The Ashley Madison Database Was Leaked
The response to this this on Twitter would be beyond fucked- up if it weren't so completely predictable.<p>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".<p>But no matter what you think about Ashley Madison --- and I think A.M. is so comically scummy that I had trouble believing it was a real thing before the breach apparently proved otherwise --- there is nothing ethically acceptable about publicly gawking at and sharing data from the leak.<p>The people doing this aren't victimizing Avid Life Media; they're re-victimizing the real victims of what is clearly an actual crime. If it's O.K. to hack into someone else's server and mass-out people for having profiles on a dating site because you suspect most of them might be "guilty" of the crime of "marital infidelity" --- and come on, 98% of the people talking about this on Twitter barely recognize that as ethically problematic in the first place --- how do you make a case that it's unethical for dragnet traffic looking for people who want to blow up civilians with homemade bombs?<p>Pungent hypocrisy isn't even the worst of it. By amplifying the drama and pageantry of the leak, people are altering the incentives attackers have to pull stunts like this. They're helping normalize a crime that most of us think really should be illegal. The people who created this dump are very unlikely to get caught for it. So what's really going to happen is that the next dumb kid who gets captured as the one unlucky DDoS "protester" in a group of 40 on an IRC channel, that kid is going to deal with a prosecutors who is further radicalized by events like this.<p>It's just a toxic, evil, repulsive scene.<p>"Avid Life Media" is gross and creepy, and apparently totally incompetent. I'm not saying everyone has to take a vow of silence about their getting completely owned up. I'm just saying you cross a line when you start circulating people's private data.