It was another one of those Good Lord stories the newspaper publishes with some regularity these days. Can people really be so foolish? Answer: Why, yes. So you read, shake your head, and mutter, "Good Lord."
The story was on Page One over the weekend. Apparently there's this website out there called Ashley Madison, and its specialty is dating. For folks who are married. As the country song goes, married--but not to each other.
Dispatches from the Associated Press say hackers broke into the website and began releasing detailed records on folks who had signed up.
Of course they did. Hackers have torn through firewalls set up by the Internal Revenue Service. They're hacking into certain cars and tampering with brakes and windshield wipers. The Pentagon has problems with those jokers. Did anybody think a website for cheaters would be safe?
Apparently a lot of folks did. And they might have a lot of explaining to do--at home--soon enough.
That would have been that, except the Associated Press kept digging, as the Associated Press does, and it found that a lot of the people who had signed up on this website were government workers.
Many, no doubt, in sensitive jobs.
Using government computers.
While at work.
Things keep getting curiouser and curiouser. The AP says it has found assistant U.S. attorneys on the list. At least one counterterrorism employee at Homeland Security is involved. A staffer at the White House, too. Others visited the website from networks operated by the State Department, the U.S. Congress, and the aforementioned Pentagon.
As the AP put it, "Federal policies vary by agency as to whether employees could visit websites like Ashley Madison, which is similar to a dating website, during work hours."
Federal policies vary? The way some offices allow you to have family pictures on your cubicle wall and others not so much? Or maybe it's sorta like how some federal agencies allow jeans on Fridays, and others require more formal attire all week. Read the memos from HR about the policy details on when you can use Ashley Madison on the clock.
How about this for a policy change, which should be adopted by all government agencies, federal, state, local or in-between:
No.
Taxpayers should not be paying anybody to visit Ashley Madison. Facebook is bad enough. (No telling how many man hours disappear into the internet each day as folks talk about what happened at the barbecue last weekend.) And what does this latest hacking story say about the judgment of those in sensitive government jobs? If they don't know better than to stay off an Ashley Madison-type website at work, can the country trust them with more important decisions?
The secretary of the Defense Department, Ashton Carter, said the Pentagon is looking into matters. After all, adultery can be a criminal offense in the military.
Why? Because it is embarrassing, family-shattering, and conduct unbecoming. And therefore can be used to blackmail military personnel. It's said that there are enemy spies who specialize in compromising American military types this way. Tell us what we want to know, colonel, or the wife finds out . . . .
The country can't have this. Taxpayers can't have this.
If policies vary, it's time that they were made more uniform. Soonest. We'll be waiting for the next AP story that comes out, explaining how each federal department has been given a new set of rules. With a reminder that government workers on the clock should be doing government work.
Editorial on 08/27/2015