The Greenwood Advisory Plan Commission meeting on Monday continued as scheduled after an online prankster played a pornographic video on the Zoom call for the meeting, leading to a temporary stoppage of the meeting.
Video screenshot
GREENWOOD — An ordinary Greenwood planning meeting was briefly interrupted by an online prankster playing pornography Monday night, leaving questions about how the incident occurred.
The Greenwood Advisory Plan Commission was amid voting on a primary plat approval, the legal process of subdividing a land parcel into separate lots for development, for a new Panda Express by the Greenwood Park Mall when someone on the online Zoom call suddenly began playing a pornographic video. The audio from the pornographic video overtook the meeting audio, and instead of the participant’s camera video — which would typically show a person on a webcam — it was the pornographic video.
The video played on the Zoom call for about nine seconds before Planning Director Gabe Nelson called for EXOS IT, the city’s information technology contractor, to take action. The IT contractor abruptly — and temporarily — ended the Zoom meeting. Participants were able to rejoin the Zoom by re-logging onto the call seconds later, though the participant who played the video was no longer present.
This incident was observed by several members of the public, including the Daily Journal, both in person and on Zoom. Commission members also observed it in the council chambers at the city center, where the audio and video from Zoom calls are played via speakers and displayed on television screens in the room.
The rest of the meeting continued as scheduled without other any other incidents. Nelson later apologized for what happened.
“I do just want to take a moment to just apologize for what happened at this meeting today and I appreciate everyone’s maturity with that,” Nelson said.
Plan Commission President John Shell echoed Nelson’s sentiment, apologizing for the incident as well on behalf of the plan commission. Charrie Stambaugh, a plan commission member, also expressed this in an interview with the Daily Journal.
“The staff and the commission are very apologetic to the technical error and will do everything in its power to make sure that doesn’t happen again in the future,” Stambaugh said.
Stambaugh, who described the incident as a “technical error,” said to her knowledge nothing like that had ever happened at a plan commission meeting before. She was particularly worried about her 12-year-old son, who was in the audience of the plan commission meeting when the incident occurred. He had been there to watch her work, she said.
“My No. 1 concern was to make sure he wasn’t a witness to the technical error,” she said.
Incidents like the one that occurred on the Zoom call have happened before in other communities around the U.S. These incidents are often referred to as “Zoom-bombing,” which became a particular concern amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when dozens of the incidents were reported as governments moved to virtual meetings.
Online pranks of this type still continue today, leading to disruptions of government meetings. Crescent City, California, dropped its Zoom call-in feature for public meetings earlier this year after six unidentified callers made anti-Semitic and African-American hate comments under the pretense of offering opinions on unrelated items on a city meeting agenda, The Del Norte Triplicate reported.
But these incidents are still rare, particularly for Johnson County and Greenwood, which have not experienced incidents like them before.
Greenwood has offered Zoom options for all of its public meetings since the pandemic, when Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed an executive order allowing public meetings to take place via video conference. After the order expired in 2022, and after a change in state law, the city adopted its own virtual meeting policies for the public and city council, city board and city commission members, also adding links to join on city agendas.
Stambaugh said the incident is the fault of no one on the city’s or plan commission’s side, but there should be a way to make the Zoom meetings more monitored. While Stambaugh is not an IT expert, she has done hundreds of Zoom calls, and there are different ways to moderate who comes on the screen, she said.
“My hope and my guess is that the city will take the proper steps to ensure that that doesn’t happen again in the future,” she said.
The city does already have passcodes for the meetings, a requirement for all meetings conducted on Zoom, but the passcodes are publicly available due to the nature of the Zoom calls being part of public meetings.
City officials are already planning changes in light of the incident. The city’s IT contractor plans to implement more controls to limit access on the Zoom calls, including automatically muting all participants, who will then be required to to use the “Raise Your Hand” feature to be given access to speak, Myers said.
However, the video feed will still be up — just without sound, Myers said.
Greenwood is also considering switching from Zoom to Microsoft Teams for the video call component of meetings. Teams has more controls over the calls, Myers said.
Officials are also attempting to identify the user who played the pornography.
“We’re also working to try to find out whose computer that came from because the IP address is traceable,” Myers said.
