Nancy Scola is a reporter covering technology for POLITICO Pro.
The San Francisco office of California’s Department of Justice occupies a 14-story tower amid what might be the most formidable density of high-tech money and power in the world. The top floor looks across to Twitter’s headquarters, just five blocks away; Facebook is 30 miles down the peninsula in Silicon Valley; and Google not far beyond that.
On the afternoon of February 4, 2015, executives from those companies, as well as Microsoft and other online giants, filed through the building’s doors and into a distinctly unglamorous, windowless below-ground room. They sat in rows. The companies there had made hundreds of billions of dollars collectively during the freewheeling internet boom of the aughts and 2010s, and they weren’t accustomed to being summoned by local law enforcement. If anything, politicians were usually eager to catch a bit of their reflected glamour. President Barack Obama had dined with high-tech CEOs and invited industry leaders to the White House for advice; Hillary Clinton, then preparing her 2016 White House bid, was making speeches in Silicon Valley.
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But as the internet had become a central part of American life, and as social media exploded as a force, concerns were growing that something was going uncontrollably wrong. Just months earlier, a hacker breaking into iCloud had stolen and published the private photographs of a sweeping collection of female celebrities, including the actresses Gabrielle Union, Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence, the 24-year-old “Hunger Games” star, called the experience a “sex crime.” And while those stars could afford lawyers and PR experts to fight such a violation, there were uncounted women, and some men, who struggled to reel back hor ..
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