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Most people in here (I assume) think Snowden's leaks were ethic, though illegal. The reaction to The Fappening was likewise equal parts glee and disgust. Almo

Most people in here (I assume) think Snowden's leaks were ethic, though illegal. The reaction to The Fappening was likewise equal parts glee and disgust. Almost nobody would blink an eye at revealing a doxxing dump from a terrorist sympathizer or CP forum. Ethics are a subjective thing, and lines are hard to place.

lentil_soup 11y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  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.
  - dagw 11y ago
    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.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      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.
      - lentil_soup 11y ago
        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.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        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.
      - kalms 11y ago
        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.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        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.
        kalms 11y ago
    - TsiCClawOfLight 11y ago
      Which conservative Christians do.
      - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
        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"
  - lentil_soup 11y ago
    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.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      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.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      > 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.
      - gnaritas 11y ago
        The burden of proof is upon the one who makes the claim, so no it isn't the other way around.
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        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.
        tlb 11y ago
        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-Pacific-ebook/dp/B00T8C3TYA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1440020984&sr=8-4&keywords=malinowski http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Savages-Argonauts-Western-Pacif...
  - mtgx 11y ago
    > 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"?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      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.
      - mtgx 11y ago
        Actually, it's my fault, I thought you were referring to the people who dumped the data.
- varjag 11y ago
  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.
  - cafard 11y ago
    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.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      > 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.
  - mattzito 11y ago
    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.
anentropic 11y ago
it helps if you think about it
randac 11y ago
I'd be interested to know how people feel here regarding the messy Gawker/Hulk Hogan situation also.
marchdown 11y ago
Consistency is shooting yourself in an even number of feet. How is it ethical to dox people that are being made into villains?
astrashe 11y ago
If Snowden had just taken the documents and posted them online without any filtering, it would have been extremely unethical. It would have gotten people killed. But that's not what he did -- he enlisted reputable journalists to process the documents and make decisions about what was safe to release and what wasn't. Let's say the hackers in this situation wanted to prove that Avid Life Media was acting unethically -- that they had lied about wiping old customer data. They could have worked with journalists to demonstrate that without actually leaking personal information to the world at large. Snowden's critics have claimed that he's put people in danger, but they've never been able to back that claim up with actual examples. And honestly, since they've lied about every aspect of that situation over and over again, while Snowden has always told the truth, it's hard to believe them. In this case, it seems very likely that people are going to get divorced, and that kids are going to go through the shredder over this. Maybe you have to be middle aged to know this, but you hit a stage in life when people start having these incredibly hostile divorces, with really intense hatred on both sides. And that is terrible for kids. This is going to create that situation in lots of families. It's not cool. It's punching down, it's hurting people who had nothing to do with anything in order to get at some people who seem to be genuinely slimy (Avid Life).
- aianus 11y ago
  The spouses who believed they were in a monogamous marriage deserve a divorce and the chance to be with someone honest who cares about them. I'm not sure how you see staying together blissfully unawares as the better option but then again I don't like children.
  - thekingofspain 11y ago
    > The spouses who believed they were in a monogamous marriage deserve a divorce and the chance to be with someone honest who cares about them. I agree, but that's not for us to act upon.
- rhino369 11y ago
  >he enlisted reputable journalists to process the documents and make decisions about what was safe to release and what wasn't. That's really only the bare minimum. He also exposed a bunch of obviously legal programs that just made the US look bad to allies or outted intelligence programs designed to attack future potential enemies. He did this because he believed those actions were morally wrong. I don't see how that is different from outting cheaters on a website. Both are punishing people for violations of your moral code.
moistgorilla 11y ago
> terrorist sympathizer or CP forum The difference is that these two promote physical harm while cheating doesn't

lentil_soup 11y ago

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.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
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.
- dagw 11y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    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.
    - lentil_soup 11y ago
      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.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        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.
    - kalms 11y ago
      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.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        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.
        kalms 11y ago
  - TsiCClawOfLight 11y ago
    Which conservative Christians do.
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      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"
- lentil_soup 11y ago
  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.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    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.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > 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.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      The burden of proof is upon the one who makes the claim, so no it isn't the other way around.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        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.
        tlb 11y ago
        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-Pacific-ebook/dp/B00T8C3TYA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1440020984&sr=8-4&keywords=malinowski http://www.amazon.com/Sexual-Savages-Argonauts-Western-Pacif...
- mtgx 11y ago
  > 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"?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    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.
    - mtgx 11y ago
      Actually, it's my fault, I thought you were referring to the people who dumped the data.
varjag 11y ago
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.
- cafard 11y ago
  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.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > 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.
- mattzito 11y ago
  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.

anentropic 11y ago

it helps if you think about it

randac 11y ago

I'd be interested to know how people feel here regarding the messy Gawker/Hulk Hogan situation also.

marchdown 11y ago

Consistency is shooting yourself in an even number of feet. How is it ethical to dox people that are being made into villains?

astrashe 11y ago

If Snowden had just taken the documents and posted them online without any filtering, it would have been extremely unethical. It would have gotten people killed. But that's not what he did -- he enlisted reputable journalists to process the documents and make decisions about what was safe to release and what wasn't. Let's say the hackers in this situation wanted to prove that Avid Life Media was acting unethically -- that they had lied about wiping old customer data. They could have worked with journalists to demonstrate that without actually leaking personal information to the world at large. Snowden's critics have claimed that he's put people in danger, but they've never been able to back that claim up with actual examples. And honestly, since they've lied about every aspect of that situation over and over again, while Snowden has always told the truth, it's hard to believe them. In this case, it seems very likely that people are going to get divorced, and that kids are going to go through the shredder over this. Maybe you have to be middle aged to know this, but you hit a stage in life when people start having these incredibly hostile divorces, with really intense hatred on both sides. And that is terrible for kids. This is going to create that situation in lots of families. It's not cool. It's punching down, it's hurting people who had nothing to do with anything in order to get at some people who seem to be genuinely slimy (Avid Life).

aianus 11y ago
The spouses who believed they were in a monogamous marriage deserve a divorce and the chance to be with someone honest who cares about them. I'm not sure how you see staying together blissfully unawares as the better option but then again I don't like children.
- thekingofspain 11y ago
  > The spouses who believed they were in a monogamous marriage deserve a divorce and the chance to be with someone honest who cares about them. I agree, but that's not for us to act upon.
rhino369 11y ago
>he enlisted reputable journalists to process the documents and make decisions about what was safe to release and what wasn't. That's really only the bare minimum. He also exposed a bunch of obviously legal programs that just made the US look bad to allies or outted intelligence programs designed to attack future potential enemies. He did this because he believed those actions were morally wrong. I don't see how that is different from outting cheaters on a website. Both are punishing people for violations of your moral code.

moistgorilla 11y ago

> terrorist sympathizer or CP forum The difference is that these two promote physical harm while cheating doesn't