391–400 of 527 posts
It's too bad a cost benefit analysis is so tricky here. Exposing cheaters could prevent further cheating, but it could also cause serious identify theft. In the end, I think the line is too blurry to seriously justify the breach.
The list of .gov and State govt email accounts is public transparency. Someone should extract those and turn them over to Muckrock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: why do cheaters "deserve to be outed?". I realize you'd be enraged if someone cheated on you. So would I. But what does it matter to you what other people do with their private lives? Do you think people struggling with alcoholism also deserve to be outed and publicly humiliated?
No one is wronged in the case of alcoholism. People are wronged in the case of cheating. I don't see why cheaters should not be outed.
In any case, just because you wrong someone this doesn't automatically imply you should be publicly exposed for all to see. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; it depends on the nature of what you did. I don't think infidelity is an act that warrants public exposure and shaming. I think if the wronged partner finds out and then outs you, they are probably justified... I mean, it's about them as well as you, and I can understand their rage. But what does a perfect stranger have to do with anything in this matter?
On the bright side, the one thing this unfortunate incident will do is create an opening for many couples to reconcile, now that the truth is out. "We cannot be facile and say bygones will be bygones, because they will not be bygones and will return to haunt us. True reconciliation is never cheap, for it is based on forgiveness, which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has to be based on an a…
Heh. If I were Ashley Madison, and I wanted to create plausible deniability for people in the real dataset, you know what I'd do? I'd create and "leak" a bunch of other datasets with generated data, and data pilfered from other hacks, to muddy the waters. "Oh, my name's in there? That must be faked up data from the Playstation Network hack years ago. Of course I'd never sign up to Ashley Madison, Mr Journalist."
Except there's already a verified dump out there: 40AE8A90DE40CA3AFA763C8EDB43FC1FC47D75F1 Sorry to burst your bubble, but it just won't work.
What's amazing is the extent people go to downplay the harm and immority of infidelity. Hacking should be a crime but lying and willful harm using false pretense (cheating) is not...? Really shows how bankrupt our moral culture is.
There are many couples that have open relationships and might have used this site. They would be fine with finding their spouse in the data.
However, the same person's boss might not agree, and now they have access to this information. Someone might find themselves on a performance plan for no obvious reason.
This is a treasure trove for people who want to force their version of ethics and morality on other people.
The response to this this on Twitter would be beyond fucked- up if it weren't so completely predictable. People are posting direct links to the dump, screenshots of lists of emails, and statistics for classes of domains. The general reaction to the availability of the dump is reasonably characterized as "glee". But no matter what you think about Ashley Madison --- and I think A.M. is so comically scummy that I had tr…
To me the publication of the data is not quite so black and white because ultimately the Ashley-Madison data was going to escape into the rest of the internet. This assumes it hadn't already been published prior to the recent event and that's an assumption because Ashley-Madison is and has been in position to monetize the data in standard ways [and perhaps rather non-standard ways] from day one.
Which is a roundabout way of pointing out that Ashley-Madison is and always has been in a position to publish this data via changing its terms of service or by selling itself to a successor company and transfer the data as just another asset. The key here is that individual users don't hold license to the data, and so a successor company can do with it as they please restricted only by actual law-enforcement Uber/AirBnB style [as opposed to hiring lawyers and restricting their actions based on what's on the books].
Web-scale infidelity [even if much of it is of the weaker Jimmy Carter sort: "I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."] will inevitably be followed by web-scale exposure. Sharing a secret means giving up access-control to the information...someone else can read my diary or talk to my best friend or read it off a web-server, and the likelihood of someone doing so correlates directly to their interest in doing so.
Which brings me back to the ethics. There's no clear deontological case for a universal law against publishing data, and the long-term Utilitarian optimum solution is intractable. So we're left with the normal social context of those aspiring to extra-marital affairs are worse than gossips or vice-versa.
The response to this this on Twitter would be beyond fucked- up if it weren't so completely predictable. People are posting direct links to the dump, screenshots of lists of emails, and statistics for classes of domains. The general reaction to the availability of the dump is reasonably characterized as "glee". But no matter what you think about Ashley Madison --- and I think A.M. is so comically scummy that I had tr…
Talk about a flawed analogy!
I would argue that it's totally ethical to hack/steal/gawk at the data from a "Terrorists R Us" website that publicly advertised itself as a social network for terrorists, and took money from terrorists and terrorist wannabes to help them connect with other terrorists and swap bomb-making tips.
In fact, that kind of targeted attack would be the exact opposite of "dragnet" surveillance. If we could steal and dump all the data from ISIS's central database, we should absolutely do that!
Edit: And before anyone jumps in here with "terrorism isn't the same as cheating on your spouse"--of course it's not--which makes parent's analogy even more ludicrous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're blackmailable, or financially in dire straits, you should not hold a TS clearance. Seriously. End of story. If someone with a TS clearance ever has someone attempt to blackmail them, they're obligated to tell their boss and security officer(s).
True, but giving the gov your blackmail file and giving your kid's nosy 3rd grade school teacher your blackmail file are different things. It is not difficult to imagine a person with a TS using AM, telling their boss about 'that one time' or not even worrying to tell them, having their OPM data flung to outer Bongolia, and then having this AM data bounced about. Though people should be better about updating their bl…
You misunderstand me.
If you're blackmailable, you shouldn't be holding a TS clearance. If you're granted a TS, and later become blackmailable, you really should have your clearance revoked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> really amazing [...] a bit long, but totally worth the read You have just described at least half of the dozens of posts on that blog. (There's a best-of list, still intimidatingly long, here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mmg/yvains_most_importa... and a best-of-best-of subset of that, unfortunately with only the titles and no links, here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mmg/yvains_most_importa... . I…
The point that really came home to me from that post is that --- to use the author's terminology --- an outgroup is a tribe which is in conflict with my tribe. In other words, a tribe whose activities is irrelevant to me is not my outgroup. So tolerance towards it is easy and therefore worthless. This is something I've never seen stated outright before, and it seems totally true to me.
(For the avoidance of doubt, my comment that what you said applies to lots of things on SSC wasn't intended as any sort of criticism -- I wasn't saying "boo, you failed to describe the article in a way that distinguishes it from the others" but "yay, SSC has a lot of really good articles".)