Medical Lake meeting briefly derailed after porn streamed over Zoom

An unusually crowded Medical Lake City Council meeting, animated by disputed and unfounded concerns that Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown was secretly planning to open a homeless shelter in the small neighboring community, was briefly derailed Tuesday night after a virtual attendee began streaming pornography and loud music over the council’s video conferencing software.

“It was horrible,” Councilman Chad Pritchard said in a brief interview, noting that the attendee played “loud Indian techno” music and porn over the Zoom live stream.

Zoom-bombing, the hijacking of a video conference by disruptors, has been a common problem for governments and classrooms that adopted virtual attendance options following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The FBI urged caution four years ago as the trend emerged, specifically pointing to reports of streamed pornography, hateful images and threatening language.

The issue has become more muted in recent years as organizations have adapted to prevent disruptions, but Medical Lake is not the only local city to still grapple with intrusion. In December, Liberty Lake residents attending a city council meeting responded to a suspected hacker yelling lewd and racist remarks by singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” attempting to drown out the disruptor.

Pritchard believes the city’s protocols to prevent disruption may have been lax Tuesday in an effort to allow an unusually large number of residents to watch the meeting virtually. The incident was “definitely” a one-off, he suggested.

“We just hadn’t done this in a long time, with this many on Zoom,” Pritchard said. “It’s usually just one or two.”