I look at my father lying in the leather recliner that I and my mother -- his long-time ex-wife -- picked out for him just a few months ago. A stain is visible on the arm, probably ice cream, I think. The stains I see on his pant leg are ones I don’t want to think about.
This new apartment originally held such hope, filled with sunshine and all new things; such a huge departure from the dank, over-cluttered, cigarette-stained and dust-filled disaster where he'd lived before. But already this place suffers along with him, displaying the signs of his hard-living existence: pills scattered on the table and floor, latex gloves, half-filled cups of soda, open boxes of cereal and food. Everything disrupted, nothing in its place. The only unsullied spot is the bed, where he never sleeps.
The social worker gently presses my father for some answers. He responds to her interest, perking up a bit and repositioning himself. I watch the crumbs from cookies dusting his shirt relocate to the floor. I sigh, desperately wanting to leave this apartment, this whole nightmare, him. But unfortunately, I am the meat of the operation, sandwiched between him and my other life as wife and mother of three young boys.
“You’re so good at this!”the social worker says as I flip through folders of papers to supply her with the answers she needs. I smile politely and shrug, but I want to lunge across the table and strangle her. I don’t want to be good at this. I don’t want any of this at all.
They always gush as I provide document after document, carve out hours from my days, my kids and my life, making phone calls and appointments, following up, putting out fires from my father's medical and social mishaps, sitting through evaluations for him on everything from Medicaid to Meals on Wheels to nursing and home health aides as he slips in and out of lucidity, occasionally emerging to interject an answer or some confused muttering.
Decades ago, he wasn’t this person, at least not in any way that seemed to matter to me as a child just going about my business. I spent my days traversing the streets of Brooklyn on my bicycle and, at home, hiding away in my room with a book and my stuffed animals.A big dreamer moonlighting as an eyeglass salesman who liked to drink through his nights, my father typically spent his days in bed with the television on, forking large leafs of dressing-drenched iceberg lettuce from a giant salad bowl into his mouth. It was that or a grapefruit, juice dripping down his arms. I watched with fascination as he’d spit seeds at a napkin off to the side.
Where all this sleeping, eating and dreaming took place was also the epicenter of fun, though. He'd be a beast under cover, prowling the mattress back and forth as my younger brother and I tried to cross without being pulled under and eaten. Or he'd hold our hands and feet together like sloths and then hurl us, 10 feet high, onto the mattress.
At bedtime, he told tales using his fingers as characters. My father could spin a yarn from a thread. There was the famous Vernon with V, who held a striking resemblance to the peace sign, and Chickpea, his smaller, generally wiser sidekick. Another character was his disobedient and dangerous hand named Oscar, who would often try to strangle him while his other hand pulled Oscar off, and I’d giggle as they battled, one hand against the other, my father struggling against himself.
Back then, he was a charismatic man full of mischief and laughter. It didn’t matter if I might wobble over his Scotch-soaked form on the hallway floor because he just might reach out and grab my ankle for that touch of connection, flashing me a wicked smile before letting me pass and then passing out again.
Not until I was 17 did I have my first real awakening to his problems. My parents’ divorce was seven years past, and my mother had been remarried for six. She, my brother and I lived on Long Island now, and my father lived alone, moving from one small, nasty apartment to another, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, an island in a sea of empty liquor bottles and clutter.
I could somehow ignore that, until the day his sluggish, rambling voice left a desperate, pleading message on my personal answering machine.“Leetha I need helppa… no...I okay… Help…,” his voice slurred, followed by the sound of his phone clanking haphazardly. The line went dead.
I didn’t call my mother, understanding even then that he was my responsibility. Sitting alone in my room, I repeatedly called my father’s number, panicking with each angry bleat of the busy signal. Ultimately, not knowing what else to do, I called the police, who went to his apartment – this one in New Jersey – and had to break down the door when they received no response.
He was there, of course, and claimed he had taken an extra sleeping pill. I don’t remember the details, but it was the end of the man who had me giggling at the edge of my bed and the beginning of me becoming the hand to keep him from strangling himself.
The social worker laughs at something he says, and my father gives me a crooked, satisfied grin.
Amazingly, a small glimmer of childhood idolization lingers. Forget the hospital stays, the dependencies, the self-destruction, the emotional manipulation, the cries for help that always leave me crying. I want to believe that this 73-year-old man will somehow find his way back, that he’ll stop beating himself up and beating me up along with him, that he’ll defeat the demons of pain, depression and anxiety and find some happiness.
But I have no real hope. I have too many folders.
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Sparkling at the centre of this beautiful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a Wolf–Rayet star known as WR 31a. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt)
Mondays are hard. But with the right space photos, you can feel cool and collected no matter what – because the universe is beautiful and big, and there's something pretty calming about that.
Just try to keep stressing out about your commute with this one on your screen: A beautiful cosmic bubble floating 30,000 light years away.
At the center of the blue haze sits a Wolf–Rayet star known as WR 31a. Wolf-Rayet stars start out as burning behemoths around 20 times more massive than our sun. When these massive stars reach the Wolf-Rayet stage of their lifecycle, they frantically fuse heavy elements in their core – a process that creates more heat and radiation, causing their outer layers to blow away – until they reach the ones too heavy for fusion.
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These stars typically lose half their mass in less than 100,000 years, making them incredibly short-lived by cosmic standards. Once the days of fusion are numbered, they implode into supernovae or black holes, depending on just how massive they are.
The beautiful blue bubble shown above is a so-called Wolf–Rayet nebula – the result of the star's shirking of its gasses. This particular bubble was formed by interstellar winds around 20,000 years ago, and it's expanding outward at a not-so-calming 136,700 miles per hour.
Eventually WR31a will explode into a supernova, seeding its neighborhood with materials that will be recycled into a new generation of stars.
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Former CIA director Michael Hayden believes there is a legitimate possibility that the U.S. military would refuse to follow orders given by Donald Trump if the Republican front-runner becomes president and decides to make good on certain campaign pledges.
Hayden, who also headed the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, made the provocative statement on Friday during an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Trump, fresh off a string of primary victories, has yet to secure his party’s nomination, but Hayden said the candidate’s rhetoric already raises troubling questions.Republican frontrunner Donald Trump escalated his attacks against his opponents Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, saying one "sweats too much" and the other one is a liar, at a rally on Feb. 28. (Reuters)
Earlier this month, Trump told a South Carolina retirement community that he supports waterboarding and similar interrogation techniques because “torture works” when it comes to extracting vital information from terrorists.
Deeming waterboarding “torture,” President Obama’s administration discontinued its use during his first term in office. Proponents of the controversial practice, as The Washington Posts Jenna Johnson noted, avoid labeling it as torture, which would violate various international laws and treaties. Trump, meanwhile, has not only pledged to reinstate waterboarding, but also introduce other methods of interrogation that are “so much worse” and “much stronger.”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t work — torture works,” Trump told the Sun City retirement community. “Okay, folks? Torture — you know, half these guys [say]: ‘Torture doesn’t work.’ Believe me, it works. Okay?”
Trump has also said on multiple occasions that the United States should kill the family members of terrorists.
“That will make people think. Because they do not care very much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their family’s lives,” Trump said during a debate of Republican presidential candidates in December.Politifact has pointed outthat targeting terrorists’ family members is barred by the Geneva Conventions.
During his appearance on “Real Time,” Hayden cited Trump’s pledge to kill family members as being among his most troubling campaign statements.
“That never even occurred to you, right?” Maher asked.
“God, no!” Hayden replied. “Let me give you a punchline: If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.”
“That’s quite a statement, sir,” Maher said.
“You are required not to follow an unlawful order,” Hayden added. “That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.”
“You’ve given us a great reason not to support Trump. There would be a coup in this country,” Maher joked.
Hayden said he didn’t mean to imply that the military would provoke “a coup.”
“I think it’s a coup that you said it,” Maher added.
“I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign,” Hayden said during the interview with Maher.
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Since Donald Trump declared he would run for president eight months ago, many have tried to take him down and failed. Rival Republicans,the Republican National Committee andthe Huffington Post are just a few examples of those who have swung and missed, trying their best to derail a man who looks more and more like the GOP nominee with every passing primary. And HBO’s John Oliver, who called the candidate a “litigious serial liar, a “bulls— artist” and a “baby with evil, smaller fingers” on”Last Week Tonight” on Sunday, may have swung and missed as well. But no one can say that Oliver didn’t give it a very extended try.
Over 22 minutes, Oliver revived many popular criticisms of Trump. The candidate has no clear policy positions and overstates his net worth, Oliver alleged; he uses his wealth to promote himself as a credible candidate, though wealth does not equal political greatness; his campaign is not self-funded, despite his claims; he is racist. Yet, Oliver said, Trump can no longer be dismissed.
“Donald Trump is America’s back mole,” Oliver said. “It may have seemed harmless a year ago, but now that it’s gotten frighteningly bigger, it’s gotten hard to ignore it.”
Then Oliver offered a novel strategy for those who wish to battle Trump: refer to the candidate by “Drumpf,” what one biographer said the Trump family name was before it “evolved over the centuries.” Indeed, Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire” (2000), thought it was “fortunate” that “Drumpf” had become “Trump.”
“’Trump’ is a wonderful word, a marvelous name,” she wrote. “A name Dickens would surely have given to a prominent character if only he had thought of it, ‘Trump’ evokes trump card, trump hand, trump suit — all terms associated with winning. Whether Donald Trump could have had the same success with any other name is an intriguing question.”
This is the very question Oliver now wishes to explore.
“The very name Trump is the cornerstone of his brand,” Oliver said. “If only there were a way to uncouple that magical word from the man he really is.”
Donald “Drumpf” in Texas on Feb. 26. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
Oliver then proposed to do this — with “Drumpf” hats sold at the website DonaldJDrumpf.com, the hashtag #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain, and an app that replaces “Trump” with “Drumpf” in Web browsers.
“We cannot keep being blinded by the magic of his name,” Oliver said. Of “Drumpf,” he added: “It’s the sound produced when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy.”
European court upholds ruling that European court upholds ruling that passengers are entitled to compensation for late flights as well as cancellationsAirlines face payouts of millions of pounds to passengers after a European court upheld a ruling that compensation should be paid for flight delays as well as cancellations.
The EU's court of justice ruled that passengers whose flights arrive more than three hours late are entitled to compensation of up to €600 (£488) each unless the delay is due to extraordinary circumstances outside the airline's control, such as strikes or bad weather.
In confirming its interpretation of EU law, the court reiterated that passengers delayed could suffer similar inconvenience to those on cancelled flights and therefore should be similarly recompensed.
The judgment resolves a grey area in regulation and potentially opens up airlines to millions of pounds in claims, including many put on hold pending the European ruling.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said the verdict provided "much needed clarity".
Iain Osborne, CAA director of regulatory policy, said: "Every year around 200 million passengers travel on 2m flights to and from the UK, with the vast majority experiencing no problems. However, when something does go wrong, there are regulations in place to protect travellers, and the CAA is ready to ensure companies abide by them."
The CAA can help passengers bringing complaints against airlines or airports, although it stressed that passengers should first contact airlines to give them an opportunity to consider their claim before getting the authority involved.
The EU is separately reviewing its regulations on what assistance and compensation should be provided.
challenged the CAA's interpretation of due compensation, said the airline was disappointed by the outcome but also welcomed the clarity.
Airline sources said that while the cumulative bill would be sizeable, the majority of delays – such as those due to fog which disrupted dozens of flights at Heathrow and elsewhere on Monday and Tuesday this week – would not lead to airlines being liable for compensation. Constraints on crew working hours and the nature of short-haul scheduled services mean many flights are in any case cancelled when delays loom.
However, long-haul and charter flight customers on holiday packages, whose economics dictate that planes would fly even with long delays, are most likely to benefit from the additional rights. Passengers will still have to pursue claims individually.
t was 9 o’clock on a Sunday night last July when a journalist called Brian Krebs came upon the scoop of his life. The 42-year-old was at home in Virginia at the time, and wearing pyjamas. For years Krebs had written a popular blog about internet security, analysing thefts of consumer data from big companies around the world, Tesco, Adobe, Domino’s Pizza among them. Now Krebs, as his weekend came to an end, was being tipped off about a more sensational breach. An anonymous informant had emailed him a list of links, directing him to caches of data that had been stolen from servers at a Canadian firm called Avid Life Media (ALM). Krebs vaguely knew of ALM. For years it had run a notorious, widely publicised web service called Ashley Madison, a dating site founded in 2008 with the explicit intention of helping married people have affairs with each other. “Life is short. Have an affair” was the slogan Ashley Madison used.
At the time Krebs received his tip-off, Ashley Madison claimed to have an international membership of 37.6 million, all of them assured that their use of this service would be “anonymous”, “100% discreet”. Only now Krebs was looking at the real names and the real credit-card numbers of Ashley Madison members. He was looking at street addresses and postcodes. Among documents in the leaked cache, Krebs found a list of telephone numbers for senior executives at ALM and Ashley Madison. He even found the personal mobile number of the CEO, a Canadian called Noel Biderman.
“How you doing?” Krebs asked Biderman when he dialled and got through – still not sure, until this moment, that he was on to a legitimate story.
‘Life is short. Have an affair’: former Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman. Photograph: Jon Enoch/Eyevine
Then the CEO of Ashley Madison began the slow, careful work of begging Krebs not to publish anything about the most appallingly intimate internet leak of the modern age.Only a few hours later, in the west of England, a contentedly married man we’ll call Michael woke up and went through his usual Monday-morning routine. Coffee. Email. A skim of the news online. Already Krebs’s story about a hack of servers at Ashley Madison had been picked up by prominent media agencies. The story was a lead item on every news page Michael browsed. Infidelity site hacked, he read; a group calling itself the Impact Team claiming responsibility and threatening to release a full database of Ashley Madison customers, present and past, inside a month. More than 30 million people in more than 40 countries affected.
Though in the days to come the number of active users of Ashley Madison’s service would be disputed – was that figure of 37.6 million for real? – Michael could say for sure there were many authentic adulterers who used the site because he was one of them. “I’d taken some elementary precautions,” Michael told me recently, explaining that he’d registered on Ashley Madison with a secret email address and chosen a username by which he couldn’t be personally identified. He had uploaded a photograph. He was experienced enough with adultery websites – Ashley Madison and a British equivalent called Illicit Encounters – to know that “if you don’t put a photo up you won’t get many responses”. But the picture he chose was small and he was wearing sunglasses in it. “Deniable,” Michael said.
Whenever he visited the site he was careful. If he wanted to log on to Ashley Madison to speak to women he would only do so on a work laptop he kept in his office at home. Michael had six internet browsers installed on the laptop, and one of these browsers could only be loaded via external hard drive – this was the browser he used to arrange affairs. So Michael was “irritated and surprised” to realise, that Monday morning, that his elaborate precautions had been pointless. He tried to work out ways in which he would be exposed if the hackers went through with their threat to release Ashley Madison’s customer database.
Getting in on the act: moral crusaders, operating with impunity, began to shame and squeeze the exposed. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images
Subscriptions to the site were arranged so that women could use the service for free while men paid a monthly fee – this, in theory, to encourage an even balance in its membership. Michael had joined Ashley Madison after seeing it written about in a newspaper. He recalled getting a deal as a new signee and being charged something like £20 for his first month. He paid using his credit card. The profile name and email address he’d chosen were no threat, the photograph deniable – “but your credit card,” Michael realised, “is your credit card.” At this time there would have been a lot of men (even conservative estimates put the number of paid- up Ashley Madison subscribers at the time well into the millions) thinking: your credit card is your creditOn 18 August, Ashley Madison’s entire customer database was indeed put online. In the subsequent panic, rewards for information about the hackers were offered. Police in Toronto (the city where ALM was based) vowed to find the culprits. Meanwhile politicians, priests, military members, civil servants, celebrities – these and hundreds of other public figures were found among the listed membership. Millions more, formerly anonymous, suddenly had their private details sprayed out on to the internet. It varied according to an individual’s caution when signing up to the site, and to their luck, and to their gender (the men in general more exposed because of Ashley Madison’s requirement they pay by credit card), but after the leak some people found they could be identified not only by their names and their addresses but also by their height, their weight, even their erotic preferences.Michael followed it all from his home computer as the story evolved, through July and into August, into an enormous, consistently strange, consistently ghastly global calamity.
Moral crusaders, operating with impunity, began to shame and squeeze the exposed. In Alabama editors at a newspaper decided to print in its pages all the names of people from the region who appeared on Ashley Madison’s database. After some high-profile resignations all around North America, people wondered if there might not be a risk of more tragic repercussions. Brian Krebs, with some prescience, wrote a blog advising sensitivity: “There’s a very real chance that people are going to overreact,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw people taking their lives because of this.”
A small number of suicides were reported, a priest in Louisiana among them. Speaking to the media after his death, the priest’s wife said he’d found out his name was among those on the list before he killed himself. She said she would have forgiven her husband, and that God would have too. “God’s grace in the midst of shame is the centre of the story for us, not the hack. My husband knew that grace, but somehow forgot that it was his when he took his own life.”
During the early weeks of the crisis ALM, the company behind Ashley Madison, stopped responding in any sort of adequate way to calls and emails from its terrified customers. Countless marriages were at risk, people teetered on appalling decisions, and meanwhile ALM put out brisk press releases, one announcing the departure of CEO Noel Biderman. It made superficial adjustments to the front of its website, at some point deciding to remove the graphic that described Ashley Madison as “100% discreet”.
‘I was basically a therapist for them’: Australian journalist Kristen Brown, who spoke to about 200 of those affected. Photograph: courtesy Kristen V Brown
So the masses sent spinning by the leak could not turn to ALM for advice. Most could not easily turn to their partners. Someone had to fill this enormous absence, hear grievances. Troy Hunt, a mild-mannered technology consultant from Sydney, had not expected it would be him.
Only this time, Hunt recalled, desperate and difficult and extremely personal messages began arriving in his inbox almost immediately. Mostly it was men who emailed – paying customers of Ashley Madison who mistakenly believed that Hunt, having sifted through the leaked data, might be able to help them. Could he somehow scrub their credit cards from the list? Hunt described the tone of these emails as fearful, illogical, “emotionally distraught”. About a hundred emails a day arrived in that early period, Hunt recalls. Considered together they form a bleak and fascinating historical document: a clear view into the hivemind of those caught up in the leak, caught out.As the crisis developed he found that dozens and then hundreds of people, caught up in the event, were looking to him for help and for counsel. Hunt, who is in his late 30s, explained what happened. His expertise is internet security; he teaches courses in it. As a side project, since 2013, he has run a free web service,HaveIBeenPwned.com, that allows concerned citizens of the internet to enter their email address, go through a simple process of verification, and then learn whether their personal information has ever been stolen or otherwise exposed in a data breach. When hackers pinched data from servers at Tesco, at Adobe, at Domino’s Pizza, Hunt trawled through the data that leaked and updated his site so that people could quickly find out if they were affected. After the Ashley Madison leak he did the same.
People confessed to Hunt their reasons for subscribing to Ashley Madison in the first place: “I joined Ashley Madison one night bored, honestly… Curiosity… Drunken evening…” They volunteered to him what they’d done, or nearly done, or hadn’t done at all. They described what it was like to learn about the leak: “The worst night of my life… Sheer fear… Sick and foolish… I can’t sleep or eat, and on top of that I am trying to hide that something is wrong from my wife…” They pleaded with Hunt (who could do nothing for them). They apologised to him (a stranger). They wondered if they should admit everything to the people who mattered to them. And they wondered what that might cost. “Tell your wife and kids you love them tonight,” said one email. “I shall do the same, as I really don’t know if I will have many more chances to do so.”
Some of those who got in touch, Hunt told me, mentioned suicide. He didn’t know what to do. He was a computer consultant. He sent back the numbers of telephone helplines.
Who was behind the hack? Who was the Impact Team that claimed responsibility?
Troy Hunt often wondered about that. He knew a lot about data theft at big corporations, what it tended to look like. Hunt thought this episode seemed “out of character” with many such hacks he’d seen. The theft of such a large amount of data usually suggested to Hunt that somebody employed by the company (or someone who had physical access to its servers) was the culprit. But then, he reasoned, the subsequent leaks had been so careful, so deliberate. “They came out and said: ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Then radio silence. And then a month later: ‘Here’s all the data.’” It was sinister, Hunt thought, militaristic even.
Then there was the jarring strand of moralising in the messages the Impact Team did put out. “Learn your lesson and make amends” was the group’s advice to any of Ashley Madison’s users left in pieces by their work. Not the obvious behaviour, Hunt suggested, of a revenge-minded staffer who only wanted to hurt his or her employer.
Brian Krebs made efforts to understand the hackers, too. He’d never been able to figure out who first tipped him off, but he wondered at one point if he’d found a promising lead. In a detailed blog, published in late August, Krebs followed a trail of clues to a Twitter user who seemed to have suspicious early knowledge of the leak. “I wasn’t saying they did it,” Krebs told me, “I was just saying that maybe this was [a line of investigation] that deserved more attention.” He didn’t know if police forces investigating the case ever followed up on his lead. The Toronto force, to date, has announced no arrests. (When I asked, recently, if there had been any developments their press department did not reply.)
What motivated the hackers, then? In the initial ransom note the Impact Team suggested that unseemly business practices at ALM – for instance a policy of charging users to delete their accounts on Ashley Madison and then continuing to store departing users’ personal information on internal servers – had provoked the hackers’ ire and justified its attack. But the mass release of private data, to make a point about the maltreatment of private data, cannot have seemed to anyone a very coherent reason for doing all this.Krebs told me: “Whoever’s responsible – no doubt they know that there are now lots of people wanting to put a bullet in their head. If it were me, if I was going to do something like this, I would make pretty darn sure that nobody could trace it back to me.” At least in public, the Impact Team has not been heard from again.
To try to better understand the thinking of the Impact Team I spoke to hackers who said they were not involved with the Ashley Madison attack but had kept a close eye on it. The general assumption, in this community, seemed to be that attacking a firm such as Avid Life Media (a bit shouty, a bit sleazy) was fair game. Few felt the mass release of millions of people’s personal information – they called it “doxing” – was ideal hacker etiquette though. “Not sure I would have doxed 20 million people at the same time,” one said. Even so they felt the saga would teach the world a useful lesson. “Anyone doing anything online,” I was told, “should assume it isn’t secure.”
One hacker I spoke to said he’d spent hours and hours digging through the Ashley Madison data after the leak, going out of his way to draw attention to his most salacious findings. Speaking to me by email and in private chatrooms, he asked that I call him AMLolz, for “Ashley Madison laughs”. We discussed some of the findings he’d made and subsequently publicised, through an AMLolz Twitter feed and an AMLolz website. He noted with some pride that in one of his deep searches he’d come across emails that suggested members of Ashley Madison’s staff were themselves having extramarital affairs. He had posted screenshots of incriminating personal messages, and several magazines and newspapers had picked up on his findings and run stories.
AMLolz might not have been involved in the Ashley Madison hack, but he was certainly involved in giving it an impactful afterlife. I asked him what motivated him. Disapproval? Revenge? “Because it was very humorous,” he said eventually. “And very interesting. No mission statement, just looking for lols.”
AMLolz used the term “peripheral damage” more than once in conversation, neatly encompassing, in those words, all the sleepless unfaithful and their tortured other halves, the newly unemployed, the dead, their doubly grieving widows. I asked AMLolz what he would tell one of these “peripherally damaged” if he were to meet them in person.
He replied: “It would depend what they had to say to me first. [Smiley face.] That being said, something along the lines of: ‘Own your actions. Don’t lie to yourself, or anyone else…’ It’s not good. [Thoughtful face.]”
In the west of England, Michael could hardly disagree with this. Even as he sat in his home office, reading the developing news about Ashley Madison and wondering if his wife was doing the same, he was well aware of his own culpability. He didn’t think he had anyone else to blame but himself. Who was he really going to blame? Ashley Madison? “I think it would probably be a little naive of me to expect high standards from a company that was promoting itself as a meeting point for people looking for adulterous affairs. It’s a bit like borrowing money off your drug dealer and expecting him to pay it back.” Michael simply accepted what was going on and watched, with a numb fascination, as the crisis rolled on.
In August, the private detective industry reported, cheerfully, an uptick in business. Lawyers steered high-publicity legal actions against Ashley Madison – at least three plaintiffs in America wanted to sue – as well as seeing through quieter divorce claims. In Australia a DJ decided to tell a woman live on air that her husband was on the database. Members and former members began to be sent anonymous extortion letters. Michael received several. Pay us in seven days, he was threatened in one email, “or you know what will happen… You can inform authorities but they can’t help you. We are porfessionals [sic].” Michael was unnerved by the emails but ignored them. The world, in these small increments, got shabbier.
Like Troy Hunt in Australia, Kristen Brown, in California, found herself operating as a sort of on-the-go counsellor during these strange months. For Brown, a 29-year-old journalist, it began when she started interviewing victims of the Ashley Madison leak for the website Fusion.net. Interviewees kept wanting to talk, though, long after she’d published – a lot of these people, Brown guessed, left without anyone else they could speak to frankly. “I was basically functioning as a therapist for them. They were crushed by what happened.” Brown guessed she’d spoken to about 200 of those affected by the hack over the past six months.
To an unusual degree, Brown thought, a tone of moral judgment skewed the commentary and discussion around the Ashley Madison affair. “It’s a gut reaction, to pass a moral judgement,” she said. “Because nobody likes the idea of being cheated on themselves. You don’t want to find your own partner on Ashley Madison. But spending hours and hours on the phone with these people, it became so clear to me how frigging complicated relationships are.”
‘Maybe we need privacy disasters like this to help us wake up’: Brian Krebs, the cybercrime journalist who broke the Ashley Madison story in July 2015. Photograph: Daniel Rosenbaum/New York Times/Redux/Eyevine
Brown continued: “We all have this idea of the site as completely salacious, right? Cheating men cheating on their unassuming wives. And I did speak to those men. But then I spoke to others who’d, say, been with their wife since they were 19 – they loved their wives but there were problems, there were kids, they’d stopped sleeping together. They had good partnerships, their lives worked, they didn’t want to upend everything. They just weren’t fulfilled or satisfied romantically. Some people were on the site with the permission of their spouses. I talked to one woman who was afraid to leave her husband, and being on Ashley Madison was her way of working out what to do. Some people I spoke to were single and didn’t want attachment and using Ashley Madison was just a way. People’s reasons were complex. They were real.”reasoning for cheating. His situation was complex, and real. He told me he had been unfaithful to his wife “from after we first got married”, conducting a string of one-off or months- or years-long affairs for almost 30 years. “As life partners, my wife and I fit really well. We are very, very good friends – that describes us. But I know there’s a missing dimension to our relationship.”
Ashley Madison was a way to try to account for that missing dimension.
And not always, said Michael, a particularly satisfying way. He wasn’t even sure that every woman he spoke to during his time on the site was genuine. Sometimes, when conversation had a flavour of “classic soft porn”, he said, he wondered if his correspondents were employees of the company, reading from scripts. (The likely truth, as suggested by internal documentation made available in the leak, was stranger still. Coders at Ashley Madison had created a network of fake, flirtatious chatbots to converse with men like Michael, teasing them into maintaining their subscriptions on the site. It was for this reason that commentators began to doubt whether Ashley Madison had as many subscribers as it advertised; Avid Life Media, ever since the leak, has always claimed to have a healthy and even growing userbase.)
Michael had met someone real through Ashley Madison. Like him she was in a stable companionable marriage, only one that lacked a certain dimension. She lived in the north of England. She had children. She and Michael shared tastes in books and spoke a lot on the phone. Sometimes they discussed their partners and their respective marriages, other times they steered from the subject. There was a sexual element to the affair, Michael said, but they never slept together. It was a relationship that was precious to him.
“If you’re going to chat a woman up in a bar, or at a work conference, or wherever,” Michael told me, “then: ‘Hello, I’m married’ is not a good opening line. Whereas if you’re going on to a website like Ashley Madison – they know. It’s a bit ridiculous to talk about honesty in terms of these relationships. But they actually start with honesty. Because you’re not pretending to be something you’re not.”
Ashley Madison was a way of having a “safe affair”, he said. Safe in the sense that he didn’t think it likely he’d be found out by his wife (he had his special browser, his secret email address). Also safe in the sense that he didn’t think anyone would get hurt.Since the leak Michael had not used Ashley Madison again nor spoken to the woman in the north. His wife, as of February 2016, had not found out about his affairs.
The hack of Ashley Madison was historic – the first leak of the online era to expose to mass view not passwords, not pictures, not diplomatic gossip, not military secrets, but something weirder, deeper, less tangible. This was a leak of desires.
“I think that history’s probably littered with examples of madams whose little black book went walking, you know what I mean?” said Brian Krebs. “But this was massive, en masse, on the internet. Who knows? Maybe we need privacy disasters like this to help us wake up.”
Kristen Brown thought it was important to take away a different instruction from the saga. That marriage is not one thing, and that the millions of users of Ashley Madison very likely had millions of different reasons for being on there. “There’s a vibe between two people that can’t be quantified. How to say what the right path is for any one pair? Relationships are fucking weird. And they get weirder the longer they go on.”
In London recently I met with Troy Hunt. He’d flown in from Australia to teach a corporate course on internet security. We had lunch between morning and afternoon sessions in his classroom in Canary Wharf. While we ate Hunt showed me his phone – another email had just come in from someone requesting his help. Six months had gone by since the leak; the flow of desperate messages had slowed but not stopped.
Hunt responded to this email the way he always did now, sending back a prewritten response that included a list of answers to frequently asked questions about the hack. Also that list of hotline numbers.
When we’d finished eating his teaching resumed. Two dozen people filed into the room with their laptops and sat quietly while Hunt lectured them about cyber security. He’d worked a contemporary lesson into his speech, and projecting an image of a now-infamous website on to a screen behind him, he said to the class: “Put up you
