting due to being filmed via camcorder while savagely beating the young Rodney King, remarks: "No, not an irrefutable visual record of my illegal actions!... But at least a grand jury won't indict me!" You're not going to see that kind of commentary on any other animated show—especially since The Boondocks isn't on anymore.

The music is amazing

One of the true standouts of Season 2 was the work of music supervisor Fatin "10" Horton (credits include Lloyd Banks, Jean Grae, The Boondocks, etc.). Music supervision is an integral part to the success of a TV show, and Black Dynamite is no exception. Horton recruited top talent like Adrian Younge, Zo!, and Phonte' Coleman (of R&B group The Foreign Exchange and formerly of Little Brother) to record songs and damn near anything else that needed to be done musically. The result is the best music supervision on a television show since Scott Vener's run on Entourage. As the show is so based in parody, the musical staff shines when crafting expert soundalikes of classic tunes. "That's Not a Woman"—an obvious, and hilarious, Bee Gees rip off about transvestites—and "All You Niggas Should Swim," a pitch-perfect Earth, Wind and Fire warning about a racist shark that only eats black people are just some of the best musical moments of the show. My personal favorite? "Chicken Waings," an ode to eating unhealthy soul food to the tune of Rick James' "Mary Jane." Check out all the songs here.

Beyond a purely technical use, music is weaved into the culture of Black Dynamite: from The Godfather-themed episode that focuses on a beef between Dick Clark's American Bandstand and Don Cornelius's Soul Train, to big-name guest stars like Erykah Badu, Tyler, The Creator, and Chance The Rapper (who voices Bob Marley, of all people) who have lent their talents this season.

So what does that mean for Season 3? Well, more ass-kicking for one, but also more references to current-day events (maybe an Iggy Azalea/Macklemore episode using, like, Hall and Oates or something?). More than anything, though, I'm expecting viewers like you to be watching along. You know, because Black Dynamite is the best show on television.http://www.adultswim.com/videos/black-d...

He's best known for dabbling in the macabre, but when I talked to the 67-year-old director/musician John Carpenter by phone earlier this week, he told me he was "just delighted." We were discussing his new (and first) album John Carpenter's Lost Themes and the glowing reception it has received thus far. Carpenter is best known for directing horror movies like Halloween and 1982's The Thing, as well as gritty action fare like Escape from New York, but all the while he's been composing music (in fact, he has scored most of this movies, including all of the aforementioned).

Lost Themes is as moody, brash, and synth-based as his scores, but there are no actual movies attached to these pieces. "I want this to be a score for the movies that are playing in your head," is how he described the album, which was born of an improv session between him and his son.

Over the phone, I found Carpenter to be direct and combative (but playfully so—I think). Talking to him reminded me of interviewing Brian De Palma—both veteran directors are terse but open, self-assured but humble. Carpenter and I discussed his music, Taylor Swift, the state of horror cinema, and the folly of calling yourself an artist. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Gawker: How has it been doing press for this album? Music is not generally the art that people ask you about.

John Carpenter: It's amazing. It's much more fun than it is to talk about music than movies.

Why is that?

I don't know! Just opinion. It's because I've talked about movies for years and years and years, and suffered the abuse, so it's nice to have kudos now.

What kind of abuse are you talking about?

In the movie business? Oh please.

John Carpenter gets abused? Even to this day?

I've always gotten abused. Always.

You've been composing forever. Why is your first album just now coming out?

It was all a matter of luck, it was never planned. This began as an improvisation with my son and I playing. We improvised about 60 minutes worth of music and he went away to Japan to teach, so I just sat on the music. And then I got a new music lawyer. She asked me, "Do you have anything new?" I sent her the stuff my son and I had done, and a couple of months later I had a record deal. What the hell? This is easy.

The song titles are evocative: "Fallen," "Abyss," "Purgatory," "Night." Did you have any scenes or visual ideas in mind as you were improvising?

It was all about the music and then later I put the titles on.

Was it freeing to make music without having responsibility to an image?

You got it, that's exactly right. It's freeing not to have to work to an image, it's freeing not to have a schedule and a deadline. It was unbelievable. Just the greatest.

Are you aware that there is an entire strain of European modern disco producers who idolize you as a composer, like Legowelt for example?

No, I'm not aware of it, but that's great. Maybe they'll share in their residuals with me.

What do you listen to?

All sorts of stuff. Scores, old rock and roll. I'm not into rap music very much. Modern pop music.

Like who?

I really like Taylor Swift. She's really talented. Hans Zimmer is one of my favorites, too. He's unbelievable.

Is it cathartic to make themes? This music is emotionally blatant.

That's me! That's my career: blatant. That's all I've wanted to do all my life...Dude, I don't know. I don't think about these things. You want me to intellectualize about a process that's purely instinctual. Think of Grandma Moses.

Has technology affected your process at all?

Sure. The synths today, good god. They're great. My lord. We never had anything like this in the old days.

Is it because the old synths were temperamental and made it hard to replicate sounds?

They sound better! The sounds are incredible now. They've matured. They don't sound so cheesy. I know there's a big revival in '80s synths but please, they're nothing compared to what we have.

Do you feel you've been properly recognized for your music in the past, being that it's been so crucial to your films?

Sure. I'm recognized as much as I'm recognized. There is no "should be." In my mind, I should be anointed king, but that's not going to happen. I have to accept what's true and what's in front of me.

What do you think about the current state of horror?

Horror has been with us since the beginning of cinema and it continues to evolve and grow through the generations. It's going through a period of growth now. It exploded in the '90s and early 2000's. You had Japanese horror, you had torture horror. It's changing again. What's popular now is the low-budget supernatural stuff.

Do you like that stuff? As someone who likes horror, I think we're at a low point.

You know...I don't know, people go see it. So that's what the movie business is about. It's about commerce.

But what do you think about that? Are you idealistic at all, or just a pragmatist?

I'm pragmatic, but I always believe that horror movies can be reinvented with brilliance. A few years ago, there was a really fine Swedish movie called Let the Right One In. Man, that reinvented the vampire legend. It was great. So there are really good ones. But it's always been the same: Most horror movies are bad, a few are fair, very few are good, and every once in a while there's an excellent one.

Would you say that Halloween is one of the excellent ones?

I can't...I don't know! Why do you ask me those kind of questions? Just remember what I said: Why don't you anoint me king, that's all I can say.

The reason I ask you that question is because I don't really get to talk to a lot of people who have created objective masterpieces. It's interesting for me to hear what the creator of such a work actually thinks of it.

Well, it's a movie we made in 1978. I don't know! It's not up to me to say.

Does it ever feel like a curse that you made a movie that to this day, to this minute, are asking you about?

Hell no! It's wonderful.

Are you satisfied? It seems like you're in a phase of your career where you can do whatever you want, like releasing this record.

This is all about luck. I'm just standing in a blessed position. It fell into my lap. People seem to like it so far. Maybe I'll do some more. But I won't take it any further than that. Pragmatic is probably a good word. My day consists of watching NBA basketball, playing video games, and playing music. I don't ask for more in life. Except to be king.

What about movies? Are you actively pursuing making any?

Sure, sure. But slowly because I'm an old man now. I don't move as fast.

Does the changing movie industry make you feel at all disenchanted with it?

Well, it's changed a lot. It's just a different game now than it was in the old days. Single people aren't deciding what gets made, it's corporations deciding. It's a different aesthetic, which is fine. They still make a lot of money, and a lot of great movies still get made.

Do you think these corporations hamper the creative process at all?

No. It's just different. It's just different.

When you look at your career, are you happy with yourself, your life, your job?

My dream as a little kid was to be a movie director and I got to live out that dream. I'm the happiest guy in the world. Are you kidding? This is fabulous. I got to be John Carpenter. What the hell? What else do I want, except king?

You're really on the king beat. This is like you're using The Secret: You're putting it out into the universe.

I am. I'm hoping something will happen, but I know nothing's going to happen.

Have you listened to the remixes on the record, the bonus tracks?

Some of them, yeah, I have.

How are they?

Well, they're somebody else's interpretations. It's like someone else directing a movie that you've written or doing a remake. It's theirs. I don't know. It wouldn't be what I did, but it's fine.

You've also experienced that with Halloween. What did you think of Rob Zombie's remake?

Oh please don't ask me! Please, I beg you!

All right. I can put it together, because I know part of your original idea was to keep Michael Myers without a back story, so it did seem to be an affront to so much of what made Halloween ingenious.

Well, that's one way of putting it. Another is I really don't want to comment on it. It's all about commerce, my friend. They call it show business, not show art.

Do you think of your movies as art at all?

Oh come on now. Come on now. They're just movies. It's up to other people to tell you that you're an artist. It's not up to me to determine that. "Oh now I am an artist and I am the king!"

I live in New York, and I meet a lot of people that I wish felt the way you do.

Shocking, isn't it? You're not an artist until someone else tells you that you are. It's not possible.

Many people have called you an artist, though. Are you saying that you maintain a perspective, that you don't really let those opinions inform your self-image?

They don't have anything to do with it. I'm a realistic human being. Anything like that is like, "OK, fine." I've gotten called bad names, I've gotten called good names and none of it means anything.

Have you ever been hurt by feedback you've received?

I'm hurt by everything. I got used to it over the years. At the beginning I was shocked: what the hell is this? "Didn't they see the movie I made?" But what the hell can I do?

Imagine how much worse it would have been if you were coming up in the age of social media, when all of those voices were amplified.

Lord, man! But you can't take that crap seriously. You're gonna curl up into a ball.

The reason why it's hard not to is because, like you said, you have to rely on other people to call you an artist. So in a way, your worth, your contribution to society is in other people's hands.

Well...You win. I don't know.

John Carpenter's Lost Themes is out Tuesday on Sacred Bones Records.

Canada Goose Jackets are for pricks. The big bulky puffers are distinguishable from other parkas only by a patch. Don't buy one, because they're expensive, and winter sucks enough without being a consumer sucker on top of it all.

Uggs were bad, but at least they were clearly Uggs—you got an eyesore for your money. Uggs also never cost upwards of the $1,200 price tag a Canada Goose jacket commands. Furry boots are preposterous, but they were populist. Not so for the Goose, which has become an Sundance and Manhattan fixture, a fluffy status symbol for those affluent enough to make themselves look like big wintry golems. Take it from Bloomberg Business, which reports the brand's beefy bottom line, engorged with the money of people worried about getting cold on the way from their door to an Uber:

Once the uniform of adventurers and Aspen playboys, the big, bloated parka full of feathers has successfully made the transition from frontiersmen to fashionistas. "In a lot of places it's what the Louis Vuitton handbag was 10 years ago," says Mona Bijoor, whose JOOR online wholesale marketplace will process about $2.6 billion in spending this year among elite retailers and fashion labels. "You can tell that it's a trend because puffers aren't a core thing for certain brands, and even they are starting to do them."

"We're the Land Rover of clothing," adds CEO Dani Reiss. Yes, exactly! The problem is he thinks that's a good thing, and so do coastal suckers. Wasting money is cool, yes; but only if you waste it on something visible from far away, like a gold trucker hat, or carrying around a tote bag filled with cash. A parka with a patch on the chest: that ain't cool.

If you really absolutely want a big-ass jacket with a tacky fur hood, buy one of these Chinese knockoffs from Alibaba. Wow. I just saved you like a thousand bucks, you're welcome, man.

TKTK EXCLUSIVE: A Bunch of People Fucked Up the Mitt Romney News | Newsfeed What to Yell During the Super Bowl | Justice Video Shows School Police Officer Beating 13-Year-Old Girl With Batonhttp://gawker.com/how-to-read-ga...

Does a celebrity who complains as much as Iggy Azalea even enjoy being famous? Today's shit-fit tantrum comes after Steve Madden uploaded photos she doesn't like from an Iggy-branded shoe line. "I'm in shock," sputtered the rapper from the "Clueless" tribute music video. "Tainted with these God awful images..."

The Australian cultural ambassador took her furious complaints to Twitter after seeing the "Steve Madden x Iggy" promotional Tumblr:

Crikey, Ivd been bamoozeled with the photos they took appon themselves to create and share. Tricked by the Tumblah. G'day in HELL.

She later deleted those tweets, but not before HuffPo could snap a screenshot. The Tumblr is also now locked behind a password, but not before Google could cache it for all of us to look at. In Iggy's defense, it is pretty horrid and socks abound:

In the wake of the controversy (after erasing the tweets), Azalea posted a statement to Instagram in which she defended her meEeEeEeEeltdown ("I'm extremely passionate and emotional and crazy sometimes because I care ALOoOoot about this shit!"), loved Steve Madden™ ("I love Steve Madden as an individual and as a company.") and banned socks ("I just don't support neoprene Jesus sandals WITH socks.").

Ironic 1990s GeoCities "net art" and the pastiest calves this side of Mullumbimby make for a frightful combination, so I don't blame her for being a little upset at the leaked images. But someone as easily confused and Australian as Iggo might find their mental and emotional health greatly improved by staying away from social media altogether. The internet is a colorful and surprising place, chock-a-block with bamoozeles.

[Images via Google // Huffington Post/Twitter]