Whoops. At least one official City of Newton email address (@newtonma.gov) appears on the list of users alleged to have set up account on the marital cheating website AshleyMadison.com, Boston Magazine reports.
City of Newton email included on the Ashley Madison list
by Village 14 | Aug 20, 2015 | Newton | 33 comments
was it on a private server???
I have a couple of thoughts on this. While I fully support the media releasing government information leaked by whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden–all of whom I consider American heroes, I think it’s irresponsible [perhaps even criminal] for the media to release information stolen from a private company about private citizens. The media’s reporting of details stolen from the Ashley Madison website is no different than if those same media outlets had reported names and credit card information from the massive data breach experienced by Target not long ago. While it bothers me that someone employed by the city of Newton used their work email address for a purpose unrelated to their job, I’m not in favor of any media outlet reporting who that person is, and I don’t think speculation benefits anyone.
What a shame that this site and the people who use it have been targeted. It serves a purpose for many people and should be left alone.
Equally interesting is that 44 individuals used their @whitehouse.gov email addresses
I agree with Mike and Colleen, this is really none of our business.
I’m sorry but does no one have a problem with a public employee using a public resource (government email addresses) paid for with your tax dollars for a private purpose (regardless of its morality)? Because I sure as hell do. Look at that list. Just above the newtonma.gov email were a whole bunch of US Navy email addresses. We all pay for that so that some public employees can enjoy a little afternoon delight.
+1 @Ted; The specific issue here isn’t privacy. It’s about a city or other public employee using a city/government resource. And it is disrespectful to colleagues who are following the rules. I hope the city takes appropriate disciplinary action against this person.
It also shows a lack of intelligence and care, not to mention an excess of laziness, to use one’s work email address for something like this when it’s easy to get a free anonymous email address from Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc.
@Ted: I don’t care if public employees use their government email addresses to conduct limited private business. It’s easier to operate from one email address sometimes.
I do, however, have a problem with government employees showing a profound lack of judgment. It’s not a question of morality. Using work email for extracurricular activities such as Ashley Madison is just stupid.
Still, I have no interest in learning their identities.
What Gail said. This shows a profound lack of judgement.
Gail, and anyone who uses their work email account for private purposes, you should read this. Generally speaking, employees have little or no reasonable expectation of privacy when they use their company email account. Which is why I always advise my clients that if they want to keep something private, they should not use their work email address.
I wonder whether the person(s) on this list at newtonma.gov are employees of the City or elected My hope is that they are elected, since we all know that politicians live on the dark side (P.S.: Even Area Councillors have newtonma.gov e-mail addresses). My hope also is that those elected persons are not paid and do not have benefits, or I would want them to reimburse the taxpayers for dalliance (moral or immoral) on the taxpayer’s dime.
@Sallee, on a related point of poor judgement, I know of a few Area Councilers that are using work email addresses for AC buisness and not their newtonma.gov addresses. In the, unlikely, event of any Open Meeting Law inquiry, I know my company would be pissed at me if they were asked to turn over emails to the State. I think the same is true of public employees, and elected officials, using tax funded resources for personal business.
It would be great to have one email for everything but that really should be independent of an organization. Maybe we all need to get private email servers running in our basements 🙂
We have a hard enough time holding onto city staff without them now thinking we’ll be poring over their emails looking for personal use. What if they send an email from their work acct to their spouse asking them to pick up corn at the farmers market? Do we really demand that they log onto Hotmail to do that? This is no different. Last I checked adultery is not illegal. And who knows if it was adultery anyway? Maybe it was a single person. Maybe they logged on once and never used it. WHO CARES. Just because a workplace can snoop on employees doesn’t mean they should. Let’s have our own pushback against the Big Brotherization of society.
@Emily, I agree with everything you said, but for the record…
The level of government intrusion into personal lives is astounding. It’s a disgrace that adultery law is still on the books in this state. But then again, cannabis is still illegal here too. I’ve often thought that lawmakers should be required to eliminate one outdated law for every new law that they pass. In any event, I agree with everything Emily wrote. The City needs to show a little respect for its employees’ privacy.
@Emily and everyone else – it’s not a matter of the City pouring over people’s email looking for personal use. City emails are public records. You never know when there will be a reason that all of an employee’s emails will be requisitioned (FOIA, law suit, whatever).
In addition, at any workplace, other people can end up with access to your email for legitimate reasons. For example, at my office we had someone unexpectedly go on a long medical leave in the middle of a project. It was crucial that the person taking over for her be able to access all emails related to the project – and she was in no shape to edit her emails before that happened.
It’s really not that hard to separate your work and personal accounts. I check my personal email through a web interface throughout the day – one more open tab on my browser is no big deal.
@Gail – wow!! I hope our State Reps and State Senator are reading this.
I’m with Ted on this.
This is very bad.
Who knows whatelse people do.
It is unbelievable that adultery is a felony in Mass.
@Emily, we had a city employee who used a city vehicle to pick up a prostitute on his lunch hour. Is that use of a public resource alright with you too? You called in the other day to Boston Public Radio to excoriate Boston for letting city employees park free at meters and municipal lots while on city business, but it is okay with you for Newton employees to use their city email accounts to visit Ashley Madison, presumably for entirely private purposes (i.e., so their spouse won’t find out that they are frolicking about)? Sounds like a double standard to me. How about downloading porno on city computers? Is that okay with you? What is the difference?
One of the reasons I insisted on the aldermen having city email accounts was so that we would comply with public records laws, that require that all such emails be preserved. The elected officials have to comply with the open meeting law and also not use their city email accounts for campaigning. There are a lot of campaign finance and ethics laws that also apply to us. Those same campaign finance and ethics laws apply to any city employee. I see no problem with expecting that city or school employees will use public resources solely for city or school business. The private sector has been doing this for years. Because when it comes right down to it, it is really no different from using the company car for a “frolic and detour” of one’s own.
City employees’ “use of their city email addresses to visit Ashley Madison” could have consisted of nothing more than typing that email address during the registration process, which they may have conducted from their own home. That wouldn’t constitute use of public resources by any stretch of the imagination.
The recommendation that city employees access their private Gmail or Hotmail accounts while at work, on the other hand, would represent private use of a public resource, i.e. the Internet connection…for which, incidentally, Verizon or Comcast charges government clientele twice what they charge everyone else (based on what I’ve seen in GSA price lists).
So if you’re going to get indignant over something, it should probably be the latter.
@Ted, if you think using a city vehicle to pick up a prostitute during one’s lunch hour is equivalent to a name being found on the Ashley Madison site, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Also, it’s quite a hoot to hear the claim that the private sector is supposedly so vigilant in policing the use of company resources by employees. That may apply to the small fry at the cash registers, but the higher-ups always find creative ways to make use of the company helicopter.
I wish that if people were so worried about the misuse of public resources, they would have raised a stink about the mayor unilaterally giving away exclusive use of a $1.4 million property in Newton Corner so that young ‘entrepreneurs’ could have a cool place to chill out on their way to billionaire status. But nobody seemed to care too much about that, for some reason.
Instead, let’s focus our attention on finding the receptionist or the street sweeper who made the mistake of entering his/her city email address into a registration form. Everyone loves a witch hunt, so long as it’s somebody else’s witch being hunted.
@Emily
Ted is right.
This reminds me of my times in the schools when kids would use their school Google Docs account to send non-school related material to their buddies, I definitely was not exempt from this. The students were never able to claim they thought their email was private, did not realize it was a problem etc. Heck even some students personal emails were sometimes bullied to give up to administrators.
It is time that city officials be held at the same level as our students, because I guarantee you if you used your school email/Google docs to go on a dating website etc. whether at home or in school, you would face a whole lot more punishment than the city officials will probably face, if at all any. Actually I remember multiple times this happening with Facebook at school etc… And this is not even an isolated incident, although somewhat different but related to accountability, I remember a certain someone getting fined a whopping weeks pay over plagiarizing a speech when students would get a whole lot worse than that.
Best
BTW @Ted, I haven’t seen the list – everything I’ve read claims that the database itself is stolen property and it’s technically a crime to download it. I know that there are some websites that allow you to search the list, but it sounds like you’ve actually viewed the list in alphabetical order? I thought that was only possible if you downloaded the database via Tor or BitTorrent. Is there another (legal) way to view the list without downloading it?
Work emails, computers and internet connection services are owned/supplied by the company (private, public and non-profit) and are always susceptible to viewing by the company, as are any sites visited on the company computer. They are also susceptible to being viewed in lawsuits, FOIA inquires, suspicion of wrong doing by the user (either hurting the company or illegality), hacking and innumerable other things.
The company rules of use are generally easily available as are the laws governing their accessibility. This isn’t a “big brother” issue. It’s for the owner’s protection and the public’s protection from “big brother’s” keeping secretive information. These procedures are also recommended to companies as part of maximizing worker productivity, I.e. profit.
It’s a part of working in the private sector; why would it be different in the public sector? It falls into the transparency and accountability everyone says they want from public employees.
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t pick up their smartphone to do anything private while at work. I don’t know the work emails of my kids or my family, but we have no problem reaching each other if need be while at work. Switching to a personal device for personal use is really easy; I either leave mine on my desk or carry it into meetings; I carry it basically everywhere.
There are exceptions, of course, that prove the rule.
In an aside, it’s pretty easy to work around anything concerning the web, so these people using the AM website at work are also computer illiterate.
Emily, you are taking an interesting stance considering you are an elected public official and employee and you are advocating using public property for private use, regardless of what use that might be.
I am surprised that you would approve of employees contacting family and friends (and telling those people that they could contact them back) on work emails, unless there were an emergency. (Even then calling or texting first would seem the best idea.) Somehow talking about such a trivial, every day occurrence such as picking up something at the farmers’ market, on a work email seems worse because that implys a common place use. Surprising to say the least.
I am not concerned about loosing public employees who want to violate the terms of their employment, anymore than private employees, particularly now that it’s incredibly easy to not to.
Michael, this has nothing to do with “small fry at the cash register” or the “higher ups.”
Marti, I was talking about enforcement of the letter-of-the-law in the private sector. Control of private sector resources is rarely applied equally across the organization. But if you have a different insight into American corporate culture, I anxiously await enlightenment.
Anyway, let’s find out if anybody in the mayor’s office ever registered for Amazon.com using a work email address. If so, I demand that heads roll!
No enlightenment to offer.
Of course everything is different for the people at the top, goes without saying, but even executives have to be careful with their use of work emails. Seriously, you aren’t questioning that are you?
What this boils down to, pure and simple, is that a lot of people including me find ashleymadison.com to be repugnant. But it’s not illegal and I wouldn’t judge anyone who uses it because I have no idea what their circumstances are. My simple question to the witch-hunters is: does this mean that we need to discipline everyone who opened an Amazon account using a newtonma.gov email address? If the answer is yes, I think you’re going to have a tough time identifying a punishable offense. Using an email address for registration purposes isn’t a violation of any regulations that I’m aware of.
Also, reports have indicated that a very large number of the email addresses, for example most of the whitehouse.gov emails, were either fake or falsely used. Is anyone privy to whether the newtonma.gov address actually exists and whether it was knowingly used?
This would be a far bigger deal if a city employee had used a city issued credit card to pay for a website account. But using a city email address to register for that account, doesn’t even rise to the level of penny ante for me. Punishing employees for such a low level offense is a sure fire way to create a disgruntled work force.
What we should all be talking about is the spate of armed robberies that have hit the Garden City. Guns, knives, pistol whipping… and we’re focused on Ashley Madison. Seems kinda cRaZy!!!