Hacked!
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Cyber Attacks
The Ashley Madison story offers us a curious nexus of timely themes and age-old appetites. Sex, money and power are, of course, boilerplate human obsessions. However, beyond such well-worn objects of fascination, some novel and uniquely contemporaneous concerns cross paths here, as well.
Cyber hacking is one. The larger digital world is another and how it interacts with and modulates those older, more universal human interests. How is the digital realm transforming more traditional human relationships, social institutions and ecological environments? And does this story offer some insights?
The Hack
By definition, the term ‘hack’ typically refers to someone gaining unauthorized access to data in a computer network.
Compare this to the definition of ‘infidelity’ which includes disloyalty, adultery, breach of trust, transgression.
Or consider the definition of ‘adultery’ where the transgression or breach of trust more specifically references the violation of a lawful sexual relationship. And such adulterous infidelity can, of course, become legal grounds for a divorce.
The point of this little tour through the dictionary is to note a certain symmetry regarding the gaining of ‘unauthorized access’. Without attempting to relegate a legal marriage to its more traditional notions of male-dominated property relations, nevertheless, there remains a notion of a legally privileged relationship, or a normative value or right, being violated or transgressed in both cases.
In the case of the computer hack, a violation of personal or private information is in play. In the case of adultery, a violation of a personal or private right is involved, where the legal concept of marriage carries with it the assumption of unique and exclusive sexual relations. It is, presumably, the violation of this right, which allows adultery to be legal grounds for a divorce, that is, for dissolving the legal obligations of a legal marriage, but, not necessarily without legal penalties.
But what exactly are such normative expectations and legal rights attempting to preserve and protect?
For now, with this preamble regarding violation and transgression of morally and legally prescribed boundaries in place, let’s consider more closely some of the legal and normative boundary-breaking details uncovered in this documentary.
Ashley Madison
The back story of the documentary is the rise of the Ashley Madison website and the business empire of its founder Noel Biderman.
The Ashley Madison website enables user connectivity much as Uber, the car sharing service, does. In the case of Uber, connectivity is between drivers and riders. In the case of Ashley Madison, the users being connected are portrayed as married persons and people to whom they are not married. The purpose of the connectivity is advertised as dating, hookups and sexual relations, i.e., infidelity.
ABC Nightline: Biderman says he built a billion-dollar business betting on infidelity. 25 million members in 37 countries.
The Clients
The documentary involves interviews with some Ashley Madison users, for example, Tasmin Smythe, who presents herself as a “marketing consultant and a serial mistress”.
Tasmin: I did meet…a lot of politicians…corporate CEOs, a lot of guys…in middle management…everything from construction workers and students…
So just to review, one person’s description of the folks she encountered using Ashley Madison services:
- politicians
- corporate CEOs
- guys in middle management
- construction workers
- students
She sounds like a busy girl!
After the hack, the user base was revealed for all to see.
Narrator: Many celebrities, politicians, religious leaders and military personnel were reported to be members….
As a result, the expanded list can now include, again, politicians, but additionally:
- celebrities
- religious leaders
- military personnel
What is of interest to us is, how do digital networks interconnect and interact with other social networks?
Keep in mind, politicians, corporate CEOs, constructions workers, students, religious leaders, military personnel and even celebrities, are all participants in traditional social networks and institutions. Political, corporate, construction, education, religious, entertainment and military, all these terms point to social institutions with their own internal and external, formal and informal networks of organization, with their own normative and legal boundaries.
How are these more traditional structures of social organization being affected by cyber networks that seemingly pass right through them? Such cyber network activity may not be under the direct control of such traditional forms of organization, but those organizations may, nevertheless, find themselves to be normatively and legally responsible for such cyber activities occurring ‘within’ their organizations.
Can traditional distinctions of inside and outside, within and without, survive the permeating effects of such ubiquitous cybernetic activities?
The Marketing: Healthy Living
Part of the marketing of the life style which the Ashley Madison website was promoting, facilitating and profiting from, was the idea of legitimizing infidelity as a valid and acceptable form of social behaviour. In fact, it was selling its services as contributing to a stable, healthy family life!
Noel: I see it as a platform that helps people stay married, they help millions of people find contentment, passion and happiness.
In part, the marketing of such messages came through the public persona of Louise Van Der Velde who was presented as a professional counselor and therapist: the pleasure professor!
Louise: Noel said that society was changing, the model of relationships that we have from the past and at the moment isn’t working. A lot of people are having affairs and it’s all done behind people’s backs. It’s destructive for families.
So part of the selling of the “new model” of relationships was the idea that Ashley Madison was promoting stable, healthy relationships, non-destructive of work and family. In other words, Ashley Madison provided a safety valve that helped preserve and strengthen rather than undermine work and family relationships.
So, presumably, the key to this ‘new model’ of social relationships was an open and transparent embrace of what the ‘old model’ called infidelity.
But what if the violation and transgression of the illicit act of infidelity was all part of the thrill Ashley Madison was promoting, providing and profiting from?
In other words, does the conceptual worldview wrapped around this ‘new model’ of social relationships, which Ashley Madison was commercializing, hold up to any kind of scrutiny?
So the marketing claimed to preserve and protect traditional values and institutions, but is that how users of Ashley Madison’s services typically integrated such relationships into their own family lives?
Curiously, the site apparently attracted the attention of rural women from conservative areas:
Narrator: Long before the hack, Ashley Madison had been helping to destroy marriages. Many of the real women on the site were from rural areas…
So, how were such ‘new model’ activities dealt with at the evening supper table?
A word of thanks for the food on the table and a little nod of benediction to all those helping to keep the family safe, warm and content? Were pictures of Ashley Madison’s third-party service providers affectionately on display in the warm light of the living room mantle? Did parents invite their teens to thoughtfully consider the healthy relationships that the Ashley Madison brochures on the coffee table openly embraced as the ‘new model’ family?
The Victims?
Now, according to the promotions, of course, there would be no ‘victims’, only beneficiaries. So why would some people see themselves as ‘victims’?
And why would participating spouses fail to inform their marriage partners about just how this wonderful, ‘new model’ family service, that Ashley Madison was offering, was, in fact, helping to save and invigorate their marriages? Did such Ashley Madison devotees not truly believe the message of the ‘good news’ the cult leaders were announcing from the pulpits of the ‘new model’ gospel? Or did they just resign themselves to the fact that their marriage partners were simply too ‘old school’ in their attitudes and values to properly appreciate and embrace the ‘new model’ of marriage in which they were now unwitting participants?
Sssssssh, indeed!
Hmmm, did the iconic brand image of the lovely lady, finger to mouth, wedding ring visible, was she not saying, I won’t tell, if you won’t tell, in other words, can you keep a secret?
Hardly the symbol of open and transparent relationships. So how did it all play out at the bedsides and dinner tables of Ashley Madison members and their family relatives?
Well, in any case, ‘victims’ seem to have fallen into two broad categories, as persons who suffered some self-perceived kind of damage as a result of the business relationships Ashley Madison systematically commercialized.
First, there were spouses who were ‘victims’ of infidelity.
Tasmin: I had quite a few of the gentlemen that I had met and talked to…their wives were decimated and hurt and they wanted to talk.
And, second, website users whose public and personal reputations were damaged when the company’s computer system was breached and their data was publicized.
Police: As of this morning we have two unconfirmed reports of suicides associated because of the leak of Ashley Madison’s customers profiles…
There was also the damage to the Ashley Madison brand as the hack revealed the insecure status of user data and the nature of the wider business activity of which the Ashley Madison website was but a part.
The documentary cites examples of marriages which did not survive the public outing of one of the marriage partner’s infidelity. This certainly raises some doubts about the accuracy of the marketing campaign claiming to preserve, rather than undermine, healthy family relationships.
So does this suggest that users and their spouses were simply not buying into the ‘new model’? An indication that this was nothing more than a case of ‘old school’ infidelity all along?
Interestingly, the wife of CEO Noel Biderman participated in marketing interviews in which she claimed to be in a “traditional” relationship with her husband, stating that infidelity was “not what I signed up for” and that her husband was clear to her that he had never had an extra-marital affair. Sadly, for Mrs. Biderman, the documentary asserts that the emails dumped by the hackers of Ashley Madison clearly revealed that he had, in fact, had many affairs.
The body language portrayed in the following picture of that moment in the interview perhaps says it all: not exactly the portrait of paragons of a healthy, open and transparent relationship.
Infidelity: Your Marriage has been Hacked!
Narrator: AshleyMadison.com was set up in 2001 as a safe place to arrange illicit affairs…
So if we think about our initial discussion of terms such as hacking, infidelity and adultery, this story can perhaps be illuminating if we consider that what websites and businesses like Ashley Madison are organizing and profiting by, are systematic ‘hacks’ of traditional social relationships, specifically, the institution of marriage, in this case.
So Ashley Madison and other business like it, systematically hack into traditional institutions for profit and for the pleasures of the ‘hack’? The thrill of crossing a boundary held sacred by the person who is being violated, what kind of social psychology are we dealing with here? And what kind of society does it represent?
Can marriage and infidelity co-exist as normative and legal activities? Why is there such a normative and legal right of unique and exclusive sexual relations as part of the normative and legal institutionalization of marriage? Why do people sign up for traditional marriages in the first place?
Infidelity, as noted, is not in itself illegal. Cops don’t show up at the door, just because someone is having sexual relations with someone other than their spouse. However, also as noted, infidelity is a legal ground for a legal divorce from a legal marriage.
So what is a legal marriage attempting to prescribe? And can what that is co-exist with the normatization and, let’s call it, the full legalization of adultery? In other words, we come to the point where infidelity and adultery are no longer legal grounds for a divorce. How could or should they be, if, in fact, they make marriages stronger and healthier?
Does all this simply mark the end of another obsolete social form to be tossed in the dustbins of history? Or are there enduring values and rights that need to be protected?
Well, let’s consider what is typically legally in play when a divorce occurs: a redistribution of entitlements and responsibilities regarding property and the kids! Who gets what!
So why should sexual pleasure be restricted ‘within’ the boundaries of a monogamous relationship or legal marriage? What does that have to do with family property and the well-being of the kids? What’s the relationship between monogamy and child-rearing responsibilities? Why can’t the kids be raised by commercialized robots, while the biological parents are off enjoying those pleasures that professor was suggesting were so healthy for us all?
The Marketing: The Gateway
The financial basis of the Ashley Madison website was the underlying pay-to-play business model where emails led to credit cards, which opened the door to the goodies.
Christopher: … I would start getting … emails saying that this woman checked out your profile, she wants to talk to you, this person’s interested in you. And because if you didn’t have a paid account, you hadn’t bought the credits, you couldn’t see the actual pictures of the profiles…
Once inside, a web of opportunities, which went beyond mere dating, opened up before the user.
Gina: …a sprawling collection of websites that appear to be designed to get people to come in to do other stuff. And that stuff doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with dating…
Narrator: …the company owned websites that seemed to cater for every conceivable male fantasy…All the websites had one aim: to draw in male customers.
Why resist? Just do what the ads tell you to do, they only have your best interests at heart. Just look at all the happy faces in the ads.
And if you’re going to ‘hack’ into marriages, why not go after the kids too, before and when they leave the family nest? They’re young, fresh, naive and looking for adventure, it’s an ideal opportunity to profitably ply your brand across their devices.
The Marketing: Porn and MBA Sugar Daddies
Nope, MBA does not stand for a masters degree in business administration, rather a ‘mutually beneficial arrangement’. A negotiated sugar-daddy relationship where, typically, a wealthier male finances an on-demand sexual relationship with a financially needier female escort.
Gina: A lot of those are escorts. Some of them just boldly say “escort”. But escort services are illegal in the US outside of a couple of areas so you can’t really come out and say:”Hey, I’m a hooker!” you know, it’s illegal.
The company created a porn star campaign and deliberately advertised outside a university clearly appealing to a youthful market of possible escorts willing to trade reliable sexual favours with wealthier sugar daddies willing to pay.
Some of the dumped emails indicate how this marketing campaign could be expanded.
Narrator: …the possibility of bringing foreign women to the US to work as ‘sugar babies’.
Email: …female users being temporary student workers…highlight some sexy countries…that is your “ethnicity” play
The company denies it engages in prostitution services.
KTLA News: A spokesperson for Avid Life Media said the placement and timing of the ad is part of the company’s strategy. With graduation right around the corner and students looking for jobs and money. When we asked if this was prostitution the spokesperson said, “No, it’s intimacy with a twist.”
This story suggests an interesting nexus with our larger story. A matrix of sexually active young adults, away from home, often for the first time, a body of intense users of digital devices, and all gathered together by the education system, is this a perfect environment for economical commercialization, an ideal target area for recruitment, by the likes of Ashley Madison?
So who are the ‘sugar daddies’ here?
Well, we’ve been given something of the potential list:
- politicians
- corporate CEOs
- construction workers
- religious leaders
- military personnel
Hey mom, whose minding the kids?
Does this get mentioned in the orientation kits provided to students by university and college services? Do they get an Ashley Madison brochure about the ‘new model’ of healthy relationships? Or are they warned about the perils of commercial interests targeting campuses with recruitment campaigns soliciting escort services? Are foreign students particularly vulnerable for being targeted in this kind of campaign, as the uncovered emails suggested?
Are university and college administrators having these conversations when they sit down with their respective ministers of education? Oh right, of course, the minister of education is a politician. Remember, we heard about them, and CEOs. Did we hear anything about university and college administrators? Is anyone looking into that? Oh, right…sssssh!
Does this have anything to do with the millenial experience of rape culture on campus?
The Marketing: Deception & Subversion
Narrator: Ashley Madison became known for their cheeky, often outrageous, press campaigns.
Gina: The peculiar genius not just of their marketing efforts but I think of their leadership seems to be to be able to take anything, even negative news and turn it into a promotional opportunity.
Subverting or spinning any negative message into its opposite becomes a go-to marketing technique.
As the documentary reveals, the business press, like Forbes and Bloomberg, fell for Ashley Madison’s advertised financials as describing a company rising like a meteor, when in fact:
Gina: …from the trail of emails you see employees saying, woah I can do up this chart and I can make up this set of data points and a lot of it seems to be largely invented.
Curiously, the Ashley Madison web of companies was not the object of immediate investigations, that was reserved for the hackers who exposed them.
Police: Team Impact, this is your wake up call. Your actions are illegal and will not be tolerated…
So, having exposed cheating, lieing, deception, fraud…it was the whistleblower who was the immediate target for legal attention. Are we looking through a looking glass world here?
So while Ashley Madison cultivated a brand image of a sound financial and commercial success, a profitable mainstream business enterprise, the corporate culture was promoting and engaging in: deceit, deception, subversion, lying, cheating. And being cheeky about it! As in, do you get the joke?
For those who committed suicide or whose families fell apart, were they getting the joke, or were they just the punch lines? What kind of cheeky humour is this? What are the instincts and values that drive the laughter and the tears?
What kind of society are we describing here? An inside-out, upside-down world, where infidelity is a family value, violation is a benefit, a world where money and sex are somehow the principle measures of what will count as true, good and right. What could possible go wrong here?
The Marketing: Fembots, Threats & Bullying
‘Fembots’ refer to “fake profiles” programmed to be in contact with real users and pretending to be real women interested in male users, but designed primarily to get those male users to part with some of their money.
This kind of deception, given that that was not what users thought they were signing up for, led some disgruntled users to develop an online griping site called AshleyMadisonSucks.com, against which Ashley Madison was taking legal action.
The result, according to the documentary’s account, was cyber bullying, blackmail, threats, false stories, and anonymous emails targeting the owner of AshleyMadisonSucks.com.
Lawyer: It seemed to be a coordinated attack from… to dissuade my client from proceeding with what he was doing.
Well, you can’t take a fembot to court…or can you? So where does responsibility fall if a legal fraud has been perpetrated? Whose ultimately at the wheel of the automated society? The programmers? The folks who pay them? The folks responsible for enforcing the law, but who look the way? The folks who buy their products?
Automation
Gina: I don’t think Ashley Madison is inventing prostitution. I think what the emails suggest they’re doing is helping to automate it. And making it very easy.
Here is a key concept: automation.
I would be inclined to argue that automation is the key to the industrial revolution and all that has flowed from it. From those first steam engines that pumped water out of coal mines, to the automated assembly line of the automobile industry, automation set in motion new levels of economic output. Computer programming has set those levels of automation to new levels again. In conjunction with ubiquitous computing, automation now threatens to overwhelm traditional forms of social relations and institutions with ubiquitous cybernetic interconnectivity.
Surely, unproductive humans are quickly becoming obsolete?
As Gina suggests, Ashley Madison and its affiliate companies sought to automate prositution and escort services by insinuating itself into the social media networks of millions of users, where they lived and worked, where they studied and played. But weren’t they simply taking advantage of what tech companies and their various governmental partners, promoters and enablers, were creating? Where does normative and legal responsibility lie here?
Automating ubiquitous cybernetic penetration of all social relationships and institutions, is just another way of saying, there is a computer on every desk and a cell phone in every pocket. Soon, will there be an implant inside every brain? And, of course, the medical profession will profitably lead the way to the latter. All for our benefit, of course!
So, even while your kids and your spouse are sitting across from you at the supper table, or your fellow employees are sitting across from you at a workplace work station, societal actors external to those social institutions and organizations, may have just as much access to you, your kids, your spouse, your fellow employees, as those traditional institutions and organizations themselves. So again, whose responsible for this, or does everyone claim innocence? It’s a looking glass world, indeed.
Of course, automation advancements often come wrapped in positive advertising messages, just like the Ashley Madison attempts to promote infidelity, deception and cheating.
But what happens when deceit and deception become ubiquitously automated? How are consumers supposed to discern fake news from real news? If you live inside a screen-mediate representation of reality, how are consumers of information supposed to verify what’s on the ubiquitous cybernetic devices that mediate all their experiences?
Oops, we hacked our habitat with the fembots of deception!
Epilogue: the Kill Zone
Joseph: I asked the Impact team whether they were going to hit any other companies and they said, essentially, sure. Maybe even politicians…
Jason: All systems have weaknesses. Even the biggest social networking site. There’s no such thing as a secure system.
Joseph: As more of our lives become intertwined with the digital world, cars having connection to the internet for example, hacking is only going to increase.
So if you are connected to the network, in your house, in your car, on your body, then welcome, because witting or unwitting, you’ve entered the kill zone, the civil war zone of hackers and hactivists who think that truth, justice and the light are on their side of what is about to be violated. Enjoy!
This is to inform you that not only your marriage, and your kids, but your planetary habitat, has been hacked by the ubiquitous, automated fembots of self-deception! The agents of deceit, subversion, threats and cyberbullying have just taken access to the cybernetic network of your mind, your body, your family, your world…prepare yourselves accordingly!
What’ Next?
So with a few such caveats to consider, perhaps we should begin our explorations of the possible manifestations of the cybernetics networks in specific social sectors.
- politics
- education
- business
- military
- religion
- entertainment
