An excerpt from the very long Doe 1 v. Lamb, decided Tuesday by the Appellate Court of Connecticut, in an opinion by Judge Nina Elgo, joined by Judges Robert Clark and Dawne Westbrook:
This civil action concerns the criminal conduct of the defendant Christopher Lamb, who, utilizing Internet services and computer devices provided by the defendant [Lamb's mother], hacked into the personal accounts of and harassed and exploited a number of innocent victims….
The record, viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs as the nonmoving parties, reveals the following …. In the winter of 2012, Lamb, then twenty years of age, moved back home to live with the defendant and his stepfather in the town of Brooklyn. Having failed out of college, Lamb was, by his own account, "[r]eally depressed," and he attempted suicide.
Lamb "had way too much time" on his hands and, by some point in 2013, had "figured out" that he could break into people's social media and cloud accounts because it was "exciting …." … Lamb would then harvest any compromising or otherwise explicit photographs, using those images as leverage to convince young women to send him more photographs. He conducted all of these activities through the Internet service provided by the defendant, and using an Internet protocol address (IP address) that, ultimately, was identified by the police as the origination of his criminal activity….
Although Lamb did not sell any of the images that he obtained, he did broadly distribute them directly to the parents, friends, employers, schoolteachers, and other contacts of the victims. Lamb estimated that he hacked between seventy and one hundred individuals and obtained sexual images from approximately twenty or twenty-five of them. All of this criminal activity was done through the Internet connection and devices that were provided to Lamb by the defendant, and which were completely under her control.
