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I think the line is on whether it's a personal/private matter and when it's not.

The NSA is a government agency, so what it does is in the public interest. A guy planning to bomb something is also by definition affecting the public so exposing that is also in the public interest.

This hack, the fappening and similar are completely personal and private so they are of no concern to anyone but the people involved in it.

2 comments

Infidelity is not a private matter however: the person being cheated on has the right to know. For a million cheaters, there's a million their SOs, often living miserable lives but denied an informed choice about their future and kept at non-negligible health risk.

It stops being a private matter when it trespasses into other people's life.

It is by definition a private matter - we have no idea what the context behind these peoples actions are. They could have an agreement with their spouse to let them discreetly cheat. Cheating could be a part of their particular marital or relationship kinks. They could be in emotionally abusive relationships and looking for comfort.

Or they could be cheaters who are lying to their SOs.

Regardless, we the general public have no horse in this race. We haven't been asked by the person's SO to find this out, the people in question are not public figures, and we have no knowledge of the specifics of their situation.

Well that's the thing, the SOs now can find out. Yeah as a cheater one would get the uncomfortable feeling from everyone else possibly knowing that too, alas. Comes with the territory.

Or an SO who has an agreement with their spouse to let them quietly cheat has to now deal with strangers and friends alike "knowing" that the spouse sleeps around.

Or person A is in a sexless but loving marriage with person B. They have kids, and don't want to get divorced because they love each other, but person B is just done with sex. Is it worse for person A to cheat on person B than it is for the two to get divorced, upending the family structure and ruining them financially?

We could debate that endlessly, but the fact remains is its none of our business what's going on with the Ashley Madison people, nor is it our place to decide what's best for the partners of Ashley Madison customers.

Would you say it "comes with the territory" when someone's drug habit is leaked on the Internet? Or their private emails?

Look, I can make a bunch of similar sad puppy stories for the other side of coin as well. People holding it "for the kids" but who wouldn't really stay in case of infidelity. Unhappy people with orthodox religious beliefs who would alas divorce in case of adultery. People desperately trying to fix the relationship and improve themselves not realizing their partner is invested elsewhere and all their effort is wasted.

I sympathize with couples who have a consensual kink however and are now caught in the middle of it. Though I doubt it's anywhere near a major portion of the userbase, they are very unfortunate collateral here. Kind of U.S. govt informers who were revealed by Assange's cablegate (which majority here is positive about), but sans grave threat to their life.

I don't have sympathy for people who make their SOs an unconsenting part of three-way sexual relationship, and yes they are never an excuse short. All people are positive about their self image, and rationalizations of abhorrent actions are a natural consequence.

> I don't have sympathy for people who make their SOs an unconsenting part of three-way sexual relationship

Do you have sympathy for people whose three-way sexual relationships are unconsentingly made public?

Yes, and you'd see my statement to that effect if you haven't skipped most of my response.

The point is this leak exposes the "good" cheaters, the "bad" cheaters, and the... gray? cheaters alike. It also probably exposes a ton of people who never cheated, but in some dark moment went on the site to gawk or fantasize. Given there are only 9 million credit card transactions to 35 million emails, it makes me think they are probably the majority.

In any case, this leak makes no distinction between people who are doing wrong and people who aren't, and it hurts all of them. Since when was it ok to smear a million people who weren't doing anything wrong, just to blow up the lives of other people who were?

I can see the person cheated on having a right to know. Everybody and his dog? If I know that my neighbor Joe is running around on his wife Jane, I might be justified in telling Jane; stapling fliers announcing to the telephone poles up and down the street seems a different matter.

There is also, as the top-level parent comment suggests, the point that adultery is more or less celebrated in much of popular culture. The mixture of hypocrisy and schadenfreude is obnoxious.

> If I know that my neighbor Joe is running around on his wife Jane, I might be justified in telling Jane

The case that isn't being made is that you should be able to tell Jane about Joe in a private way. That's called discretion. And besides being the better part of valor, it is part of being a wise person.

The people who are OK with this leak should ask themselves if someone should be able to tell a wife about her cheating husband without worrying about hacking and leaks. Or even government dragnets (maybe it's a drug problem, which could be illegal).

If we make people think twice about talking to each other, there are many cases where we make them think twice about helping each other.

They don't have a right to know. Not in the sense that you and I have a right to privacy, free expression, choice of religion, and so on. Yes, they deserve to know, and it would be a nice thing indeed for them to find out. But they don't have a right.

Perhaps they have a right to know, but that doesn't mean that you, I, or any other random bystander has a right to know.

Agree, though one could argue that what AM is doing is an explicit attempt to damage the basic building block of society, i.e. family. So this becomes somewhat a matter of public interest then.

one could argue that what AM is doing is an explicit attempt to damage the basic building block of society

Sure, but one could also argue the same about per-marital sex, divorce and homosexuals.

Which conservative Christians do.

mm so the FBI just have to look at the ex employees backgrounds up bringing - should be easy to do some profiling "not just for brown skinned people any more"

Marriages are not just moral issues, they're also contracts between people themselves and between the couples and the government. They come with privileges and tax breaks and social status, and all of it is built upon assumption that marriages are mostly permanent. AM is explicitly attempting to attack that.

Who are you to judge how people live and should their lifes? How dull. There are so many different family structures — incl. open relationships.

A family's structure and agreements is not public, nor should they be. Unless said family choose to disclose that fact by their own volition.

>Who are you to judge how people live and should their lifes?

S/he is just like all the other people who engage in electing law makers that create laws that control how we live. Part of being in a democracy like government is that everyone gets a little say in how we all live our lives with a majority rule. Things like constitutions might mean a super majority is needed for some things instead of a simple majority, but the right to have a say is still there.

I'm not judging. People may live however they want. Institution of marriage is one of the choices, that is established in the society and carries with it some particular set of features. In particular, joining in marriage is somewhat public, even if it's much less public than it used to be. Also marriage comes with explicit (even if not legally binding) expectation you don't cheat. If you don't like those aspects, don't marry; no one is telling you have to, open relationships are fine too.

Maybe you have that expectation about marriage, but that doesn't mean your expectations are shared by every married couple.

You're forcing your point-of-view upon others.

I'm not forcing my POV on anyone, I'm just stating what is the generally accepted POV in the western society. You may share it or not, but you ignore it at your own peril.

> Who are you to judge how people live and should their lifes?

Churches have no ability to enforce promises with violence or confiscation. And they shouldn't. So it's important for governments to establish some sort of lowest common denominator and hold people legally accountable.

I understand the impulse to be non-judgmental, but when both laws and the rest of society get out of the business of enforcing marriage contracts, you actually take choices away from people that want a stronger marriage contract. They can no longer enter an enforceable contract that requires monogamy.

We're not adding more choice for everyone that way. We're just choosing (as a society) a different lifestyle.

you actually take choices away from people that want a stronger marriage contract.

Isn't that what prenups are for? (modulo the fact that it is sometimes difficult to enforce prenups).

The difficulty in enforcing prenups is partly the problem here, yes.

Let's say you like the marriage rules pre-1970 (no no-fault divorce). You can't write up a prenup that resembles that and have it be enforced by the government (reject applications for divorce and applications to marry someone else).

More options and freedom weren't added when each state adopted no-fault divorce. One option was taken away (pre-1970 marriage contracts) and another was picked (no-fault divorce).

Someone might not like with pre-1970 marriage contracts, but who are they to judge someone else's culture and preferences?

I think this is not such a big issue, if it was divorce would be illegal.

If anything I would argue the problem lies then on how the estate sees marriage, not the other way around. The agreement I have with my wife is between us, no one needs to judge what we do with our private lives.

I think this is a thing that is actually changing in the recent decades. It used to be that marriages were more about connecting families, securing deals and even state issues (and so it still is in some parts of the world). Nowadays in Western society, marriages tend to be more about two people and their decision. But we're not 100% in the latter model yet, there's lot of social and legal baggage around the older ways. Divorces are not illegal, but they're still socially stigmatized.

The point is, we have to deal with how things are actually now, and not only with how they may/should be.

Haha, well that's stretching the argument a bit, but for the sake of conversation I would then ask for proof that family is indeed the "basic building block of society" and that what MA is doing is actually damaging it to an extent that it can be considered a public safety issue.

Not proof, but "the family" is recognised as really important in international law.

They don't define a family as one male adult, one female adult, and some children by birth. So, personally, I use a broad definition of family that includes homosexuals and fostering and polyamory, while rejecting stuff like forced marriage or child marriage.

> I would then ask for proof that family is indeed the "basic building block of society"

I think the burden of proof goes the other way, considering marriage laws (including those that punish infidelity) have been part of common law for hundreds of years.

The burden of proof is upon the one who makes the claim, so no it isn't the other way around.

Have you seen a society of random people who don't have long-term relationships? A country which laws don't treat family as a basic concept, and third of which is not built around it?

That family is a fundamental unit in human societies is a pretty much self-evident thing at this point. The burden of proof lies squarely on those who disagree with observable reality.

Malinowski [0] describes a highly functional such society. Instead of paternity and monogamy, they had a similarly complex but different set of taboos. Reading it will help you realize what a cultural bubble we all live in, and that there are completely different configurations of society that also work.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Savages-Argonauts-Western-Pacif...

Never heard of it before, thanks!

Families exist regardless of marriage, marriage != family, so to claim that attacking marriage tears at the foundations of society and then to move the goal post and say they're attacking families, your must first demonstrate what you're saying is true. Marriages don't make families, loved ones do.

> Agree, though one could argue that what AM is doing is an explicit attempt to damage the basic building block of society, i.e. family

Eh. So you think the people exposing husbands and wives cheating on each other are the ones breaking families, not the ones actually cheating?

Don't shoot the messenger, comes to mind (okay, maybe imprison the messenger if he obtained the data in an illegal way, but I don't think he should be imprisoned or worse for "breaking families", when he wasn't the one committing the act that ends up breaking the family apart).

Isn't that kind of how private eyes work, too? Should they be punished for "breaking families"?

I'm not saying that people exposing cheating spouses are breaking families. I'm saying that AM was by explicitly encouraging that. It's not just a random dating website, it's the website targeting married people and running campaigns saying cheating is OK.

I am definitely not arguing for shooting the messenger (I apologize if my comment was not clear enough about that) - what I want to say is that I may agree the boundary between "ok hack" and "not ok hack" may lie on the public concerns/private concerns line, but IMO one could argue that Ashley Madison lies on the "public interest" side.

Actually, it's my fault, I thought you were referring to the people who dumped the data.