However, hacking is bad if it:
• Enables Nigerian scammers to pillage our bank accounts.
• Is simply a means to assist Rupert Murdoch to sell more copies of his tabloid rags.
• Enables creeps to steal glamorous young women's intimate photos which they post online for other creeps to drool over.
It's tricky, isn't it: fine for hackers to expose mass cyber-surveillance that the state omitted to tell us about; not so fine if that exposure compromises intelligence-gathering that might prevent terrorist attacks. And hacking would be catastrophic if it enables terrorists to take control of airliners and fly them into tall buildings or nuclear reactors, or obtain the launch codes for a nation's nuclear arsenal. Now hacking has thrown up another curly one, in the form of the Ashley Madison dump.
Some will regard this as a good hack since it shames "cheating dirtbags", as the hackers see them. Perhaps the hackers are fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible is an historical document that should dictate our private and public behaviour and legal system and are invoking the sixth or seventh - depending on which religious tradition they belong to - of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
The problem is that, as a society, we flout most of the Ten Commandments on a regular basis. Take "thou shalt not covet": covetousness, envying what others have got, wanting to keep up with the Joneses, pretty much drives consumer capitalism. And if Americans really believe in "thou shalt not kill", you'd think they'd do something about their gun laws, which seem designed to make killing as American as apple pie.
On the other hand, it's hard to feel sorry for a company that makes money out of helping people to cheat on their spouses or their clients for whom jacking up a bit on the side is as mundane as buying a book on Amazon. This isn't adultery as in falling for someone else despite your best intentions; this is adultery as in going out of your way to have sex with virtual strangers and Ashley Madison is nothing more than an online meat market.
Ashley Madison reportedly has 37 million members. If 5 per cent are people whose identities have been stolen to set up an account under a false name - a smart move as it's turned out - or who've signed up in mitigating or complicated circumstances (with the consent of their spouse, say) then 2 million people who aren't necessarily cheating dirtbags may end up being named and shamed.
As has been pointed out, this info-dump can be viewed as part of the wider sex-shaming trend fuelled by persecutory Puritanism and vindictive opportunism. Sex-shaming is in the long tradition of media exposes, but when those exposed as adulterers are celebrities who cultivate a devoted family man image or politicians who say one thing in public and do another in private then the media is entitled to invoke the public interest.
One of the benefits of not being in the public eye, of being part of the mass of ordinary people, is anonymity. If you take that away from them, as the Ashley Madison hackers have done to millions of ordinary people, you put them in the same position as the rich, famous and powerful but without the protection and rewards that accrue to public figures.
It defies belief that such a wide-ranging and indiscriminate exercise won't have casualties, some of them entirely innocent, and cause collateral damage, some of it to children. Indifference to the adverse consequences of your actions and the suffering of others is the hallmark of the sociopath.
