"Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife but couldn't keep her," goes the old nursery rhyme. Often, the line is now said as "cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater..." Pumpkin pies are back in the stores, just in time for fall and Thanksgiving, and cheating and having a spouse but not being able to keep him or her is in the news.
Most people think the Ashley Madison affair has nothing to do with them but the whole ugly business should worry everyone and not just those who conduct business online through emails, banking, credit cards and cash transfers. The Toronto-based Ashley Madison dating site specialized in infidelity. Its corporate tagline was "life is short - have an affair."
It claimed as many as 30 million customers, people in relationships trying to arrange secret hookups on the side.
A group of hackers, dubbing themselves the Impact Team, stole the company's client list, along with contact and financial information attached to each client. The data was dumped onto the "dark web," the back alleys of the Internet, before making its way into several online searchable databases on the mainstream web. Using those databases, the Canadian Press was able to link email accounts in the House of Commons and the Department of National Defence to Ashley Madison.
It would be too easy to claim this as just desserts for adulterous idiots, betraying their spouses and families for some hankypanky. While that sentiment may be true, it obscures two important points that should cause everyone to be worried.
First, a group of online vigilantes have decided that the immorality of Ashley Madison as a business justifies the immorality and illegality of stealing their records and posting that confidential information online. The Impact Team believes it can operate from the shadows to break the law but it's not willing to let law-abiding citizens, whose only crime is violating their marital vows, operate in the same murky territory. This means-justify-the-ends morality is dangerous because it doesn't care of the human cost, just the principle of the matter.
There is no place for government in the bedrooms of the nation, Pierre Trudeau once said, and there is no place for online do-gooder hacktivists, either. Marriages are complicated relationships between two (or more) individuals and how those relationships are managed is no business of anyone except for the parties involved. More than a few marriages are "open," allowing both partners to explore other aspects of themselves and their sexuality with other consenting adults. In other marriages, one partner simply turns a blind eye, for whatever reasons, to the amorous side activities of the other, or is fully aware and even grants consent to such activity. Regardless of the intentions or circumstances of Ashley Madison's customers, they are personal and private. They should be free to conduct their personal and private business, both with Ashley Madison as a facilitator, and with the partners they meet through the site, without condescending hackers acting as Big Brother.
Besides the assault on the privacy of millions of people, the Ashley Madison attack poses serious concerns to online security. Ashley Madison representatives have rightly called the attack and release of their corporate data as cyber terrorism. While that may seem like an over-the-top reaction, it's appropriate for the circumstances. The global economy rests on a bedrock of business (and personal) transactions happening in cyberspace. The Ashley Madison infiltration is a small but significant threat to the security of that model. Companies, governments and citizens should all be upset and concerned. If it's Ashley Madison today, then maybe tomorrow it's the Canada Revenue Agency, the RCMP, Facebook, Google or Amazon.
Even individuals who do little or no business activity online and have no social presence on the Internet are not protected. Just because these folks don't own computers or connect to the online world, their banks, their governments, their libraries, their schools and their friends do. Those rare folks who have never owned or operated a computer or a smartphone are as at risk of having sensitive personal and business information leaked online as anybody else.
There is nothing harmless about this attack. For anyone who thinks Ashley Madison's customers are this week's laughing stock and getting the public shaming they deserve, the next laugh could be on you.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
