As y’all well know by this point, the primary mission of this blog is not to tell people how to keep themselves safe from sexual assault, except in the broader sense of advocating for the real safety will come from a shift in cultural attitudes away from tolerating rape. So I rarely, if ever, pass on advice on scenarios you ought to be wary of, but this one coming from Florida was both something I hadn’t heard before and something that is relatively easy and non-victim-blaming to protect yourself from. A student at the University of Florida was arrested for installing remote controlled cameras on the laptops of eight or nine women, accumulating thousands of pictures of them, some of them nude.

Fortunately, many colleges make free spyware detecting programs available to their students. Check with your school’s computing service to see if your school does. There are also free programs that do the same thing (Spybot, for instance) which by all accounts are as good as the ones your school pays for. Spyware detection is a different kind of program than virus protection, and you need to have both installed. Doing so will help keep you safe from credit card and password thieves, too. And if your computer starts acting super weird just after someone else was using it – get it checked out right away. Preferably by someone other than the creepy person who first messed with it.

So this article, about someone taking and posting video footage of women from behind on Florida campuses, was about behavior that is sort of icky (And very troubling in terms of the quantity of time someone is apparently spending doing this. Really, you have nothing better to contribute to society/YouTube?) but seems like the risk everyone runs in walking around in public in this video age. But the police officer affirmed what I thought was the legal standard, that “up the skirt” shooting was illegal and would be investigated as a crime.

Now, at least in Oklahoma, that’s apparently not the case. Feminist Law Prof quotes the whole article, but the key point, according to a 4 to 1 Appeals Court decision, is the the District Court judge was correct that the 16 year old woman shopping in Target when a 34 year old man stuck his camera under her dress “was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.” The lone dissenting judge, Appeals Judge Gary Lumpkin clarified the ridiculousness of this idea nicely:

what this decision does is state to women who desire to wear dresses that there is no expectation of privacy as to what they have covered with their dress

and

in other words, it is open season for peeping Toms in public places who want to look under a woman’s dress.

I have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place, I’ll grant you that, but no reasonable expectation of privacy under my clothes?!? The implications are deeply troubling.