I'm Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, and welcome to the

latest of our We the People constitutional podcasts.

The National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to disseminate information about

the U.S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis.

And after a brief summer break, we return today to discuss one of the most hotly contested questions of the week, namely

do current laws and the Constitution give public figures adequate protection from online hackers.

This question arose from the media uproar

after a massive leak of celebrity photos,

which put a new focus on several interesting legal questions about online privacy for the rich and famous in the 21st century.

Recently, hackers posted unauthorized photos of celebrities in various states of undress on a website called

4-chan that specializes in posting shocking images. The photos were

appropriated from cell phones and mobile accounts and they included images of

actresses Jennifer Lawrence and the model Kate Upton.

The images started appearing on other websites, including Reddit, and soon the international

media was reporting the massive leak of sensitive photos. The Washington Post reported that hackers bragged

about getting photos from Apple's E. Cloud service. The hackers, of course, will face severe

legal penalties, but the victim's lawyers have limited options to remove the offending images from the internet.

The lawyers can go after the websites on copyright grounds,

or they can pursue claims related to the victim's rights to privacy and publicity,

but American law, unlike European law, generally grants

internet service providers immunity from illegal content posted by others.

And the practical problem for celebrities as well as the not so rich

...