Perverts Caught Filming Women Showering On US Submarine

A sex ring of up to a dozen sailors has been uncovered operating on board a US Navy submarine.

The men secretly filmed and swapped videos of female officers and midshipmen undressing and showering while serving on the Ohio-class USS Wyoming.

Investigators think the illicit filming on the 20-year-old ballistic missile submarine took place over the course of almost a year, in what became a sophisticated and repeated, deliberate operation.

Male sailors acted as sentries and lookouts while other colleagues rushed to covertly film the women everytime they visited the boat's shower changing room.

It's understood the perpetrators used small holes in the internal infrastructure of the submarine to record videos onto mobile phones and tablets.

The devices themselves however were also banned on the nuclear-powered submarine due to concerns over security breaches.

The ring got away with their crimes for 10 months, largely because a number of colleagues felt pressured not to reveal what was happening.

Their actions only came to light in 2014 when a sailor serving on board a different submarine learnt about the video sharing and alerted his command.

Of the 12 sailors who filmed, distributed, watched or knew about the videos - eight were court-martialed with one acquitted, three faced non-judicial punishment and one was released without charge.

The scandal, revealed in a Freedom of Information Act obtained by the US publication Navy Times, has rocked the submarine community.

Lt. Jennifer Carroll, one of the first women in the US Navy to earn her dolphins and who served on the USS Maine, says: "The thing with the Wyoming is, to me, a shocking event. It was completely 180-degrees out from what my experience was."

 "In my experience relationships with members of my crew were founded on trust and mutual respect. This event contradicted what I thought was a universal sense of camaraderie among submariners."