Friday, January 27, 2017

The FBI Has Released Its Gamergate Investigation Records

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the FBI's Gamergate investigation went nowhere. The good thing is that all of the threats were bogus, no one was hurt and, for the most part, no one even cares about Gamegate anymore.

The FBI has posted a heavily redacted report of its threat investigations during the Gamergate controversy in 2014 and 2015. The 173-page document (not counting 61 deleted pages) primarily seems to cover harassment of against critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu, including a shooting threat that caused Sarkeesian to cancel a planned talk at Utah State University. Ultimately, the investigations petered out: the FBI wasn’t able to identify the people behind some of the threats, apparently declined to prosecute others, and appears to have struggled with jurisdictional issues.