Op-Ed: Ashley Madison and the End of Privacy

CYBERSEXSPACE—The internet's been with us for more than 25 years, so one would think there are a few truisms that everyone would know by now. 1) Things posted on the internet are FOREVER!!! They don't go away just because some government decrees that an ISP must deactivate its link to a particular article or person, or because someone sends a DMCA takedown notice, or even because a website has shut down or its creator has died. FOREVER, people! Get with the program! 2) There wouldn't be literally millions of websites devoted to sex if sex weren't one of the primary interests of humanity—and that's every kind of sex: sex with opposite sex partners (sometimes plural), sex with same-sex partners (ditto), sex with non-humans, how to practice sex as a good Christian/Jew/Muslim/Satanist/Scientologist/whatever... and how to have sex with any partner(s) and not get caught at it, which heretofore has been (and indeed continues to be) AshleyMadison.com's stock-in-trade. Oh; and perhaps one more thing: 3) There is absolutely NOTHING preventing some jackass from taking your "good name" and posting it in some manner to ANY of the aforementioned sexually oriented websites or in fact ANY website at all, in what has come to be charitably referred to as a "spoof." Those who haven't been living under a rock for the past few weeks are likely already aware of the basics of this story. AshleyMadison.com, the website whose (trademarked) motto is "Life is short. Have an affair," has been hacked by a group calling itself Impact Team, which previously had demanded that AshleyMadison's parent company, Avid Life Media (ALM), take down two of its sites, AshleyMadison.com and EstablishedMen.com, in part because both sites claimed that, for about 20 bucks, it would perform a "full delete" on the name and personal information of anyone who had previously signed up for either site—except that even though "full delete" netted ALM about $1.7 million, it didn't actually delete anything, and that's what apparently impelled Impact Team to go public with its data. "We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members," an Impact Team press release stated. "Now everyone gets to see their data. Find someone you know in here? Keep in mind the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles. See ashley madison fake profile lawsuit; 90-95% of actual users are male. Chances are your man signed up on the world's biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters. Find yourself in here? It was ALM that failed you and lied to you. Prosecute them and claim damages. Then move on with your life. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you’ll get over it." About the "getting over it" part: Maybe not. Reports have just surfaced of at least two of AshleyMadison's 37 million "users"—minus the spoofed names, of course—have committed suicide, though police have not confirmed any connection between the deaths and the fact that the men's names appeared in the website's records. Worse, an anonymous gay man living in Saudi Arabia recented posted an article on Reddit about how he used the site to find male companionship—"males seeking males" and "females seeking females" are two of the site's choices—and that with the release of the site's client list, he fears for his life should his gay hookups be noticed by his own government. "Most of you are Westerners in countries that are relatively liberal on LGBT issues," the Reddit user noted. "For those of you who are older—try to think back to a time 10 or 20 years again when homosexuality was intensely stigmatized. Multiply that horrible feeling of stigma by a million, and add the threat of beheading/stoning. That's why I used AM [Ashley Madison] to have discreet encounters..." That quote reminded us of Walter Jenkins, the top-level aide to President Lyndon Johnson, who was forced to resign his post in October of 1964, just before the presidential election, after D.C. cops discovered Jenkins and another man in the restroom of a YMCA engaging in "disorderly conduct," the term used in those days when well-connected perps had been caught having gay sex. But getting back to Middle Eastern countries with insane sex laws, other sources have reported that in Saudi Arabia, where adultery is a capital crime, more than 1,200 Ashley Madison users have email domains registered in that country, while in Qatar, where gay relationships are illegal and punishable by five years in the slammer, and adultery can get you 100 lashes—and if the woman you've hooked up with is Muslim, she can be executed—53 of its citizens have Ashley Madison accounts. Over in Turkey, where adulterers are barred from serving in the military, 1,450 user accounts have been discovered. Meanwhile, back in the good ol' U.S. of A, diligent investigators who plumbed the "dark web," where Impact Team's data was originally released, came up with a fascinating statistic: Roughly 10,000 e-dresses with .gov suffixes—either government employees or contractors; the Associated Press found "at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a U.S. counterterrorism response team"—and another 5,000 with military (.mil) e-dresses had signed up with the site, though bear in mind that the more famous the name, the greater the likelihood that someone has spoofed it. On the other hand, it would be helpful to remember two things: 1) depending on circumstances, adultery can be a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and 2) history has shown that a fair number of political leaders have proven unable to "keep it in their pants." (We found this one particularly amusing.) Other apparent users of the site? According to Marketwatch, which was interested in banking domains, "175 from Wells Fargo, 76 from Bank of America, 73 from Deutsche Bank, 51 from Citigroup, 45 from Goldman Sachs, 28 from PNC Bank, 15 at U.S. Bancorp, 14 at Bank of New York Mellon, nine at J.P. Morgan Chase and four at Capital One." Far more interesting than even government attorneys patronizing the site, of course, are the non-governmental religious conservatives who also do, the current most high-profile of which is Josh "19 Kids and Counting" Duggar, the former incest perpetrator who recently resigned his position as a lobbyist with the incredibly religiously conservative Family Research Council. "I have been the biggest hypocrite ever," Duggar said in a statement on August 20. "While espousing faith and family values, I have been unfaithful to my wife. I am so ashamed of the double life that I have been living and am grieved for the hurt, pain and disgrace my sin has caused my wife and family, and most of all Jesus and all those who profess faith in Him. ... The last few years, while publicly stating I was fighting against immorality in our country I was hiding my own personal failures." Speaking of "personal failures," plenty of Duggar's religiously conservative compatriots had advice for him, most notably whackjob attorney Matt Barber. "Hypocrisy is sin," Barber wrote in his column for Whirled Nut Daily World Net Daily. "It is hypocrisy, for instance, to run around cheating on your wife, and to then self-righteously rebuke others for the sin of adultery or some other sexual depravity. ... Some 32 million paying customers of the vile adultery website Ashley Madison, which makes a fortune off the backs of families it helps to destroy, have just learned this truth the hard way. ... Their sin found them out. And 'the wages of sin is death' (see Romans 6:23). That includes death of marriages and families." Similar views were expressed by Dr. Michael Brown, another conservative religious columnist, who boiled down the situation into five easy pieces: "1) Sooner or later, your sin will find you out (Numbers 32:23)"; "2) Nothing is hidden from God; "3) It pays to live clean"; "4) Be quick to repent"; and of course, "5) God’s Word is eternally relevant," adding in conclusion, "His abundant mercy is waiting for you, and the godly sorrow you experience today will lead to freedom and joy tomorrow." But not everyone feels that "Jesus is the answer," most notably Canadian widower Eliot Shore, who joined AshleyMadison.com shortly after his wife of 30 years died of breast cancer last year. "I was just looking for a little bit of company," Shore told The Daily Mail (UK). "But that was the extent of it. I sent a few emails. I never met a soul though." But his information was nonetheless contained in the data revealed by Impact Team. "Nigel Shepherd, a partner at family law firm Mills and Reeve headquartered in London, has revealed that a married British woman has asked him for legal advice after her husband was outed on Wednesday," The Daily Mail story continued. "The divorce proceedings, if they go through, will be the first linked to the site." Shore is now the lead plaintiff in a $578 million class action lawsuit being filed against ALM in Canada, and the attorneys are looking for an additional $7.65 million in punitive damages. Shore's attorneys, Charney Lawyers and Sutts, Strosberg LLP, expect to press their case on behalf of 37 million site users, and if successful, would get a return of about $15 for each—but at least one adult-industry-related attorney thinks they've got a pretty good case. "Unlike prior breaches, the hackers are not merely keeping the information to themselves, but they are releasing information that identifies people, including public figures and federal employees," noted attorney Jay Marshall Wolman on the Legal Satyricon blog. "Divorces will occur because of the data dump. This is not a case of 'maybe someone will open a credit card in my name'; it is a case of 'I have to pay alimony and child support for the foreseeable future'. Data breach victims now have tangible harm." Wolman focused on the "Security" promise found on the Ashley Madison site, which reads, "We treat data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorized access. To safeguard the confidentiality and security of your PII, we use industry standard practices and technologies including but not limited to 'firewalls', encrypted transmission via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) and strong data encryption of sensitive personal and/or financial information when it is stored to disk." Apparently, much of that simply wasn't true, and the release of liability in the site's "Terms and Conditions" section may not cover the allegations in the Shore lawsuit. "I expect significant litigation over the enforceability of these terms," Wolman concluded. He's not the only one: "We're all saying, 'It's going to be Christmas in September'," said L.A. attorney Steve Mindel. "Pretty soon all of this stuff is going to surface and there's going to be a lot of filings for divorce directly as a result of this. It’s going to be like black Friday for the law firms." The Daily Mail article contains two sidebars of husbands' and wives' reactions to the Ashley Madison revelations, one of the more humorous of which was, "So my husband cheated using Ashley Madison this Spring, but created an email account to use with it that didn't include his name. When D-day happened, I set up an account to check up on him. So, guess who's email address showed up in the data leak (mine) and guess who didn't? (cheating husband)." Indeed; the whole Ashley Madison situation has created so much press that even Hustler mogul Larry Flynt had a bit of advice for those whose e-dresses may appear in the data: "Don't do or say anything you wouldn't want to read about on the front page of the New York Times," he cautioned. An article from Reuters News Service raised another possible outcome of the data dump: blackmail. "Reports that blackmailers armed with the data dump are contacting Ashley Madison members for extortion will reinforce concerns," wrote Josephine Mason. "For the online adult entertainment segment, which accounts for more than 10 percent of Internet traffic, the trend is particularly worrisome," quoting BurningAngel founder Joanna Angel that, "I don't know anyone that's prepared for something like this. ... It could end up affecting a company like mine. It will make people more paranoid." After all, are the subscriber lists of adult websites any less hackable than Ashley Madison's? Flynt, on the other hand, has learned Lesson #1 of the internet: "Privacy no longer exists," he said, "and it hasn't for some time."