Vox Sentences: Why the Ashley Madison hack is such a big deal

Hackers just exposed millions of adulterers; the GOP presidential field doesn't like birthright citizenship; and New Orleans police officers convicted of gunning people down after Katrina get a new trial.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

So You're About To Be Publicly Shamed

Carl Court/Getty Images

• Hackers released an enormous amount of user data from the site Ashley Madison, a dating site for adulterists, yesterday. Vox's Timothy Lee explains.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• The data includes detailed information (including, in some cases, sexual fetishes) for 36 million accounts, and over 9 million credit card transactions.

  [The Verge / Ross Miller and Frank Bi]

• One problem: Ashley Madison didn't actually require users to verify their email addresses. So some of those addresses in the data dump might belong to innocent people who were maliciously or accidentally signed up.

  [The Intercept / Farai Chideya]

• The hackers, who go by the name Impact Team, announced last month that they'd hacked the site; when corporate owner Avid Life Media refused to shutter it, the hackers followed through on their threat to release user data.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• Some press reports say Impact Team objected to Ashley Madison on moral grounds. But if you read the group's releases, it seems clear they're mostly upset with Ashley Madison for creating fake female profiles to lure men to sign up for an already heavily-male site.

  [Bustle / Lauren Barbato]

• This is absolutely terrible timing for Ashley Madison; the company that owns them was hoping to go public in Europe soon.

  [Bloomberg / Kristen Schweizer]

• They're trying to recover by allowing users to delete their accounts for free, as opposed to the $20 they normally charge. Impact Team claims the deletion service didn't work anyway, because the company keeps the name and address on the credit cards used to pay the $20 fee.

  [Vox / Timothy B. Lee]

• There are genuine ethical dilemmas in how to look at, search in, or report on this data. The Awl's John Herrman lays them out pretty well.

  [The Awl / John Herrman]

• Here's one (not necessarily ethically recommended!) way to go about it: "I Talked To My Cheating Ex After Finding His Email In The Ashley Madison Hack."

  [BuzzFeed / Ellen Cushing]

The quest to overturn US v. Wong Kim Ark

Shutterstock

• Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson — the top three Republican presidential candidates in national polling — want to deny US citizenship to people who were born in and live in the US, but whose parents are unauthorized immigrants.

  [Talking Points Memo / Katharine Krueger]

• There are currently about 4.5 million children who are US citizens and have at least one unauthorized immigrant parent.

  [Immigration Policy Center]

• Donald Trump believes those 4.5 million people are not currently citizens, and that as president he could simply launch a court case to get the Supreme Court to agree. Then he pledges he'll deport them along with their parents.

  [Politico / Nick Gass]

• Donald Trump is, you will be shocked to learn, wrong. In the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that the US gives citizenship to anyone born on US soil regardless of immigration status (there are a few explicit exceptions). And even if the Court rejected that interpretation today, such a ruling would not automatically strip citizenship from people who already have it.

  [New York Daily News / Erika Lee]

• (You can argue that unauthorized immigration as we know it today barely existed in 1898, and you'd be right — the first law restricting immigration to the US in any way had passed only a few years earlier. But the decision is still pretty clear.)

• Other candidates believe Congress should pass a law to "clarify" the meaning of the 14th Amendment, or agree with Trump that the Supreme Court should change its interpretation of it.

  [Politico / Brianna Ehley]

• Trump et al. focus on the threat of Mexican immigrants crossing illegally into the US to birth "anchor babies." Actual unauthorized immigrants don't tend to name citizenship for children as a reason they came to the US, at all.

  [Latino Decisions]

• However, there is an actual birth tourism industry in the US. It's geared toward wealthy Chinese families who come legally on tourist visas.

  [Rolling Stone / Benjamin Carlson]

• There isn't good polling on birthright citizenship, but what polls there are suggest Americans are tightly divided and leaning against it.

  [CBS News / Rebecca Kaplan]

• European countries do not have unconditional birthright citizenship (though many of them grant citizenship at birth to native-born children of native-born parents, children who are born in and who have lived in the country for a certain amount of time, etc). European countries also have massive amounts of trouble with immigrant integration.

  [Migrant Integration Policy Index]

No one looks good in the Danziger Bridge case

Mario Tama/Getty Images

• A federal court of appeals has ordered a new trial for five New Orleans police officers who were convicted on civil-rights charges for gunning down two civilians on the Danziger Bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

• The 2005 incident — which is known as the Danziger Bridge Incident — was legitimately horrific. Not only were two people killed, including mentally handicapped man Ronald Madison, but Madison's brother was arrested immediately after escaping the bridge for the attempted murder of the police officers. Click here for a visual guide to the crime.

  [New Orleans Times-Picayune / Dan Swenson]

• The officers, and the New Orleans Police Department, have maintained that the officers were shot at first. But a subsequent investigation revealed evidence that the NOPD had tried to cover up the crime — by including false information in reports, including easily falsifiable things like how many times Madison was shot (they said once; it was really seven times).

  [NPR / John Burnett]

• The officers were convicted in both the deaths and the cover-up by a federal jury in 2013.

  [WWLTV.com]

• But wait! It turns out that throughout the 2013 trial, federal prosecutors were leaving anonymous website comments about the case. That is super-unethical. The initial ruling granting a new trial, at the district court level, described the result as an "online 21st-century carnival atmosphere."

  [5th Circuit Court of Appeals via Brad Heath / Twitter]

• The DOJ is also accused of trying to intimidate witnesses.

  [New Orleans Times-Picayune / Andy Grimm]

• The federal government has a chance to appeal to the Supreme Court, or to the full panel of 5th Circuit judges. But this ruling is an obstacle all the same.

  [5th Circuit Court of Appeals]

MISCELLANEOUS

New bucket list item: get trolled by a New York Times crossword. [Slate / Ruth Graham]

• Throughout the 19th century, basically every lease in New York expired on the same day. The results were as chaotic as you'd expect.

  [CityMetric / Alex Dean]

• Half of British people age 18-24 identify as not completely heterosexual.

  [YouGov / Will Dahlgreen and Anna-Elizabeth Shakespeare]

• The many meanings of faves.

  [The Message / Tracie McMillan Cottom]

• The founder of Snopes.com recounts the wildest story he investigated that turned out to actually be true. It's nuts.

  [io9 / Cheryl Eddy]

VERBATIM

"We ask journalists to keep some critical, dispassionate distance from their stories. But what happens when the stories they're covering are not abstractions, not just things that happen to other people? What happens when echoes of those stories keep sounding off in their own lives?" [NPR / Gene Demby]

• "Making artisanal stock options in your Brooklyn loft co-working space is expensive."

  [Bloomberg View / Matt Levine]

• "So it turns out that a lot of people on Tinder don’t know who Jeremy Corbyn is or don’t care."

  [New Statesman / Ruby Lott-Lavigna]

• "A survey taken in the Franken office determined that the least desirable place to live in the country is actually inside the Washington Post's headquarters."

  [Sen. Al Franken to Washington Post / Christopher Ingraham]

• "'Nathan was born at 23 weeks. If I'd known then what I do now, I'd have wanted him to die in my arms."

  [Alexia Pearce to The Guardian / Tracy McVeigh]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Johnny Harris

• The #1 reason people die early, in each country

  [YouTube / Johnny Harris]

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