Speaker 1: A note for listeners, this episode includes some disturbing descriptions
Speaker 1: of sexual acts and assault. If you have kids around,
Speaker 1: you might want to use headphones and please take care
Speaker 1: when listening. If you've looked at headlines about Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: at all in the past year, you've likely heard of
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence and generative AI tools think chat, GPT, or
Speaker 1: stable diffusion. They're touted as the next big thing, but
Speaker 1: the use of these applications can have a dark side.
Speaker 1: Many of them are open source and freely available, and
Speaker 1: users are able to alter publicly available photos of people,
Speaker 1: including images taken from social media, to depict events that
Speaker 1: never happen in real life. These images are called deep fakes,
Speaker 1: and oftentimes they're being altered in sexually explicit ways. While
Speaker 1: the photos are fake, the harm is real. In many cases,
Speaker 1: the victims are young people who don't know the images
Speaker 1: exist until someone they know discovers them online. Bloomberg and
Speaker 1: investigative reporter Olivia Carville went to a town in New
Speaker 1: York where this happened.
Speaker 2: In terms of the impacts to the young woman, Nightmare
Speaker 2: is one of them lost over twenty pounds from streets.
Speaker 2: A number of them started carrying pepper spray in their handbags.
Speaker 2: Two of them started carrying knives in their handbags, and
Speaker 2: they still feel a sense of trauma from what happened.
Speaker 1: As awful as these photos can be, law enforcement and
Speaker 1: victims have found it difficult to use the laws currently
Speaker 1: on the books to bring the people making these images
Speaker 1: to justice. Bloomberg cyber reporter Margie Murphy says prosecutors can
Speaker 1: find themselves in a bind.
Speaker 3: It's still incredibly blurry. A lot of people within law
Speaker 3: enforcement that I spoke to you for the story all
Speaker 3: said that it feels really mishmash at the moment between
Speaker 3: state laws and federal laws, and that the law really
Speaker 3: hasn't kept up with the technology in this area.
Speaker 1: Olivia and Marghi are here to detail their business week investigation.
Speaker 1: I'm Nancy Cook today. I'm the big take how AI
Speaker 1: generated deep fake images are hurting real people. So Margie,
Speaker 1: let's define the terms that we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1: What is a deep fake photo?
Speaker 3: So a deep fake photo is a picture which has
Speaker 3: been digitally manipulated to depict an individual doing something they
Speaker 3: didn't and that's using a deep learning model, so artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3: That's where the deep comes from. And so right now
Speaker 3: today that would be using open Aiyes, Dolly is one
Speaker 3: that you may have heard of. There's mid journey, there's
Speaker 3: stable diffusion tools where you can basically ask a machine
Speaker 3: to create an image that looks incredibly realistic, but it
Speaker 3: never happened.
Speaker 1: And what is generative AI as you talk about it
Speaker 1: in the.
Speaker 3: Piece, the generative AI that we use at the moment
Speaker 3: tends to be using text to image. So it's the
Speaker 3: ability to kind of type in and say picture of
Speaker 3: person eating an apple, and the machine can generate that
Speaker 3: image for you, but you know, no photograph was ever taken,
Speaker 3: but it looks incredibly real.
Speaker 1: And Olivia, you open your piece with a chilling story
Speaker 1: out of New York. Can you tell us what happened?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure. So I work on Bloomberg's investigations team and had
Speaker 2: been interested in deep fakes, I think for most of
Speaker 2: the world. We came to learn about what a deep
Speaker 2: fake image is from that iconic shot of the Pope
Speaker 2: in a puffer jacket, and I did a lot of
Speaker 2: research around deep fakes and then partner it up with
Speaker 2: Margie and we decided to try and find a case
Speaker 2: which illustrates just how damaging this technology can be, and
Speaker 2: we found that case in Long Island, a suburb of
Speaker 2: New York City. This is one of the first deep
Speaker 2: fake related conviction in US history. And what happened here
Speaker 2: is a young man decided to use software tools on
Speaker 2: the Internet to manipulate doctor alter images of girls from
Speaker 2: his high school. He targeted about forty different girls that
Speaker 2: he went to school with and did so in very
Speaker 2: horrific ways. In some cases, he digitally undressed them, He
Speaker 2: put their faces onto the bodies of women engaging in
Speaker 2: sex acts. He used photographs from when they were as
Speaker 2: young as five years old. And this case really shows
Speaker 2: us just how difficult it is to lay charges against
Speaker 2: an individual who created fake or deep faked pornography.
Speaker 1: And do we have an inkling about who was the
Speaker 1: person responsible for this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the most interesting parts of the case.
Speaker 2: We felt is that the young woman who had been
Speaker 2: targeted in these images actually investigated who was behind them
Speaker 2: because they felt that authorities weren't doing enough to track
Speaker 2: him down. The story really starts on New Year's Eve
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, where a group of young women in Leavittown
Speaker 2: came to discover photographs of them had been altered, manipulated,
Speaker 2: turned pornographic and nature and uploaded to this website. The
Speaker 2: website has a very graphic internet address name that's come
Speaker 2: on printed picks dot com. And on New Year's Eve,
Speaker 2: this group in Leavittown actually started discovering their images had
Speaker 2: been uploaded to the site, and word got out. They
Speaker 2: began messaging one another, sharing a link to the website
Speaker 2: and discovered just how horrific some of these images and
Speaker 2: the content that had gone up on this website had been.
Speaker 2: In some cases, their poster was talking about raping and
Speaker 2: murdering the girls. And so it was that New Year's
Speaker 2: Eve that they first started reaching out to the police.
Speaker 2: And throughout the course of twenty twenty one, the young
Speaker 2: women themselves were investigating who was behind this, who had
Speaker 2: uploaded all of their photos, altered them, turned them pornographic,
Speaker 2: and posted them onto this website, and a lot of
Speaker 2: them came to the conclusion that they knew who it was,
Speaker 2: that they knew who the suspect was. They believed it
Speaker 2: was a man that had attended school with them, a
Speaker 2: former classmate, an actual friend of many of theirs as
Speaker 2: well they recognized his handwriting and some of the images.
Speaker 2: They recognized his writing style in some of the captions
Speaker 2: on the website that he posted their images too. And
Speaker 2: it was the young woman who actually took his name
Speaker 2: to the police and said they believed he was behind
Speaker 2: it all.
Speaker 1: And Olivia, how old were these young women when this
Speaker 1: happened and how old are they now?
Speaker 2: Most of the young women were around eighteen or nineteen
Speaker 2: years old when they discovered this website. It was the
Speaker 2: year after they graduated from high school in Levettown, and
Speaker 2: today they're around twenty two or twenty three years old.
Speaker 1: Did they have a hard time getting the authorities involved
Speaker 1: in this, including the local police, and making sure that
Speaker 1: they knew it was a problem.
Speaker 2: I think there was definitely a frustration that the police,
Speaker 2: the families felt, at least, weren't moving fast enough to
Speaker 2: try and do something about this case. It's important to
Speaker 2: remember that cyber harassment cases or online vulgarity isn't really
Speaker 2: high on police priority lists. In this example, you had
Speaker 2: an individual who was creating fake images, and there's no
Speaker 2: real law that says what he was doing was illegal.
Speaker 2: So while it was grotesque and you'd look at the site,
Speaker 2: and certainly the woman that I talked to were disgusted
Speaker 2: by what they saw. But the difficulty is that there
Speaker 2: are no laws in the US that said what this
Speaker 2: young man was doing was actually illegal.
Speaker 1: And Margie, can you explain how the new advances we've
Speaker 1: heard about this past year in gener of AI are
Speaker 1: making it easier to generate deep photos?
Speaker 3: Yes, so the new advances have just one improved the
Speaker 3: look of these pictures, so they just look incredibly realistic
Speaker 3: now in a way that a few years ago, when
Speaker 3: we first started hearing about deep fake and deep fake pornography,
Speaker 3: they just didn't quite look as convincing. And secondly, a
Speaker 3: lot of the tools that have come out are open source,
Speaker 3: which means it's really easy for people to download the model,
Speaker 3: train the model themselves. A lot of the technologies, you know,
Speaker 3: they've been created so you don't need super compute power
Speaker 3: to process these models. The idea was to kind of
Speaker 3: democratize them and make it so that everyone could use
Speaker 3: their PC to kind of generate images and videos. Not
Speaker 3: for bad necessarily, but of course with the Internet, there
Speaker 3: are always people who will take these great technologies and
Speaker 3: do horrible things with them, and so this open source
Speaker 3: nature means that kind of once the cats out of
Speaker 3: the bag, it's very difficult for people who develop these
Speaker 3: technologies to put guardrails in place, and some of them have,
Speaker 3: and they've been very upfront about talking about how, you know,
Speaker 3: we're trying to help also do deep fake detection. So
Speaker 3: once deep fakes are out there, we can say, oh, yes,
Speaker 3: that was our tool, and you know, be careful that
Speaker 3: isn't a real image. But once it's out there and
Speaker 3: people have access to the core technology, they can remove
Speaker 3: those guardrails and they can kind of do what they
Speaker 3: want with them, which is why we've seen this rise
Speaker 3: in deep fake pornography and this kind of cottage industry
Speaker 3: that's emerged around undressing apps, which have just proliferated across
Speaker 3: the Internet.
Speaker 1: Olivia, you spoke to many of the women affected in
Speaker 1: this New York case. What did they say about how
Speaker 1: it impacted them and what they kept trying to do
Speaker 1: to call attention to it.
Speaker 2: I think one of the scariest things for some of
Speaker 2: the women I spoke to was just how realistic those
Speaker 2: images looked. They looked at the photo where they recall
Speaker 2: taking it, and they were wearing a bikini or a
Speaker 2: t shoe, but the image that had been uploaded to
Speaker 2: this website, it showed them completely naked, and in some
Speaker 2: cases the breasts that had been imposed on their bodies
Speaker 2: were actually so realistic looking that they believed that other
Speaker 2: people would think it was really them. And I think
Speaker 2: that's what was one of the hardest parts for some
Speaker 2: of the young women involved. In others, they were just scared,
Speaker 2: to be honest, that was I think the biggest emotion
Speaker 2: that came from the young woman that I talked to
Speaker 2: was a fear of men, a fear of the internet.
Speaker 2: Not only were their photos uploaded to this awful site,
Speaker 2: but in some cases, the poster was actually encouraging users
Speaker 2: of this site to reach out to the girls individually,
Speaker 2: to contact them directly, so he posted their full names,
Speaker 2: their addresses, their social media handles. I talked to a
Speaker 2: lot of parents as well because of the sensitive nature
Speaker 2: of the case, and the emotion I got was just
Speaker 2: raw anger and also frustration that what happened took their
Speaker 2: daughter's innocence away and they felt like they felt let
Speaker 2: down by the authorities because of how long it took
Speaker 2: to resolve the case and how challenging it was to
Speaker 2: prosecute it because, through the eyes of the parents and
Speaker 2: their daughters, this was a crime. They didn't care about
Speaker 2: the nuances of the law or the fact that the
Speaker 2: law hadn't caught up with the deep fake technology. What
Speaker 2: they cared about was the fact that the prime suspect
Speaker 2: was in their community and no one was doing anything
Speaker 2: about it. So, in terms of the impacts to the
Speaker 2: young woman nightmares, one of them lost over twenty pounds
Speaker 2: from stress, A number of them started carrying pepper spray
Speaker 2: in their handbags, two of them started carrying knives in
Speaker 2: their handbags, and they still feel a sense of trauma
Speaker 2: from what happened.
Speaker 1: When we're back why it's difficult for investigators to charge
Speaker 1: a ledged perpetrators with a crime for creating and posting
Speaker 1: deep bake images. Olivia, You've mentioned how hard it was
Speaker 1: for police and these young women to actually figure out
Speaker 1: who was behind posting the deep fakes. How long did
Speaker 1: they suspect the person who was behind it and how
Speaker 1: did they sort of figure that out?
Speaker 2: Well, the young woman involved felt like they knew who
Speaker 2: was behind it very shortly after discovering the website. Within days,
Speaker 2: they had a suspect in their mind, and that was
Speaker 2: Patrick Kerrey, a nineteen year old man who had attended
Speaker 2: high school with them and was actually a friend of
Speaker 2: a lot of the young women who were targeted. The
Speaker 2: problem was there was no real evidence connecting Patrick Kerrey
Speaker 2: to the website or to these posts. When he would
Speaker 2: upload the photos, he would do so anonymously from usernames
Speaker 2: like Siri, Jeinefeld or tween hunter. He never used his
Speaker 2: real name or his real identity. And the challenge from
Speaker 2: the police perspective, they didn't have enough evidence to get
Speaker 2: a warrant out to subpoena his IP address to really
Speaker 2: prove that he was the man behind this campaign, and
Speaker 2: it would take a lot of effort from the police's
Speaker 2: part to really investigate this case because unfortunately, there were
Speaker 2: no laws that Carrie had broken by posting fake pornographic
Speaker 2: images of these women.
Speaker 1: And Olivia, who was Ana and what did she have
Speaker 1: to do with finding a break in this case?
Speaker 2: So Anna is a really popular cheerleader from General Douglas
Speaker 2: MacArthur High School. She'd actually known Patrick Carrey from the
Speaker 2: age of five years old. She lives a stone's throw
Speaker 2: from his home and they went to the same elementary
Speaker 2: school together. She grew increasingly frustrated throughout twenty twenty one
Speaker 2: at the lack of response around the case and also
Speaker 2: some of the disgusting things that were being posted about her.
Speaker 2: There was one example where the harasser had included an
Speaker 2: image that looked as though she had been murdered, and
Speaker 2: he had posted it online with her full name and
Speaker 2: some of her social media information, and she just felt
Speaker 2: like she'd had enough, So in August of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: she decided that she wanted to investigate who was behind
Speaker 2: all this and to prove once and for all who
Speaker 2: this cyber harasser was. She'd heard rumors and speculation that
Speaker 2: Patrick Carey was behind it, and she didn't believe that
Speaker 2: he could do something like this, so she wanted to
Speaker 2: not only unmask the predator, but she also wanted to
Speaker 2: clear Carrie's name, and she decided to do this by
Speaker 2: actually doing a deep dive into every single photo the
Speaker 2: poster had uploaded to this website. She studied them. She
Speaker 2: looked into the background of the images to see if
Speaker 2: she could find any evidence that could help her identify
Speaker 2: who this person was, and there was one part taricular
Speaker 2: photo she saw where he had posted an image from
Speaker 2: a little girl's bedroom and he was actually wearing little
Speaker 2: girl's underwear. This told her that he had access to
Speaker 2: a young girl's bedroom, and she looked in the background
Speaker 2: of the image and she saw a white dresser with
Speaker 2: brown trim. She saw a soft toy animal on the beard,
Speaker 2: and she decided that she would then search for Patrick
Speaker 2: Carrey's younger sisters. Having grown up very close to his
Speaker 2: home in attending elementary school with him, she knew that
Speaker 2: he had twin sisters, her a number of years younger,
Speaker 2: and she started looking for them online to see if
Speaker 2: she could find any social media presence, and she actually
Speaker 2: found one of his sisters posting TikTok videos from exactly
Speaker 2: the same bedroom. It had the same dresser with the
Speaker 2: same brown trim, the same soft toy animal on the beard,
Speaker 2: and that's when she realized that a person that she
Speaker 2: believed was a friend of hers, a classmate, someone whod
Speaker 2: she's known for almost her entire life, was behind all this.
Speaker 2: She took that evidence into the police station in late August,
Speaker 2: and it was September fifth that Patrick carry was arrested.
Speaker 2: The lead detective on the case actually went over to
Speaker 2: Carrie's house, knocked on the door with some of the
Speaker 2: print outs of this particular website and some of the
Speaker 2: posts that had been made, and he began reading them
Speaker 2: out aloud to carry who was at home with his mother,
Speaker 2: and he admitted that he was behind it all.
Speaker 4: Prosecutors say Carrie created fourteen different profiles posting these deep
Speaker 4: faked images from August twenty nineteen to September of this year.
Speaker 4: When he was arrested.
Speaker 2: He had been charged with low level harassment violations and obscenity,
Speaker 2: which is a pretty old school charge that was really
Speaker 2: the prosecutors didn't feel like it was going to stick,
Speaker 2: so they had ninety days to raise the stakes. And
Speaker 2: they told me that the case had come through as
Speaker 2: an on call, which in their department at least, that
Speaker 2: meant that the police were hoping the prosecutors would upgrade
Speaker 2: or update or file new charges again to Carrie, because
Speaker 2: they weren't really sure what to charge him with.
Speaker 1: And we should say, you reached out to Patrick Carey
Speaker 1: for comment and he didn't respond to you. You spoke
Speaker 1: to the district attorneys in this case. What did they
Speaker 1: say about what it takes to charge someone for posting
Speaker 1: deep fake photos.
Speaker 2: The two district attorneys that actually handled and investigated this
Speaker 2: case were really surprised when it landed on their desk
Speaker 2: and they realized, you know, the depravity of some of
Speaker 2: the content, just how disgusting some of these posts were,
Speaker 2: and the fact that there were no real charges that
Speaker 2: they could lay against this individual. I remember one of
Speaker 2: the district attorneys telling me that she was scared that
Speaker 2: reading through some of Carrie's posts, she was afraid that
Speaker 2: this behavior could go offline, as in he could commit
Speaker 2: real crimes in the real world, not just as an
Speaker 2: anonymous predator online. So she wanted to ensure that they
Speaker 2: could raise the stakes on the charges that have been
Speaker 2: filed against Carrie. But the challenge they really.
Speaker 3: As there were no charges.
Speaker 2: There was no charge that they could turn to that
Speaker 2: said it was illegal to post fake pornographic content of
Speaker 2: young women on the Internet, so they had to get creative.
Speaker 2: They studied the penal code, They read through every page,
Speaker 2: They looked at every single photo that Carrie had uploaded
Speaker 2: to this website, studied the background of the images, studied
Speaker 2: what was in the images, and finally, on October fifth,
Speaker 2: they found a crack in the case, which is they
Speaker 2: found one real nude image of a fourteen year old
Speaker 2: girl's genitals. That meant that Patrick Carey had posted child
Speaker 2: sexual abuse material online and that was prosecutable. So the
Speaker 2: charges were upgraded to see SAM charges.
Speaker 1: And see SAM here were referring to child sexual abuse materials.
Speaker 1: So marguie briefly, what laws are out there now in
Speaker 1: the US the cover photo sharing, what's protected and what's illegal.
Speaker 3: So that currently no federal law that criminalizes the sharing
Speaker 3: of fake pornographic images in the US. That doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that someone sharing these kind of images won't be prosecuted
Speaker 3: because there are varying state laws under kind of revenge porn.
Speaker 3: There are new bills that are being brought in about
Speaker 3: deep fake images, but there isn't this strict federal law.
Speaker 3: So this is why we had these issues with the
Speaker 3: prosecutors when it comes to children. So child sexual abuse
Speaker 3: material that is banned. So there is a federal law
Speaker 3: saying that you cannot generate child sexual abuse material. However,
Speaker 3: it's a narrow law and the problem is that a
Speaker 3: lot of these ai generations of children are just nude images,
Speaker 3: which you wouldn't prosecute someone who's posted a picture of
Speaker 3: a child in the bath or on the beach, and
Speaker 3: in the same way, there isn't a precedent for prosecuting
Speaker 3: anyone who generates an image of a new child, So
Speaker 3: there has to be a very explicit abuse being to
Speaker 3: picted in the image, which is kind of given a
Speaker 3: lot of people credence to just had the misfortune of
Speaker 3: looking at a lot of forums where people are sharing
Speaker 3: tips on how to generate these kind of images. You
Speaker 3: can see in the comments that they feel quite emboldened
Speaker 3: by this law, so it's still incredibly blurry. A lot
Speaker 3: of people within law enforcement that I spoke to for
Speaker 3: the story all said that it feels really mishmash at
Speaker 3: the moment between state laws and federal laws, and that
Speaker 3: the law really hasn't kept up with the technology in
Speaker 3: this area.
Speaker 1: At the same time the young women and prosecutors in
Speaker 1: New York were trying to track down who was posting
Speaker 1: these deep bakes, there were other people investigating this site
Speaker 1: who were they.
Speaker 3: For a few years actually, there had been a group
Speaker 3: of people who had had similar experiences as those girls
Speaker 3: in Levittown, victims who had had their pictures posted or
Speaker 3: simply just people who had heard of the web site
Speaker 3: and were repulsed by it. And what we've found out
Speaker 3: was one of the key people in investigating the website
Speaker 3: was Will Wallace, who's a former police officer who's living
Speaker 3: in New Zealand and had been working for years on
Speaker 3: trying to uncover some of the users for similar reasons
Speaker 3: as the levitt Town women.
Speaker 2: I think, for me, the craziest part of the reporting
Speaker 2: process of this story was that moment that we realized
Speaker 2: this vigilante movement to shut down come On Printed Picks
Speaker 2: coincided with the investigation that the young woman from Levittown
Speaker 2: were doing to try and identify their harasser. I remember
Speaker 2: I was driving back from Leavittown to New York City.
Speaker 2: It was late at night, it was raining, and I
Speaker 2: called Margie and had her on speakerphone, and I was
Speaker 2: telling her everything I'd learned from an interview, my first
Speaker 2: interview with Anna, where she described how she actually discovered
Speaker 2: Patrick Carey was behind this website. And Margie jumps back
Speaker 2: in and tells me that there's been a vigilante movement
Speaker 2: of trolls and hackers in a former police detective from
Speaker 2: New Zealand, which happens to be where I'm from that
Speaker 2: had been involved in trying to shut this website down
Speaker 2: for the past two or three years.
Speaker 3: He had been tipped off by former police colleagues that
Speaker 3: there was a case they couldn't crack a woman who
Speaker 3: had received years of abuse from people sending her pictures
Speaker 3: of her photos next to their genitalia. They were sending
Speaker 3: it to her parents, to her boyfriend that caused the
Speaker 3: end of her relationship. And after he'd done one case,
Speaker 3: he just got a kind of obsession with the website
Speaker 3: because he couldn't believe that it was still up and running.
Speaker 3: He was adamant that he could find out who was
Speaker 3: behind this file site, and he kept trying to alert journalists,
Speaker 3: he was alerting law enforcement in different parts of the world,
Speaker 3: and he was just getting nowhere. And so after months
Speaker 3: and months of frustration, he decided to look into the
Speaker 3: admin himself to try and put some heat on him,
Speaker 3: and he decided to publish a blog exposing who was
Speaker 3: behind it and detailing his investigation into how he uncovered her.
Speaker 2: It was. We were both just so shocked and surprised,
Speaker 2: because in journalism you always hope that the stars are
Speaker 2: going to a line, and that you can have an
Speaker 2: intersecting narrative of two different stories happening at the same time,
Speaker 2: but it never really happens, and it did in this story.
Speaker 2: We could explain to readers not only what happened in
Speaker 2: Leavettown in this one very specific case, but the broader
Speaker 2: global picture of a group of online vigilantes who were
Speaker 2: targeting this website, joining forces digitally from around the world
Speaker 2: to shut it down.
Speaker 1: And you spoke to Will Wallace about the apparent administrator
Speaker 1: of the site, scatran Costa, and what Will did to
Speaker 1: try to get the sait taken down.
Speaker 5: Here's well, it wasn't likely that law enforcement were going
Speaker 5: to intervene at that. It was pretty much sort of
Speaker 5: chasing Scott round the Internet and finding out who the
Speaker 5: providers were and reporting him to the providers. There's so
Speaker 5: many services at someone's fingertips that it is quite easy,
Speaker 5: particularly if you have the skills and knowledge, just to
Speaker 5: shift to a different provider. That is one of the
Speaker 5: issues where it's kind of people on the Internet having
Speaker 5: a go at getting rid of a website, is that
Speaker 5: you're always going to be doing that, Whereas with law
Speaker 5: enforcement intervention, they have a lot more levers they can pull.
Speaker 5: I don't know if it will end. I don't know
Speaker 5: if the service will ever get taken down, but at
Speaker 5: least I feel as though I've done my bit, and
Speaker 5: that's to create more accountability.
Speaker 1: After the break, the outcome of the Levittown case and
Speaker 1: why AI technology keeps out pacing regulation, Olivia. In an
Speaker 1: interview later on with one of New York's das, you
Speaker 1: found out that there was more to the story with
Speaker 1: Carrie's deep fakes. What happened?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this interview was done in the Nassau County Courthouse.
Speaker 2: I was talking to both of the district attorneys who
Speaker 2: had been involved and investigated this case, Kelsey Laura and
Speaker 2: Melissa Scannell, and we were talking through their investigative process
Speaker 2: and how they came to increase the charges against Carrie,
Speaker 2: how they investigated what really happened, and I recall towards
Speaker 2: the end of the interview, I asked them if they'd
Speaker 2: ever contacted the administrator or owner of the website or
Speaker 2: tried to get the girl's photos removed, and they told
Speaker 2: me that after his conviction, there was one final task
Speaker 2: they wanted to do, which was to reach out to
Speaker 2: the person behind this horrific website and ask them to
Speaker 2: remove all photos and all posts that Carrie had ever
Speaker 2: made associated with his usernames. They were going to do
Speaker 2: that by sending the administrator Carrie's certificate of conviction and
Speaker 2: saying these hosts resulted in criminal conduct, please remove them all.
Speaker 2: But when they went to do that, the website was offline.
Speaker 2: So just days earlier, William Wallace and the Vigilantes mission
Speaker 2: had been successful when this website had gone dark, so
Speaker 2: the district attorneys felt like there wasn't really any more
Speaker 2: that they needed to do. The photos had been removed,
Speaker 2: the posts were no longer there. But during that interview
Speaker 2: I informed them that actually this website had moved to
Speaker 2: a different domain, a different URL, and all of the
Speaker 2: posts of the Levittown Girls were back up online and visible.
Speaker 2: And I remember Melissagists her jaw dropped, and she was
Speaker 2: so angry and also shocked and confused at the same time.
Speaker 2: And she was speaking very eloquently and calmly throughout the interview,
Speaker 2: and she just stopped and said, what what do you
Speaker 2: mean They're still there?
Speaker 1: And Marguie, did anyone associated with running any of these
Speaker 1: sites respond to you when you can't them.
Speaker 3: They did after a long while. We did a lot
Speaker 3: to try and contact Scott Trent Coster. It took a
Speaker 3: few months and eventually they responded to a kind of
Speaker 3: long email where we asked a lot of questions and
Speaker 3: laid out the story and that we were going to
Speaker 3: name them, and they called me a weirdo, which is
Speaker 3: one of the strangest responses I've ever had. They pointed
Speaker 3: out that it was very strange for me to want
Speaker 3: to name anyone and that I should not be focusing
Speaker 3: my time on exposing someone's identity. We know that the
Speaker 3: admin has spoken to some of the vigilantes before and
Speaker 3: they have had similar responses, very odd responses like why
Speaker 3: are you trying to ruin my business for me? You
Speaker 3: should just leave us alone? What's wrong with us having
Speaker 3: our kinks?
Speaker 1: And Olivia, where is Patrick carry now?
Speaker 2: He was sentenced to six months in prison, ten years
Speaker 2: probation in lifetime sentence as a sex offender. This means
Speaker 2: he can't own a smartphone, he can't own a device
Speaker 2: with a camera, He can't live within a thousand feet
Speaker 2: or be within a thousand feet of a school or
Speaker 2: a playground or a place where children are, and surprisingly,
Speaker 2: in August I found out he'd actually been released after
Speaker 2: four months with time off for good behavior, and he's
Speaker 2: back in Livetown. One of the young women who open
Speaker 2: our story Cecilia Luce. She was driving along the street
Speaker 2: and she saw him walking down one of Levittown's main drags.
Speaker 2: He had on a brown hoodie, he had headphones in,
Speaker 2: and she started immediately crying. She was so scared to
Speaker 2: see him, And then as she drove on, she felt anger,
Speaker 2: and she decided to stop and turn her car round
Speaker 2: and go back. She wanted to confront him, she wanted
Speaker 2: to yell at him. She had been a close friend
Speaker 2: of Patrick Carrey's throughout high school. So she did a
Speaker 2: U turn, turned to her car, back around, and he
Speaker 2: had disappeared. She carried on driving for a number of minutes,
Speaker 2: looking down all the side streets to see where he
Speaker 2: would have gone, but she never saw him again. At
Speaker 2: is sentencing, one of the young women I talked to
Speaker 2: actually read out a victim impact statement. Her name is
Speaker 2: Kayla Michelle, and she was the only young woman who
Speaker 2: testified at his sentencing. She described attending every single hearing,
Speaker 2: relating to this case. I think for a few reasons.
Speaker 2: One of them is because she'd known Carrie since she
Speaker 2: was eight years old, she thought he was a friend
Speaker 2: of hers. And another reason is that she was just
Speaker 2: so angry at him and she wanted to ensure that
Speaker 2: justice was going to be served. So during my interview
Speaker 2: with Kayla, who is now twenty three and still lives
Speaker 2: in Leavertown, we talked about the moment that she actually
Speaker 2: had the courage and bravery to read out this victim
Speaker 2: impact statement in court, and she described to me how
Speaker 2: nervous she was, that she'd written down what she wanted
Speaker 2: to say and the piece of paper was shaking in
Speaker 2: her hands, that she had to take three deep breaths
Speaker 2: before she was strong enough to talk, and that she
Speaker 2: looked directly at Patrick Carry in court and he refused
Speaker 2: to make eye contact with her. I reached out to
Speaker 2: one of the court reporters who were in court that
Speaker 2: day in order to get a full transcript of what
Speaker 2: Kayla said, and this was what was read out in court.
Speaker 2: Kayla said, I'm the strongest person in the room because
Speaker 2: I'm looking you directly in the face to tell you
Speaker 2: that you discussed me. You hurt me, but you've also
Speaker 2: changed me. You had the audacity to talk to me
Speaker 2: through social media, joke with me, and try to be
Speaker 2: cordial with me while behind my back belittling me, putting
Speaker 2: me down, sexualizing my younger self and body. You completely
Speaker 2: change the way that I viewed myself and my body,
Speaker 2: and for that, I'll never forgive you. Your name will
Speaker 2: forever give me nightmares and haunt me. I hear your
Speaker 2: name and I feel sick.
Speaker 1: Marguie, What is needed legally to prevent the further spread
Speaker 1: of these sites and AI generated photos?
Speaker 3: That is just such a hard question. You know, we're
Speaker 3: talking about this story. This isn't the first, and I'm
Speaker 3: it's the first we're hearing of, but I think there'll
Speaker 3: be many similar stories like this because the law is
Speaker 3: tricky and we're really catching up with what technology is
Speaker 3: able to do. And also there is an issue with
Speaker 3: who is liable who is accountable for this, So it's
Speaker 3: not just the users of the technology who are generating
Speaker 3: these images. They then have the ability to post them online,
Speaker 3: and then the owners of these websites aren't really liable
Speaker 3: under Section two thirty, which means that as a a
Speaker 3: website or blog. If a user is posting something that's criminal,
Speaker 3: they're not going to be held liable for it, but
Speaker 3: they're enabling this whole forum for thousands of images to
Speaker 3: be uploaded.
Speaker 2: I think that the reason why their question is so
Speaker 2: hard goes back to their age old Silicon Valley mantra
Speaker 2: of move fast and break things, where this technology was
Speaker 2: rolled out before legislators, regulators, the public really understood its power.
Speaker 2: So now as we're seeing states trying to catch up
Speaker 2: to these new tools, they're creating new laws that As
Speaker 2: Maggie and I reported, we looked across the United States
Speaker 2: and saw all the different portions of legislation that have
Speaker 2: been created to try and target deep fakes. But we've
Speaker 2: got a patchwork across the country now. Some states have
Speaker 2: civil statutes, some have criminal statutes, Some only target election
Speaker 2: related deep fake content, which is a subject we haven't
Speaker 2: even had time to address on today's podcast. But other
Speaker 2: statutes are just amendments to existing revenge porn laws. So
Speaker 2: no one's really figured out the right way to solve
Speaker 2: this problem yet. In October, we saw President Biden announce
Speaker 2: a new executive order to target artificial intelligence and ensure
Speaker 2: that it was illegal that you couldn't use these tools
Speaker 2: to create child sexual abuse imagery, child porn, or intimate
Speaker 2: imagery of individuals doing things that they never really did.
Speaker 1: And we don't.
Speaker 2: Actually know when these are going to be implemented or
Speaker 2: how they are going to be implemented. You know, that's
Speaker 2: the big question right now.
Speaker 1: Olivia Marghi, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 2: Us, Thanks for having us, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take.
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Speaker 3: The Dot Bun, the Don Staple Bar