You can spot a mural of 'ethical hacker' Mia Landsem on Trondheim’s Wall of Feminism
“It cost him 5,000 kroner to ruin my life,” Mia Landsem tells me. The ‘him’ was an ex-boyfriend, a ‘douchebag’ she dated when she was 16-years-old. The life-ruining incident was depressingly far-too-common. She was at a bar in Trondheim, then aged eighteen, when she realised what he had done: put a naked photo of her online. ‘Aren’t you that porn star?’ a stranger asked her that night, showing her her own photograph on a porn site. “I ran to the toilets to throw up,” she says.
Two years later, Landsem decided to press charges and her ex-boyfriend was eventually fined – the aforementioned 5,000 kroner (roughly €400): money she never received, charged with a crime that mentioned nothing of the trauma she had endured. Because the damage of his act, of course, was already done. The insidious, long-lasting ramifications of a violation like this are manifold. The abuse spread like knotweed around her life, leading her to be recognised everywhere, causing her huge anxiety and depression, searing trust issues, falling grades at school, the fear she would never be able to apply for the police – her dream job and, eventually, resulted in serious suicidal ideation.
Something that ends up being traded like Pokémon cards, something laughed and boasted about in the darkest recesses of the internet – a naked photo of a woman – is increasingly treated as a joke. But it’s a joke with devastating, often fatal consequences. Image abuse online – a term most activists prefer to the culpability implied in ‘revenge porn’ – rose by 20% in the first for months of 2020 alone in Sweden and Landsem tells me the statistics in Norway, from her own personal experience, are still increasing and, most concerningly, those subjected to the online abuse (cyberbullying) are 1.9% more likely to die from suicide. “I didn’t expect to still be alive right now, at 25, but everything is different now, thankfully,” says Landsem.
The woman who sits before me now is not the same traumatised eighteen-year-old from the bar in Trondheim. She has a job she loves and a purpose she is passionate about. She is in a healthy relationship and has a happy, busy life in Oslo. What changed was her resolve to ensure this wouldn’t happen to others. An avid gamer as a teen, Landsem decided to use her tech prowess for good and now works in cyber security, as an ‘ethical hacker.’ Her work involves legal hacking – essentially stress testing a company’s vulnerability to hacking. Like a heroic vigilante by night, she becomes a ‘computer detective’ assisting victims of online image abuse. She tracks down photographs and takes down what she can, reporting the rest to the police. “I did an exam in digital forensics so I know how to collect evidence legally, how to write a report for the police and provide everything they need,” she says, of her not-for-profit nightly escapades and how she keeps within the law.
Her work gained national public attention when, in 2017, she helped discover nude images of Norwegian handball player, Nora Mørk. The case proved a catalyst for, not only national debate, but actual legislative change. By 2021 the spread of intimate images had become a crime punishable with up to two years imprisonment in Norway. Landsem’s work hit the headlines and she now gives talks around the world and lectures in schools about these issues. She has also written a bestselling children’s book on this topic; Safe Online. “I just wanted to make sure no one ever had to feel the way I did and go through what I went through,” she tells me.
The work she does sits at the intersection of so many issues. It’s about power: anonymous digital misogyny and its real-life consequences. So much of her resolve to do this work is not only an act of saving herself, but of clawing back power – for her and for the thousands like her. She works on myriad cases, and as a result, she spends a lot of time in the very worst parts of the internet. How does she protect her own mental health?
“My work has got people like that in jail, has prevented abuse. You have to shut yourself off emotionally in order to do this job,” she explains. These untold hours in these dark online spaces has allowed her, perhaps, some valuable insights into the minds of those who do it. “I’ve learnt every human has something dark inside of them,” she notes.
She is particularly incisive about what she sees as the gamification of nude images online, being traded in something activists in this sphere call ‘collector culture.’ It is not even the nudity that appeals, she explains, it is merely a power grab, a play for street cred by trading in contraband. As she remarked about her own case, her ex shared, not photos she consented to, and had sent herself, but expressly ones she had no idea he had taken of her. “We have all of this pornography available online. So, it's not like the nude photos themselves,” she says. “It's having something that you shouldn't have.”
“There are so many young people doing it,” she says. “You would be shocked. It is not this idea we have of an old, creepy guy in a basement, it's often just 12-year-old boys and even girls too- sharing photos of boys and men." Somehow, in 2022, exchanging online naked images has become the equivalent of smoking behind the bike shed.
Landsem has concerns for this digitally-native generation. So much of her work deals with systemic, societal issues – INCEL culture, misogyny, the gendered double standards of sexuality – and how these are allowed to flourish in the unregulated quagmire of the online world. This dark domain she has unlimited access to is a microcosm of our worst impulses: a murky underbelly of society allowed free reign in the unfettered wild west of the internet, one which not only allows so much of this to happen unchecked but, Landsem believes, actually exacerbates this behaviour. “I think we are losing empathy and social skills,” she says. “It’s easier to abuse someone online because then you're not facing them, they're not screaming stop, and you’re anonymous."
Landsem also sees that social media platforms themselves have a culpability they are unwilling to properly engage with. Besides more responsibility from tech companies, Landsem is still living in the shadow of her own case, and how let down she felt by the police. Reporting the violation, was itself another trauma. Landsem knows from experience, her own and those she has willingly immersed herself in, just how serious the consequences of these crimes are. “I know so many young people whose cases of online image abuse I heard of and who I only met for the first time at their gravesites,” she says, solemnly. “If that is not an emergency, what is?”
As for Landesm herself, she will continue to fight, nightly, for those who need her. And, should she ever want to see her picture in Trondheim again, she need only look to the city’s Wall of Feminism, which now includes a painted image of computer detective Mia Landsem.