Hacking Victims Deserve Empathy, Not Ridicule; New York Times, 9/2/15

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; Hacking Victims Deserve Empathy, Not Ridicule:

"There has been a tendency in the tech commentariat to minimize the Ashley Madison breach. The site has always seemed like a joke and possibly a scheme, and those who fell for it a testament to the Internet’s endless capacity to separate fools from their money.

But the victims of the Ashley Madison hacking deserve our sympathy and aid because, with slightly different luck, you or I could just as easily find ourselves in a similarly sorry situation. This breach stands as a monument to the blind trust many of us have placed in our computers — and how powerless we all are to evade the disasters that may befall us when the trust turns out to be misplaced...

“It’s easy to be snarky about Ashley Madison, but just because it’s unpopular or even immoral, it doesn’t mean this sort of activity shouldn’t be protected,” said Scott L. Vernick, a lawyer who specializes in digital privacy issues at the firm Fox Rothschild. “This gets at fundamental issues like freedom of speech and freedom of association — today it’s Ashley Madison, tomorrow it could be some other group that deserves protection.”"