Florida man arrested in celeb hacking probe

Wonderwall, Wednesday, October 12, 2011, 11:10am (PDT)

Greg Risling and Robert Jablon

• LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A Florida man has been arrested and charged with hacking into the emails of Scarlett Johansson, Christina Aguilera and other celebrities.

  Christopher Chaney of Jacksonville was indicted Tuesday in Los Angeles on 25 counts of identity theft and hacking.

  The FBI says it made an arrest Wednesday morning in a year-long investigation dubbed Operation Hackerazzi.

  A federal grand jury claims that, beginning late last year, Chaney gained unauthorized access to the email accounts of more than 50 people. Alleged victims also include actresses Mila Kunis and Renee Olstead.

  Prosecutors contend that Chaney hacked into email accounts and hijacked the forwarding feature so that a copy of every message received went to an email account that he controlled.

  Nude shots of Johansson appeared on an Internet site earlier this year and TMZ.com reported that hackers stole them from her cellphone.

  Celebrities and people in the news have long been targets of privacy invasion but concerns have redoubled in the Internet age.

  In Britain, publisher Rupert Murdoch closed down the News of the World this year after contentions that the tabloid routinely hacked into people's phones in the hunt for exclusive stories.

  The paper, which had published for 168 years, faced allegations of systematically intercepting private voicemail of those in the news — including a teenage murder victim.

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