LOS ANGELES, CA – The popular smartphone application “Snapchat” came under siege last week due to a decimating security breach, which allowed Internet hackers to enumerate 4.6 million user names and their corresponding phone numbers, before being halted by the servers API rate limit. Just as the snappy startup fixed its security faults, there came another blow to the reputation of what has become one of the most popular forms of sending sexually provocative, explicit even, pictures to friends, especially amongst teens.
Saturday, January 4th, the home of Snapchat employee and co-founder Dave Davidson was raided by the FBI, along with the Snapchat office in Los Angeles. When reached for comment, a spokesperson from the FBI’s Los Angeles branch had little to offer, but shed some light on the allegations: “The investigation is ongoing, but we can tell you that Davidson is being held under suspicion of distributing child pornography– pictures of teens he’d gathered from the Snapchat server– and selling them in bulk on what we have dubbed the “darknet,” a haven for pedophiles and Internet hackers, but we got’em this time… We got’em,” he said with a nod.
The “darknet” the agent referred to is a known nickname for the Tor network, which anonymizes Internet traffic and uses its own pseudo-top-level-domains known as “.onions” where anonymous communities are setup to disseminate child porn, atomic bombs and homeopathic cancer cures.
Colleagues of Davidson were shocked to find out what he had done: “He was always staying late, you know, putting in the extra work or so we thought,” said a Snapchat employee, “He always wore a hoodie with “REVENGE PORN” on the back, but we just thought he was being ironic. This is all quite chilling, really.”