Ashley Madison, an online dating website that specifically targets people looking to have an affair, has been hacked by a group that calls itself Impact Team. A cache of data has been released by the Impact Team, including user profiles, company financial records, and “other proprietary information.” The company’s CEO, Noel Bilderman, confirmed with KrebsOnSecurity that they had been hacked, but did not speak about the extent of the breach.
I’m really surprised by the amount of comments online stating that this is not a problem, because they’re just “cheaters” anyway, so they don’t deserve privacy, right?
Cheating on your “loved” one is despicable, low, and disgusting (and an immediate, unequivocal relationship/friendship termination in my book), but one, it’s not illegal, and two, even if it were, mob justice is not the way to go. This hack and possible release of personal information is just as bad as any other hack.
No extortion for cash, no destruction of property, no victimization on the basis of ethnicity/gender/profession/religion, nobody’s videogames are getting taken away. I can think of a lot of ways this could be worse.
I’m sure there are pitiable souls unjustly suffering because of this, but until their stories make it to the op ed I’m not going to feel guilty for laughing at this debacle.
These people are adults, consenting. What’s the point of ‘moralizing’ it any further ? What do you know of their personal situation ? Some are perhaps not yet legally divorced but are separated. Blame divorce first then. Blame unhappy couples. Blame human nature. Go go go SJW !
Look at all those profiles. That many people want to cheat, eh? Perhaps this is a commentary on the institution of marriage and what people really think of it.
That being said, this is still nasty. I have no sympathy, and yet I understand the precedent being set by saying these people don’t deserve privacy. They do. Being an asshole isn’t illegal.
Now, I’m not against open relationships, multiple relationships, nor even polygamy so long as all is consensual for all parties. How others run their lives is not for me to decide. However, these aren’t cheating. To me, cheaters are liars. Even liars, however, should have their rights.
I think it’s more of a commentary on the amount of integrity (or lack thereof) that these people have. I myself do not condone the hacks… I mean, there could be swingers on there or people in open relationships. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for the ones who were cheating, or attempting to do so.
Lots of people use AM as a hookup site. The other site that was compromised is a sugar baby site, so a lot of the men there will be single also.
If the issue is honesty, why focus only on breech of a marriage contract? There’s a lot more romantic manipulation and double-crossing where that came from :/
Marriage contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on thanks to no-fault divorce and the ability of judges to throw out prenups.
It sure lacks appeal for the breadwinner.
I’m also irked that in my state (Minnesota), fathers can be thrown in prison for not making as much as a judge *thinks* they should be able to, but mothers can psychologically neglect or outright maul their kids and then palm them off onto the special-ed and mental health systems with no legal consequences.
I’m fortunate enough to have no kids, but I believe that they will also be hit up for the quack medical bills and held responsible for more than 18 years if the kid becomes a vulnerable adult.
(For the record, I have no problem with that if the kid has a real inherited problem or untreatable injury, but I’ve seen a lot of bogus claims by deadbeat or abusive mothers.)
Edited 2015-07-21 03:56 UTC
TheNorseWind,
This actually happened to someone we know here in NY too. Father didn’t have enough money to pay an unreasonable amount as ordered by the judge (my understanding was that it was more than his salary), so the judge imprisoned him for a whole year. No laws were broken, what kind of psychopathic judge thinks ruining a man would help things along?
It took us hundreds of years to finally outlaw the concept of owning other people’s freedom and all of their possessions. It’s insane that today you can still lock people up for just having a debt, and even worse, a random debt set by the so called justice system.
If you want to encourage people to start doing crime then this is the way. They’ve got nothing to lose.
Just going to jump in here as someone who actually works in a family court in NY. Weird, right? Child support calculations are set at 17% (I think that’s the magic number, at least I’m pretty sure) of gross pay. If you have a second kid where someone claims child support, they are entitled to 17% of the remaining gross, and on and on. Thems the rules with very little room for creativity on the judges/magistrates part. I fail to see how your friend could have been locked up for not making enough. More likely, he was delinquent on payments owed and that’s a whole different situation. That can get you locked up. But as far as orders of support go, that’s standardized stuff.
MechaShiva,
You might have heard about him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1674wvpvFU#t=152
FIT TV – Dr.Carlos Rivera. incarcerated for not keeping up with $13,000 per month payments to his ex
We knew him professionally. Other sources put the payments at $15,400.00/month. A quote from this video puts it at 15k/mo too despite the title saying 13k. The lower floor of his house was a converted business office, he lost all of that to his ex-wife. He then moved out to a small office building to continue the practice, but he lost that too and was ultimately imprisoned by the judge for failure to pay.
The judgement was unreasonable – a man cannot produce what’s not there. Furthermore the consequences of it were detrimental. It is a social injustice to all the patients he was serving and even more importantly to his own family whom he can no longer support. This is one case that family courts need to be ashamed of.
Edited 2015-07-22 00:33 UTC
I’ll admit to not watching the full video but the few minutes I did watch don’t change a thing about what I wrote. And I watched from the beginning where that 13K a month thing was something he signed an agreement to – not some arbitrary number a judge imposed upon him. I’ve listened in on enough of these types of proceedings to know 1/ never accept any one side of a story at face value and 2/ the rules are very clearly articulated to every litigant and there are many, many hearings that take place before the judges gives up and locks somebody up. I’ve never heard of it done for anything less than a total disregard for court orders. In spite of what some people think, there are well defined processes and protocols in place and the courts get it right much more often than not.
Regardless, this is pretty far off topic and I seriously doubt people are genuinely interested in the procedural goings on of a family court. Just know that if something sounds sensationally wrong, it usually stems from a sensationally wrong understanding of the facts.
MechaShiva,
You know what, if I didn’t know the guy and just heard about this on the news, I would have written it off too.
Edited 2015-07-22 16:37 UTC
Does that make it any less of a debtors’ prison? I don’t often see people thrown in prison for breech-of-contract. Fraud? Sure. But usually not for falling behind on payments.
It’s also one that singles out fathers.
Safe to say those kinds of problems are relatively rare compared to the more common meme of deadbeat dads. They aren’t widely know because they aren’t that widespread of an issue. I have a number of family members and friends in the Family law/ DCFS world. The crazy stuff is about what you would expect. Fathers with deadbeat moms do exist, and they do win judgments against the mothers, but that’s much much more rare than the inverse.
You probably have a biased sample. Most of the men that I’ve known who are in abusive marriages try really hard to avoid divorce, since it’s even worse.
It’s hard to prove psychological abuse of their kids. I had a really manipulative, toxic mother, and it took years to get over that, but my dad would have lost if he’d gone to court. She would have gotten primary custody, which would have given her more time to kick us around without any witnesses, and he would have been forced to pay for it all.
I’m pretty resilient, but I know a lot of people who have psychiatric problems because of their narcissistic, abusive or spacey mothers. I’m not saying that abusive dads don’t or couldn’t do the same damage, but we’re pretty zealous in cracking down on them. Time for some gender equality.
Edited 2015-07-21 19:24 UTC
Are you sure, I mean really sure I’m the one with the biased sample??
Don’t be an ass. Everyone has a bias, and a biased sample when talking about issues like this unless you deliberately try to avoid said bias. Judging from what I see here, I’d wager that you both have a bias regarding this.
Not trying to be an ass, but people working in the field with maybe 100 years of combined experience vs 1 personal experience? I just think its odd that he thinks my experiences are more biased than his one.
Asymmetry: You claimed certainty (“Safe to say…”) and backed it up with a presumably-large body of data (“family members and friends in the Family law/ DCFS world”); I doubted the strength of that (“You probably have a biased sample”), offered a mechanism (“[Fathers] in abusive marriages try really hard to avoid divorce”) and offered anecdotes to support its plausibility.
It’s not just my experience, either. I volunteer with a couple of support organizations, and I used to work as a Democratic organizer, putting me in daily contact with many vocal feminists who would have vented about it if they knew of even a single man getting off scot-free in a divorce proceeding. (They did vent about men avoiding payment, but that usually involved going on the run or being too poor to pay up. Hardly the same as the the counter-examples I’ve seen.)
Edited 2015-07-21 21:27 UTC
Its clear you had a bad, bad experience. I hope you find peace.
People today in general don’t know the difference between rights and privilage. Rights are in it’s very definition unconditional. You either have it or you don’t. So if you have the right to privacy, it doesn’t matter if you are a nazi, a child molester or a a cheater. It’s still your right regardless of what moral standard the rest of society follows.
What people usually means by “rights” is privilage. Unlike rights, privilages are conditional. It doesn’t apply to everyone equally. “You have the rights to privacy, unless you are a cheating bastard”. And equally often: “You don’t have the right to A because you don’t pass _my_ moral standard”. But this usually only applies to right A. When the same person fails to ablige to moral standpoint B, they are quick to dismiss it or demand peoples forgiveness. “I don’t see why my action is bad, so don’t judge me the same way I judge you.” Thus it becomes a negative spiral where subjective opinions and hurt feelings rule supreme.
If you really believe in basic rights, like the rights to privacy, it must by it’s very definition also apply to people you don’t like. If you think hacking and exposure of your private matters are wrong, then you must also think it’s wrong when it happens to cheaters. You don’t have to like these people or condone what they do. Because that is a complete different matter.
On one side of a line we have this, where some people’s lies over their personal lives are being exposed, and on the other hand we have the kind of lies that wikileaks has exposed. I’m not sure its always a really bold dividing line. Where does transparency end and privacy begin?
It’s a dating site. That doesn’t necessarily imply that the people cheat on their partners. Most of them are probably searching for a partner, some just for a one night stand or whatever and yes, a few certainly are cheating on their partners. These things are happening ever since mankind is around.
It is specifically marketed for people who are already in a relationship and goes with the slogan “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Ah, ok. Didn’t know that.
It’s not illegal, except in very oppressive countries.
Humans are not a monogamous species. It has been imposed on us primarily by religions. For most of human history marriage did not exist as we know it now. The woman was the property of the husband.
Love had nothing to do with it, love was not even a concern! Having “affairs” was expected and in many cases encouraged by the spouse because they did not love each other, having sex with someone you really did not care for was unpleasant! Only in the past couple hundred years or so has the idea of monogamy been part of it. This is one reason why such a high percentage of both men and woman “cheat”. Monogamy is an evolutionary dead end.
B. Franklin had many many mistresses and his wife was just fine with it. She was not unusual for her times.
Yeas ago there was a study to see if the mother or father was dominant in blood type inheritance… They had to stop the study because 20% of the children they tested did not match either of the parents b-type. This does not catch bio-fathers that had the same b-type as one of the “parents” so the real number was much higher.
Read some history of human society!
No one is forced to be monogamous. Lots of people, including militantly anti-religious people, demand monogamy.
If you don’t want to be monogamous, you don’t have to lie and cheat about it. You can avoid people who demand monogamy.
It’s not about wants… It’s about human nature and the _need_ to reproduce! The same evolutionary drive that gets perverted in priests and manifests itself by molesting children pushes the on rest of us non-celibate ones… Some can hold out (or hold it in… as it were) and some do not or choose not to… It’s human nature put in place by millions of years of evolution.
The social pressure to be monogamous is a great force! (and legally back up) Especially if you want to reproduce.
Edited 2015-07-21 20:16 UTC
So you are saying it is OK to lie and cheat because you have an evolutionary imperative? How about find a woman who wants to have lots of your babies?
Oh, it is just the sex and not the babies you want? Then don’t get into a monogamous relationship, or any relationship where it is expected of you.
Otherwise you just want to have your cake and eat it too.
Forced social standards like the ideology that drives monogamy essentially causes infidelity. Men’ss brains are hardwired to look and seek out genetic variety, women’s brains are wired to seek out best genetic fitness and resource provisioning. Sometimes one mate cannot provision resources but it not as genetically fit as a different mate, thus the female cuckolds the males into raising bastard children.
Which brings us to the point of marriage as a contract, it is about lineage and property transmission from the generational perspective. Men do not wish to raise the bastard children of other men and given them a inheritance. they are not his genetic descendants thus their are not preferred for the privilege.
the jealousy gene likely occurs because up until fairly recently, humans have been a largely sperm competitive species.
That depends where you live, obviously.
Well, we also lived in caves and ate raw meat at some point in time. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evolve away from that.
“it’s not illegal”
It depends who you are. If you are a member of the U.S. military, as an example, adultery is very much illegal.
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