The Unsung Internet Hero: David Segal
By: Charlie Roadman
Tags: Journalism, New York Times, Attorney, Heroes, Criminal Justice

How a New York Times Reporter Gutted the Mugshot Extortion Industry

In 2013, New York Times reporter David Segal wrote an article, “Mugged by a Mugshot.” In the process of writing the article, he changed the lives of millions of people. How? His journalism cleared millions of mugshots off the front pages of the internet (practically overnight).

Image by Jay Hollinsworth

You might not be familiar with the internet mugshot industry because it is not as big of a problem as it used to be — thanks to David Segal.

Prior to his 2013 article, if you got arrested, multiple websites would post your mugshot online, maximizing the SEO so that the arrest picture would be seen by anyone who searches your name. Your mugshot would be on the first page of google results, regardless of the purpose of the search.

These mugshot website owners claimed to be uncompromising First Amendment patriots; except they were happy to compromise and remove your mugshot for a fee.

Obviously, the real goal of their business model was to humiliate people into paying them — a.k.a. extortion. They created a digital scarlet letter that could be seen by anyone with internet access, and removed by anyone with a credit card.

I was very familiar with the internet mugshot business model in October of 2013. By then I’d been a criminal defense attorney in Austin, Texas, for eleven years, and handled over a thousand criminal cases. My clients had been charged with everything from misdemeanor shoplifting to aggravated assault. And, as is normal in my business, some of them were completely innocent.

In the years leading up to 2013, as more mugshot companies entered the field and got better at SEO, I’d get more and more questions from my clients about their mugshot showing up online.

“Is there anything you can do?”, they would ask. “Unfortunately, no,” I’d say. “Mugshots are public record. You can pay one mugshot company, but there is no guarantee that another company won’t post the same image.”

In case you don’t know what it feels like to see your mugshot on the first page of Google, here’s what happens: your brain wonders “who would google my name?” — and the answer is potential romantic partners, employers, landlords, neighbors, family and friends. Your fear exposes nearly every vulnerability in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem). It is omni-humiliation.

And, no, the mugshot companies would not automatically take down your mugshot if your case was ultimately dismissed or you were exonerated. That would require the mugshot companies to follow up on the outcome of cases. That’s too much work and they would have to care.

But back to Mr. Segal’s article. After describing the mugshot business model, the questionable ethics, victims of the extortion, and the counter-arguments for transparency in government, Mr. Segal interviewed an actual mugshot company owner.

The 25-year-old entrepreneur did not appear to be a genius, nor even particularly clever. He was just an “early mover” in the internet mugshot market. Again, proving the old capitalist axiom that it is easy to make money if you don’t care how you do it. Business was booming for this young man in October 2013.

But the important moment in the history of internet justice is buried in the last 10 paragraphs of the article — where Mr. Segal’s reporting affected millions of people’s lives.

Mr. Segal reached out to Google for comment on the surprisingly high rankings of mugshots in search results, which appeared to go against Google’s philosophy of rewarding sites that post original content.

The Google spokesman initially responded with what amounted to an “empathetic shrug.” However, a few days later the spokesman contacted Mr. Segal and said, in fact, they were introducing an algorithm change to remove mugshots from the front page immediately.

What made the difference? It is easy to imagine the spokesman walking into Google’s executive conference room and saying “Excuse me, can I get everyone’s attention? A New York Times reporter is writing an article about our mugshot policy.”

And then incredibly, after Google agreed to adjust their algorithm and remove mugshots from the first page, Mr. Segal reached out to the credit card companies — and asked them why they were complicit in online extortion. Astonishingly, these normally slow-moving institutions quickly reviewed the situation and agreed to stop doing business with mugshot companies. They even gave Mr. Segal a nice quote for the article: “We looked at the activity and found it repugnant.”

And just like that, the internet mugshot extortion business was undone. No high search rankings on Google. No ability to accept credit cards as payoff.

The result of Mr. Segal’s reporting was not the complete erasure of mugshots online. The mugshot companies still exist and are trying to claw their way back up the search results. But they are not prominent like they were prior to 2013. And to find the mugshot of a regular person, you usually have to search specifically for their mugshot (“john doe mugshot”).

The final paragraph of the article describes Mr. Segal’s follow up with the young mugshot website owner — who is stunned at the rapid disintegration of his tools for extortion. In an enjoyable understatement, he says he’s trying to wrap his head around it. I recently looked up his LinkedIn profile. He appears to have moved on to a different business. I won’t repeat his name here — to spare him the humiliation.