5 Feet of Fury

Rick McGinnis: The lesson of the Ashley Madison leaks

Rick McGinnis writes:

I never imagined that a site like Ashley Madison wouldn’t be hacked one day – there is no such thing as perfect security on the internet – but when it happened I wondered to myself that there was a measurable public sentiment that still regarded adultery as wrong, even if we can’t, as a society, bring ourselves to use the word “sin” in public any more.

As the story lived out its brief life in the news cycle, however, my pessimism returned, as it appeared that guilt and shame didn’t seem so hard to live with as getting caught, and that this story was just another predictable opportunity for both sides of the ever-polarized political spectrum to use it to try and score points of the straw men they’ve made of each other.