WASHINGTON — Following the massive data dump of the spouse-cheating website Ashley Madison, it has been learned that hundreds of employees with the Obama administration had paid accounts with the site and used their federal offices to access it.
The Associated Press (AP) outlines that it has traced hundreds of the 37 million Ashley Madison users back to the White House, Congress, Pentagon, Department of State, Department of the Treasury and over 20 other governmental departments.
“They included at least two assistant U.S. attorneys; an information technology administrator in the Executive Office of the President; a division chief, an investigator and a trial attorney in the Justice Department; a government hacker at the Homeland Security Department and another DHS employee who indicated he worked on a U.S. counter-terrorism response team,” it reports.
The AP is not releasing names “because they are not elected officials or accused of a crime.” However, it did obtain an admission from one Department of Justice investigator who spoke on the condition of anonymity in part because he was “deeply embarrassed.”
“I was doing some things I shouldn’t have been doing,” he acknowledged.
U.S. News and World Report outlines that in May, the District of Columbia had more Ashley Madison users per capita than any city in America. Approximately 15,000 email addresses connected with the site end with .gov or .mil. Over 6,700 were enlisted in the Army, 1,600 in the Navy and 800 in the Marines.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter says that the Pentagon is investigating those email addresses connected with members of the military.
“Of course it’s an issue, because conduct is very important,” he stated during a briefing on Thursday. “We expect good conduct on the part of our people.”
Adultery is a prosecutable offense under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Maximum penalties include dishonorable discharge and forfeiture of pay.
State government employees were also found as users as a result of the data dump, with 73 users being from the state of Kentucky alone. There were reportedly 27 users from the New York Department of Education and 11 with the Arizona Department of Corrections. NASA, JP Morgan, Bank of America and Boeing were also found on the list, but have yet to be verified.
“Whether in this world or the world to come, if we don’t turn from our sins and renounce them, they will catch up with us and find us out. Count on it,” wrote Dr. Michael Brown in a post on Thursday, pointing to Numbers 32:23, which reads, “[B]e sure your sin will find you out.”
“As Paul wrote to Timothy, ‘The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later,'” he continued. “One way or another, sooner or later, we reap what we sow, and if you want to avoid an embarrassing harvest, don’t sow embarrassing seeds.”
“If you knew that tomorrow, the whole world would know about something ugly you did in private today, would you do it?” Brown asked. “One day, the whole universe will know. The Ashley Madison hacking is like child’s play compared to what’s coming.”
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