US military faces burgeoning nude picture-sharing scandal
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon faced a burgeoning scandal Friday as more pictures of naked female service members apparently shared without their consent by male colleagues have turned up on secret social media sites.
General Robert Neller, the commandant of the Marine Corps, appeared embarrassed and uncertain how to deal with the problem, which first surfaced among members of his elite force.
“I am generationally challenged here,” he told a Pentagon news conference. “I don’t do social media. Maybe that’s my mistake.” The scandal broke over the weekend with the revelation that pictures of female Marines in various stages of undress had been shared in a secret Facebook group called ‘Marines United.’
Membership in the group was restricted to current and former Marines, but it had as many as 30,000 members before it was taken down.
The story was first reported by The War Horse, a news group run by Marine veteran Thomas Brennan.
He said some of the photos were taken surreptitiously, while others had been taken by the women themselves but shared without their consent.
The pictures, often accompanied by lewd commentary, gave the women’s names and units in some cases.
That was followed by a report Thursday that hundreds of pictures of naked women from all the military services were being shared on another image-sharing site, AnonIB.
Business Insider, an online news site, said the message board was threaded with conversations among men, many of whom asked for naked photographs of specific women, often identifying them by name and where they were stationed.
Neller, who has formed a working group to deal with online harassment, said fewer than 10 female Marines were known to have been victimised. — AFP