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The Hollywood Hacker, the guy behind the leaked nude photos of Scarlett Johansson, wreaked havoc on a number of celebrity's lives. But in a profile in GQ, Chris Chaney is portrayed not as a malicious villain but as some dude -- a kind of sad dude -- who was depressed and bored and living in his grandmother's house when he realized that he could guess (guess) actors' email passwords, and live vicariously in a world far more interesting than his own.
The profile is written by David Kushner, and Chaney, who lives in Florida, is described thusly:
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... 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.
Not exactly the stuff of thrilling Anonymous protests of high-tech government infiltrations.
We all know how the story ends -- Chaney becomes a celebrity himself, although for all the wrong reasons. But more than a peek into the workings of a hacking mastermind (Chaney is no such thing), the profile provides a bleak view into what's really going on in basements across America as we become increasingly infatuated with the myth of Hollywood, and distanced from our own reality.