By ADAM ATKINSON
North Country This Week

CANTON -- Zoombombers have struck in St. Lawrence County.

Zoombombing, the practice of crashing Zoom cloud conference sessions to be offensive or to cause mischief, has been reported in national media as a relatively widespread occurrence with the upsurge of online conferences for business, governmental and social purposes.

Zoombombers (also called Zoom trolls) recently interrupted the beginning of the Canton Town Council Meeting Wednesday, April 8.

One of the bombers sported a photograph of a hip-hop musician, which at one point flickered off to reveal a thin, pale male in his teens. The other Zoombomber had his video feed shut off, using only the audio connection.

The two individuals caused a brief disruption at the top of the meeting session where the first complained of health issue involving his nether regions that could benefit from hydrocortisone cream. The second individual called on life guidance from Allah in what appeared to be a poor attempt at a Middle Eastern accent.

Moderators Carol Pynchon and Anna Sorensen, both village trustees, were able to quickly remove the zoom trolls from the session and the meeting was able to proceed uninterrupted.

Like other municipalities during the COVID-19 lockdown situation, Canton is hosting Zoom meetings for its board which are open to the public. The Zoom meetings, which enable municipalities to meet public meeting obligations while maintaining social distancing, require registration to attend, after which the attendee is sent a link in their email.

Pynchon said moderators are only able to tell a registered attendees screen name, name and email address from the registration data. "(There) is no way to know whether or not the latter two are correct, it appears they can put in anything," Pynchon said in an email conversation with North Country This Week.

"One of the reasons we set up moderators - Town moderating Village and vice versa - is so the meeting participants can focus on proceedings. With moderators just keeping an eye on participants, mikes, etc., and helping with connections and technical issues, we can catch things and act fast. It's very easy to remove someone, just one button; it can be a little harder to know for sure who the problem participant is. We actually removed three who didn't look familiar; none of the three requested to re-enter," writes Pynchon.

"Carol laid it out perfectly. It’s very easy to remove them; the issue is knowing who they are before they speak," said Sorensen in an email.

Village officials are researching legal ways to make the online sessions more secure from Zoombombing in the future while still maintaining Open Meetings Law obligations. Until then, moderators for the sessions will "deal with issues as they arise."

"It's not iron clad, but we hope it works. And we hope people find better things to do with their time than disrupt the meetings of people who are trying to do their very best for their communities under particularly challenging circumstances," Pynchon said.

Help keep St. Lawrence County informed

Until now, advertising has provided the income to pay our news staff. But with a cutback in advertising due to the COVID-19 crisis, our ability to continue free news coverage is threatened.  Please donate to NorthCountryNow.com and North Country This Week so we can keep St. Lawrence County informed.  Thank you.