Hacker accused of underage porn

By JUHA SAARINEN

Convicted hacker Jodi Jones is again embroiled in controversy, this time for running a website that contains pornographic images of young women.

Some of the images were posted on the site without consent, with others raising questions about the age of the girls.

Last February, Jones, alias "VeNoMouS", admitted to hacking into internet provider Web Internet, and was sentenced in the Manukau District Court to 100 hours of community service.

Worried about running foul of the law when setting up www.ircwhores.co.nz, Jones referred some of the images to an inspector of publications at the Department of Internal Affairs.

But the department had already received a complaint about Jones and the site, and had contacted him for investigation.

Last week, Internal Affairs asked for "objectionable material" to be removed - some of which included images of underage girls.

Censorship Compliance Unit head Steve O'Brien said the department contacted some of the girls to verify whether they had given permission for the pictures to be posted. Some of them had not and Jones was instructed to remove those images.

He told the Herald he had co-operated fully with the department. O'Brien confirmed this but said the investigation was ongoing and should be finished next week.

Jones said it was "totally inaccurate that [the girls on the site] are underage".

But in a notice posted on his site, Jones said he had "decided to take down four of the profiles" due to "many people bitching bout [sic] the possibility of them being like 16 and **** when the photos were taken, frankly i couldn't give a **** ."

Jones insisted the women whose pictures were posted had given their consent and that he had each girl's telephone number.

One of the profiles, he said, was of a former girlfriend who "has done a lot of porn" and was happy to be on the site. "Every chick on the site is legal."

According to the Film, Videos and Publications Act 1993, a published picture is deemed objectionable if it "promotes or supports, or tends to promote or support, the exploitation of children, or young persons, or both, for sexual purposes".

A "young person" in this case is someone younger than 17, according to the department.

On the site, Jones encourages people to "Submit a NEW IRC whore" adding that "nows [sic] your chance to get back at that ex-girlfriend (or boyfriend) that you have nude or semi-nude photos or movies of".

"We will pin them up like last years [sic] Hustler centrefolds and you can basically sit back and watch them pay."

The language on the site is graphic and misogynistic. The women are referred to as "skanky bitches" "slappers", "sluts" and "hoes".

The Herald spoke to several women associated with Jones and the site. One, a single mother who had worked as a prostitute, said the pictures were stolen from her, and that she did not give Jones permission to use them.

Requests for their removal were ignored and the pictures were on the site until it was taken down entirely on Tuesday.

Another woman said her friend had had pornographic pictures of herself posted on the site, and "was extremely upset".

One of Jones' former girlfriends, "SexKitten", said she had not given permission for the pictures to be published on the web.

She said she was "very young at the time, only 15-16, and Jodi was 22, so I did what he wanted".

Jones is an employee of Auckland internet provider Network Service Providers and says his position there is as "programmer, systems administrator and internet security".

The ircwhores.co.nz site is hosted on the company's network, but director Brent Larsen said he had "no opinion about it", denied it was hosted by his firm, but added if it ever had been, it was now removed.

Larsen said he knew "the full detail and context" of Jones' conviction, and was comfortable with him being an employee.

Jones said his employer was not aware that the site was accessible over the internet, but knew it was "just there for development".

The site had been running for about three weeks, said Jones, and had received about 300,000 hits.

Shortly after the Herald contacted Network Service Providers, the home page was removed from its server, effectively disabling access to the site.

However, as of writing, the site is still hosted by the company but without access to its controversial content. It instead displays a notice stating it will be moved to a "production envoriment [sic] in the states".

Jones also hosts another personal site, with pornographic images, on the same server as the internet provider.

The idea behind the ircwhores site is to show pictures of women who participate in internet relay chat (IRC) sessions in "channels" or chatrooms with different topics.

IRC is a global network of chat servers that has achieved a degree of notoriety thanks to people abusing the medium.

It attracts young people, and many are careless or silly enough to send explicit digital pictures of themselves to other chat participants. Some pictures are still camera shots and others are live webcams.

Internal Affairs is monitoring IRC chatrooms on the lookout for New Zealand pornography traders.