Individuals’ privacy protections pass

Efforts to criminalize ‘revenge porn,’ invasive photos clear Legislature.

Responding to safety concerns in the Internet Age, the Texas Legislature ended the 2015 session by criminalizing “revenge porn,” acting to protect minors from online predators and passing the “upskirt bill” to crack down on invasive photography.

When it came to electronic privacy issues, concerns about how people interact via technology trumped legislative worries about government surveillance.

Bills that failed to gain traction, for example, would have required a search warrant to access cellphone location-tracking information and limited law enforcement’s use of portable cellphone towers to obtain phone numbers dialed, call length and phone location.

Instead, lawmakers struggling to keep up with changing technology paid heed to personal stories of grief.

There was Hollie Toups, who spoke at a Capitol hearing about the humiliation of learning that a website was displaying 10-year-old naked photos — along with her name, city and Facebook links.

The website offered to remove the images for $500; when she declined, the site added a map showing her home address, destroying her sense of safety, Toups said.

“I was stalked and harassed, not just online,” she testified.

“Strangers were approaching me in public. I was afraid to leave my house.”

Toups’ story helped inspire legislation targeting revenge porn, creating for the first time a criminal penalty for posting intimate photos and videos from a previous or current relationship without consent. Violators could get up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $4,000.

Senate Bill 1135, approved without opposition in either house and awaiting action by Gov. Greg Abbott, also would give victims the right to sue the website owner and the person who provided the im-

ages.

Similarly, a personal story inspired Rep. Tony Dale, R-Cedar Park, to file legislation to criminaliz e sexually explicit conversations by adults who go online or use social media to lure minors.

Dale said he was shocked to learn that prosecutors could not charge a man who had sent text messages to a Cedar Park teen that included offers of sex and rides from school and requests to visit her home while her parents were away.

Police and prosecutors were hampered, Dale said, by a 2013 court ruling that tossed out a state law targeting el ectronic conversations bet ween adults and minors that were intended to “arouse and gratify the sexual desire of any person.”

“The law was so broadly written that it could cover quoted passages from literature such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the Court of Criminal Appeals sai d.

Signed into law by Abbott, legislation by Dale and Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, responded to the court’s concerns by focusing on adults’ behavior, not the intentions behind their acts.

When the law takes effect Sept. 1, adults will face a third-degree felony charge — punishable by up to 10 years in prison — if they use social media or electronic communications in an attempt to lure minors into hav- ing sex.

Prosecutors praised the law, saying they once again can target “grooming behavior” from predators seeking to identify and lure susceptible minors instead of having to wait for the adult to initiate a meeting with the child.

A separate court ruling also led to legislation making invasive photography a crime.

Last year, the Court of Criminal Appeals tossed out a state law banning improper photography — photos or videos taken in a public place without consent and with the purpose of sexual gratification — as a violation of free-speech rights.

“Banning otherwise protected expression on the basis that it produces sexual arousal or gratifi- cation is the regulation of protected thought, and such a regulation is outside the government’s power, “the court said.

Legislators responded with a bill making it a crime to photograph or videotape “an intimate area of another person” in a bathroom or changing room without consent or in a public place where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The upskirt bill, as it was known, makes “invasive visual recording” a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in jail.

The legislation is awaiting action by Abbott .