Nude Photos of N.J. Politician Put Spotlight on Internet Privacy

COMMENTARY | Another politician has done it again. Except, well, has he? Nude photos of New Jersey local politician Louis Magazzu have appeared on the website of questionably named GOP activist Carl B. Johnson. Magazzu allegedly sent the photos to a woman with whom he was having an online relationship.

Before you file him away in a folder with former Rep. Anthony Weiner, Magazzu's situation is different. Reportedly he's been separated from his wife for two years; Weiner was married only a short time and his wife announced her pregnancy shortly after the scandal broke.

The bigger issue in this case is not that a grown man sent a grown woman a compromising picture. The question is how it arrived in the hands of the blogger and whether that blogger has the right to post it.

With the recent News of the World hacking scandal, electronic privacy demands attention. We do not know what measures the blogger may have undertaken to obtain the photo, but if it involved any hacking, those actions are firmly barred by U.S. law.

But if he didn't use any hacking or wiretapping to get the photo, if someone sent it to him, does he have the right to post it?

Any person should have the power to prevent the distribution of nude photos unless they have previously signed a consent. The removal of such photos should be immediate and complete. There is no reason a person shouldn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in regard to his or her own body, and no justification exists for Johnson to have posted such photos, particularly when how he obtained them is cloudy.

The problem of people being exploited in this way will only grow with technology. Earlier this year, a hacker in California obtained nude photos from women's accounts and sent them to their contacts. In July, another hacker stole nude photos from women, many of whom he knew, and posted them on their Facebook walls.

As the story of ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews, who was secretly filmed by a peeping tom, illustrates, the violation never goes away in this Internet age. In fact, it was far easier to find search results purporting to offer the intrusive peephole video than references to the news story.

For Magazzu, an embarrassing battle has started at a point too late for him to undo the harm, as a picture once on the Internet is a picture forever on the Internet. The time has come for law to catch up with technology and prevent the problem from growing, with penalties harsh enough to cause a potential poster to reconsider putting them up in the first place.