A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 25

This is the third year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Today’s story: The Man Who Hacked Hollywood:

The hacker’s eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot. Holy shit, he thought. This was a find — even for him. For years, he had stealthily broken into the e-mail accounts of the biggest players in Hollywood. He had daily access to hundreds of messages between his victims and their managers, lawyers, friends, doctors, family, agents, nutritionists, publicists, etc. By now he knew more dirt than almost anyone in L.A. — the secret romances, the hidden identities, films in all stages of development. Still, this photo, a private self-portrait of one of our biggest stars, was something new, something larger than life, especially his. “You feel like you’ve seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see,” he says. “But you’re the only one that’s seen it.”

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Chris Chaney never wanted to become famous as The Man Who Hacked Hollywood. In the beginning at least, he was just a 33-year-old loner looking for something to do. Two years unemployed, he lived in a rundown brick house in a middle-class neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, where the streets are named for fairy tales: Cinderella Road, Peter Pan Place. He’d spent his entire life in this same area, had never flown on a plane or traveled beyond the occasional trip to see family in Iowa or Alabama. His parents separated when he was 4, and during his freshman year in high school he moved into this house near Mother Hubbard Drive with his grandmother. Taking a room hardly bigger than his bed, he hung a Fight Club poster on the wall, stacked his DVDs in the corner, lined up his He-Man dolls below the television, and called it home.

One night in early 2008, while his grandma slept, the balding, 290-pound Chaney was idly surfing movie sites like Ain’t It Cool News when he stumbled on the latest celebrity scandal. Stolen pictures had leaked online of Miley Cyrus posing half-dressed, her midriff exposed. Chaney sparked a clove cigarette and considered the story. He couldn’t have cared less about the Miley shots themselves. What intrigued him was the guy who stole them. How’d he do it? Chaney wasn’t a hacker; he didn’t even own a computer until his late twenties and couldn’t write a lick of code. But he’d always loved solving puzzles — completing crosswords, shouting out answers to Jeopardy! This was a tantalizing new riddle: “I was like, ‘How hard could this be if it’s happening all the time?’ “

What Chaney lacked in technical skills, he made up for in effort. Finding a working e-mail address was a simple process of trial and error. In a Word document, he made a list of random celebrities and, one by one, entered them into Gmail — first name followed by last — until, days later, an address was finally accepted. (In the blur of celebs to follow, he wouldn’t be able to recall his first.) Unlocking the account, he knew, would be more difficult. To retrieve a lost password, sites often ask subscribers so-called challenge questions: What’s your mother’s maiden name? What’s your place of birth? Or, in the case of this celebrity, what’s your pet’s name? It was widely known that the hacker who broke into Paris Hilton’s phone had done it with her Chihuahua’s name, Tinkerbell. If her dog’s name was easily available online, so too, Chaney figured, were other clues.

Seems like nothing much more than a tawdry story, but then this is how they lead off the article: They’ve become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities (your Scarletts, your Milas) stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They’re also the center of an entire stealth industry. For the man recently arrested in the biggest case yet, hacking also gave him access to a trove of Hollywood’s seamiest secrets — who was sleeping together, who was closeted, who liked to sext. What the snoop didn’t realize was that he was being watched, too.

My original thought was a straight-ahead thriller: Some celebrity type, let’s a Supermodel, discovers her smartphone is being hacked. Then her computer. Then her car computer. Suddenly all the high-tech stuff she [and we] use to make our lives work becomes her enemy… in a sinister way. How can you escape something that is so ever-present?

Of course, the 1998 movie Enemy of the State covered some of this terrain. But here it’s more of a psychological thriller, a case of cyber-stalking.

But then I thought about that line from the description: “What the snoop didn’t realize was that he was being watched, too.”

Now that’s interesting. Does the Supermodel hire someone to get the lowdown on the Stalker? Or is there someone else who is interested in the Supermodel, piggybacking on the Stalker’s efforts, someone with something more violent and creepy in mind? Does this twist put the Supermodel and the Stalker on the same side? Somebody screwing with both of them?

What would you do with this idea?

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