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By Newsweek Editors
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In the summer of 2001, Jolene Jang was enjoying an outdoor festival in Seattle when she felt a creepy guy standing close behind her. He was reaching into her backpack. When she confronted him, the man started to run away, but Jang's boyfriend tackled him and held him until the police arrived. She figured that was the end of it. A few months later, a prosecutor called with unsettling news. The man wasn't just a pickpocket. He had been using a small digital video camera to take pictures up her skirt.
Jang's assailant might have only wanted the pictures he took for himself. But those shots could have ended up on one of a growing number of voyeur Web sites that invite perverts to submit their secretly captured pictures of women in public bathrooms and locker rooms. A popular subgenre: "upskirt" shots of women getting out of cars or climbing stairs. Tiny cell phones with built-in digital cameras make it that much easier. "There's definitely a lot of people who think that upskirting--'Oh, big deal'," Jang says. "People who don't understand the depths of it should think about their wives or their kids."
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Jang was especially upset because the man who photographed her wound up serving only 38 days. He was convicted under Washington state's voyeurism law, but the state Supreme Court overturned the verdict, ruling that because Jang was out in public when it happened, she had no reasonable expectation of privacy. Furious, Jang became an outspoken activist, and eventually the state rewrote the law to make the space under a person's clothes private even in a public place. Currently 44 states have some kind of statute that make video voyeurism a crime. But vague wording and First Amendment issues--preserving legitimate surveillance activities, say, while banning prurient peeping--make them difficult to enforce. A just-passed federal law could help sort out the problem. The statute makes it a crime to secretly photograph someone on federal property or military bases. The law itself won't do much to protect anyone but federal workers and soldiers, but the hope is that state lawmakers across the country will copy it.
Video voyeurism first gained national attention back in 1998, when Susan Wilson discovered that her neighbor had been secretly videotaping her with cameras hidden in her Louisiana home. At the time, there were no laws to fit the crime. "When I found out that it wasn't against the law, I felt even more violated," she says. Wilson's case partly inspired the federal law, called the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004.
Now Congress and statehouses nationwide are grappling with a larger dilemma: how to make a law that extends into tough-to-police cyberspace. Thinking of getting back at your ex-wife by posting those "intimate" pics she once let you take? Rep. Mark Green of Wisconsin will soon introduce a bill to make that a crime unless the person consents. That's welcome news to women like Susan Wilson and Jolene Jang, who say they're always on the lookout for prying electronic eyes. "I'm still wearing skirts," Jang says. "But I make sure that they're on the longer side."
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