Abortion and Data Privacy: New Cause for Concern

 

With the June 24 Dobbs decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey, the U. S. Supreme Court withdrew the nationwide blockade against the intention of many states to ban abortion to a greater or lesser degree.  Depending on where you live, abortion may already be illegal or will shortly become so. 

 

Texas, where I live, is one of the more aggressive states, having effectively banned most abortions since last fall by authorizing private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion.  To the best of my knowledge, the penalties for performing abortion focus mainly on the providers.  But any woman who wants an abortion now faces a new forest of legal complications, including the possibility that law enforcement agencies may obtain extremely private information such as data from period apps in building a case that an abortion was performed.

 

In a recent Vox online piece, Sara Morrison pointed out that although women concerned about keeping their possible pregnancy status private should probably get rid of their period apps, that is not the only way you can be spied on, although period-app companies have a rather poor record when it comes to data privacy anyway. 

 

Most media companies have a boilerplate clause as part of that agreement everybody pretends to read (and nobody does), which allows them to share information with legally constituted law enforcement agencies that have a reason to obtain it.  So even if a woman sent a private text message to her closest friend saying that she thought she was pregnant, and a state police investigation thought it was relevant in prosecuting an abortionist, they could legally obtain that message. 

 

The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters these days for anyone who spends any amount of time online, which is pretty much everybody.  While the Fourth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution guarantees the right to be secure in one's "persons, houses, papers, and effects," it does allow searches (presumably including online ones) in cases where a crime is suspected and a warrant for the search can be justified. 

 

What is so different today from the circumstances in 1792, when the Bill of Rights was enacted, is that all of us leave electronic trails that are in legal gray areas in many cases.  Simply being on social media and using one's mobile phone creates gobs of data that clever analysts with adequate resources and access to commercial databases by means of search warrants can use to create an incredibly intimate portrait, including one's pregnancy status or attempts to obtain an abortion. 

 

Morrison says the ultimate solution is better data-privacy laws.  And she may be right.  The problem with this is that the entire economic basis of social media relies on the violation of the kind of privacy that data privacy laws would protect.  So unless the Big Tech giants figure out an entirely new revenue model, their heavy hands on the scale of justice will outweigh any desire on the part of the general public to be more private online.

 

This is not an easy column for me to write, because I am personally opposed to abortion.  At the same time, I realize that trying to enact (or revoke) a law that creates a situation which is hugely unpopular among a large segment of the public leads to situations in which law either loses respect or unduly harsh measures are used to enforce it.  Probably some of both will happen in the coming months as the nation readjusts to the new circumstances surrounding abortion.

 

Judging from the way Morrison wrote her article, she seemed to take the point of view of a woman who finds herself pregnant against her intention and wants to get an abortion, but lives in a state where abortion is now illegal.  What are the options?

 

Over half of current abortions are achieved by means of medication, which means the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol taken to induce a spontaneous abortion.  Many states are or will shortly take steps to make such medications illegal for use in abortion, and the natural first thought of many—to order them online—leaves one open to surveillance as explained above.

 

The next option would be to travel out of state to a place where abortions are still performed.  But in a state like Texas, even helping someone with travel arrangements could be grounds for a lawsuit—remote grounds, maybe, but who wants to do something that leaves their friends liable to be sued?  And everyone's whereabouts are being tracked 24/7, or at least the whereabouts of your phone, unless  you turn it off.  So as things stand, there are really not many places to hide.

 

Far from solving the problem, the Dobbs decision has brought abortion into the spotlight of public consciousness and debate in a way that perhaps hasn't been equaled since the original 1973 decision that legalized it by judicial fiat nationwide.  The real problem, the one that lies deeper than online privacy, or legal decisions or codes, is a cultural one.

 

We live in a hypocritical culture which both promises untrammeled freedom, and withholds from nearly everyone the means to realize that freedom, which is illusory in any case.  The culture has convinced millions of women that pregnancy and childbirth is simply not an option compared to all the other treasures of the world, and if a woman becomes a mother without meaning to, she must correct the error even if it means the death of an innocent being. 

 

This is a serious distortion of how the world is, and correcting it is going to take more than the passage or revocation of a few laws or judicial rulings.  But if Dobbs and its fallout get us to thinking about these things, there is at least hope that the truth will eventually emerge.  And it is only the truth that makes people truly free.

 

Sources:  Sara Morrison's "Should I delete my period app? And other post-Roe privacy questions" appeared on Vox at https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/7/6/23196809/period-apps-roe-dobbs-data-privacy-abortion.  I also referred to a list of what many of the states are doing about abortion laws at https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-states-a767801145ad01617100e57410a0a21d.

Will Facebook Kill Holly?

 

I have to be careful about how I write today's column.  I do not want to betray any trusts.  But on the other hand, a topic that up to now has been an abstraction for me has become personal.  A statistic has turned into someone I know by only two degrees of separation.  To protect anonymity, I have changed names and some details of what I will write here.  But I assure you that what I am going to write is based on facts as personally told to me yesterday by someone I will call Holly, who is a twelve-year-old girl.

 

Facebook, which has now renamed itself Meta, has been in the news a lot lately, and in this column as well, because of revelations by a whistleblower named Frances Haugen.  Haugen is a former Facebook employee who has made thousands of pages of internal company documents public, and has testified to Congress that Facebook's own research showed how harmful Instagram and other Facebook services are to teenagers (girls especially) at the same time that Facebook's CEO (and owner of 55% of Facebook's voting stock) Mark Zuckerberg was saying that his firm did not have such data.  The blowback from articles in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets detailing the hypocritical actions of Zuckerberg and his company have been so severe that the firm dropped plans it had announced to develop a new service for preteens called Instagram Kids. 

 

A recent article on the Mind Matters website described these problems and quoted results of a 2017 survey by the UK's Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement that showed, among other damning evidence, that the average age at which a child creates an Instagram account is 10, even though the software says you must be at least 13 to join.  Among users aged 14 to 24, all but one of the social-media platforms surveyed showed a negative score for well-being. 

 

With all this as a background, let me introduce Holly.  My wife and I have known her slightly for at least a couple of years, and when she was ten she invited us to see her elementary school's production of Peter Pan, which for an older couple with no children was quite a treat.  Although she has since moved to a nearby town, she has the opportunity to visit us now and then, and yesterday was one of those visits.

 

Holly is one of those girls who will rattle on about whatever she's doing if you just stand there and look interested, so my wife and I invited her in and we listened to what she had to say about what she'd been doing since we saw her almost a year ago.  She talked about horses, a vacation trip her family took back East, and then school.  She attends school in a medium-size town that has a reputation for old-fashioned conservative family values, and if something bad is happening there, it's probably happening everywhere else too. 

 

She had her smartphone with her, of course, and as she took it out she said her parents have put some controls on it to limit her social-media use.  While I cannot recall her exact words, the following is substantially what she said next, when we asked her how things have gone at school with COVID-19. 

 

"Oh, it's been bad.  One of my friends committed suicide over the summer.  They were bullying her and it just got so bad she couldn't take it anymore.  That's why I don't mind my folks doing what they did to my phone."

 

After Holly left and I had a chance to think about the enormity of what she told me, it began to sink in that here was a twelve-year-old girl having to deal with the suicide of a personal friend of hers, caused at least in part by the baleful influence of social media. 

 

I don't know anything about this incident other than what Holly told me.  Scientists would call this "anecdotal evidence" and dismiss it as useless for analytical purposes.  But it brings home the diabolical influence of social media on children in a way that no amount of statistics or studies have done for me.  Somewhere there are parents of the sixth-grader who committed suicide who will never see their daughter reach adulthood, get married, or have children of her own.  And during the girl's lifetime, because she was one of the twenty-two million users of Instagram or whatever social media platform contributed to her death, she enriched Mark Zuckerberg personally by some amount of dollars he could charge for ads on her phone.  I hope he enjoys them now, because he won't get a chance to enjoy them where he's going.

 

Holly, at the tender age of twelve, already seems to have a realistic sense of how dangerous social media can be.  And, Lord willing, this sense will preserve her from the hazards of using Facebook products when one is a teenage girl.  But she has all of her teenage years to negotiate ahead of her, and she is not out of the social-media woods yet.

 

We live in an age that is hostile to children and teenagers in many ways.  If a child manages to survive the first nine months of its existence in the womb without being aborted, as about 600,000 children are each year in the U. S., she or he becomes a kind of hobby that our economy tolerates but does not encourage—a "lifestyle choice" that burdens the otherwise ideal worker with expenses and obligations that distract him or her from being totally devoted to the job and to consumption of products and services such as Facebook.  Upon entering school, an institution that was formerly safeguarded from commercial exploitation back in the 1960s when I experienced it, the child becomes the target of 24/7 ads from streaming services, the various entertainment platforms such as video games, and eventually from smartphones.  Arrayed against each individual child is the Big Tech oligopoly of world-class expertise that extracts the last drop of attention with manipulative artificial-intelligence-enhanced algorithms that do things no ordinary human being can understand, algorithms that can intensify social interactions into a tornado of abuse that makes death at one's own hand look like the only alternative. 

 

We prayed with Holly before she left, for protection from the many dangers that life as a girl in America presents today.  God is more powerful that Mark Zuckerberg.  But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to think so.

 

Sources:  I thank Denyse O'Leary for drawing my attention to the article "Facebook's . . . Er, Meta's Instagram Problem" by Heather Zeiger, which appeared at https://mindmatters.ai/2021/12/facebookser-metas-instagram-problem/. 

Against Cartesian Dualism

 

Every now and then, it's useful to look at the philosophical underpinnings of current thought and what implications they have for engineering ethics.  In a recent post on the website of the journal First Things, professor of biblical and religious studies Carl Trueman noted that Cartesian dualism—a way of looking at the human person promulgated by René Descartes (1596-1650)—is enjoying a comeback in the popular mind, although modern philosophy has long since discarded it as an inadequate model.

 

If you know anything about Descartes, you will probably recall his most famous saying:  "I think, therefore I am."  He arrived at that conclusion after discarding everything he could think of that might possibly not be true—the evidence of his senses, things he knew on authority, and so on.  Whatever else might be false, he reasoned, he couldn't help thinking that he was still thinking, and therefore there must be a thinker somewhere.  He was so impressed by this idea that he developed a whole philosophy around it, which came to be known as Cartesian dualism.

 

Descartes believed that the soul—which in modern terms pretty much amounts to what we would call the mind—was a "spiritual substance" that was immaterial, without dimensions or location.  And the body he believed to be completely material, an entirely separate substance from the soul, consisting of the brain, the nerves, the muscles, etc., all of which operate under the control of the immaterial mind and will.  As to exactly how the immaterial controlled the material, Descartes wasn't sure.  But he thought the point of contact might be the pineal gland, a small pine-cone-shaped gland near the middle of the brain.

 

Modern science has discovered that the pineal gland, far from controlling the entire body, mainly secretes melatonin, which affects sleep patterns—but that's about it.  And modern philosophy has discarded Cartesian dualism, because nobody after Descartes was ever able to show how a completely immaterial thing like Descartes' hypothetical soul could affect a physical thing like the body.

 

But this news evidently hasn't reached a lot of women athletes who submitted an "amicus" (friend of the court) brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, urging the court to uphold abortion rights in the upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, in which the State of Missouri is seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal in the U. S.

 

As Trueman observes, the women in the amicus brief speak of their bodies as nothing more than sophisticated tools or instruments, operated by their minds and wills.  They say that they "depend on the right to control their bodies and reproductive lives in order to reach their athletic potential."  If we stop with only that quotation, we can see that (a) the operative verb is "control" and (b) the purpose of controlling the body is to "reach their athletic potential." 

 

In other words, for these women, their body is a means to the end of achieving success in athletics, just as a fast race car is a means to achieving success in the Indy 500.  And prohibiting abortion is like compelling a race-car driver to give a ride to a 300-pound hitchhiker during the race. 

 

Cartesian dualism shows up in lots of places these days outside of law courts.  The whole transhumanist movement, of which famed entrepreneur Elon Musk is a proponent, is based on the idea that the real you is basically a software program running on the wet computer called the brain.  The phrase "meat cage" that some people use to describe the body partakes of this same idea—that we are not our bodies, but that we use our bodies in a way not much different in principle than using a car or a computer. 

 

Perhaps the most pernicious feature of Cartesian dualism is the temptation to assess the humanity or non-humanity of other people based on our judgment as to whether they have a mind worthy of the name.  I would imagine it is easier to contemplate an abortion if you believe the fetus in question has not developed a mind yet.  And the same goes for people who are mentally disabled, suffer from Alzheimer's disease, or are otherwise incapacitated to the extent that their minds no longer control their bodies adequately.  Perhaps it's just as well to sever the connection between the mind and the body if the mind can't do its job controlling the body any more.

 

Well, if Cartesian dualism isn't true, how should we think of the relation between the mind and will (or soul, to use the more old-fashioned term) and the body?  The model of the person Descartes was trying to displace is called hylomorphism, originated by Aristotle.  Philosopher Peter Kreeft explains that Aristotle's theory considers the body to be what the person is made of, and the soul as the form or molding and patterning influence of the body.  So matter (Greek hyle) is "informed" by form (morphe) to create one integral thing with two aspects or causes:  the material cause, namely the body, and the formal cause, namely the soul.  But the human person is one unique thing, not two.

 

If hylomorphism was more popular than Cartesian dualism, I think we would see a lot of salutary changes in everything from attitudes toward the life issues (abortion, euthanasia, etc.) to medical and surgical procedures (sex-change operations, transhumanist initiatives) and even tattoos.  If you thought you were hiring a tattoo artist to burn an image of some hip-hop star on your very being, instead of just some piece of machinery you happen to be living in now, you might think twice before doing it. 

 

But the spirit of the age favors Cartesian dualism.  As consumers, we are urged to treat the rest of the world as a selectable, disposable warehouse of products and services—why not treat our bodies the same way?  I'm glad that my university is a rare holdout among public institutions of higher education for continuing to require that all its undergraduates take at least one philosophy course.  In such a course, they stand  a chance of hearing about Cartesian dualism and why it is no longer respectable.  And they might even take what they hear in class seriously, and apply it to their lives.  Such a hope is all that keeps some educators going.

 

Sources:  Carl Trueman's article "The Body Is More Than a Tool" appeared on the First Things website at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/10/the-body-is-more-than-a-tool.  Elon Musk's promotion of transhumanism is described at https://futurism.com/elon-musk-is-looking-to-kickstart-transhuman-evolution-with-brain-hacking-tech.  Peter Kreeft demolishes Cartesian dualism (and a lot of other false philosophical ideas) in his book Summa Philosophica (St. Augustine's Press, 2012).  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on hylomorphism.

Don't Be a Technocrat

 

Much as some engineers would like to ignore politics, it's irresponsible to do so.  I'm not saying you have to be a political junkie, but an awareness of the ultimate purposes and effects of the organization you work for is part of being a responsible engineer.  Writing in the Human Life Review, bioethicist Wesley J. Smith has issued a call to defeat technocracy before it takes over more of our lives than it has already.  And every engineer should hear that call.

 

The meaning of the word "technocracy" has changed over the years.  Engineer William Henry Smyth coined it back in 1919 to mean democracy as mediated through scientists and engineers.  For a brief time in the 1930s it became a small political movement of its own, favoring the management of society by engineers and other experts rather than by democratic means.  That sense is usually the one which is used today.  A pure technocracy would be in radical contrast to a democracy, where the ultimate authority resides in the people at large.  In a technocracy, all important public (and many private) decisions are made only by experts, qualified by the usual professional credentials of education, licensing, or other signs of expertise.  And by implication, a technocrat is a sort of technically-educated bureaucrat, one of those experts to whom power has been entrusted to do the right thing for the uneducated rabble, who aren't smart enough to know what is good for them.

 

As you can tell, I'm no fan of technocracy, and neither is Wesley Smith.  He sees technocracy as a primary threat in a spectrum of what are called "life issues":  abortion, euthanasia, healthcare rationing, and the destruction of the privilege of conscientious objection for medical workers.  The problem stems from the stunted view of human life that technocracy tends to have.  Because this stunted view seems to be all too common among engineers, I'll pause to describe it in some detail.

 

Engineers are great at getting things done, but not so great at deciding what things need to be done.  In a technocracy, certain fundamental assumptions are made without questioning or even thinking about them.  For example, one such assumption is that increasing a country's GDP (gross domestic product) is a good thing.  So anything that contributes to the GDP is good, and anything else is bad.

 

That sounds nice, except what about all those useless old people in rest homes?  They can't contribute to the GDP—they're too old to work.  And what about children?  Same deal—they are a drag on the economy, not a benefit.  Even the worst technocrat can see, you would think, that if a culture quits having children, pretty soon there won't be any culture to worry about.  But it was technocrats who came up with the brilliant idea of China's one-child policy, which threw a giant monkey wrench into that country's demography and is threatening to wreck its future economy even now. 

 

Engineers are great at coming up with more efficient ways to do things.  And within the proper context, greater efficiency is indeed a worthwhile goal, if you're talking about, say, energy efficiency or reducing a waste stream.  But when you try to apply that same attitude outside its proper sphere, you end up like Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher that Smith quotes as saying the respect one should receive depends on your "capacity for physical, social, and mental interaction with other beings."  A person with such an attitude, which is entirely consistent with the goal of increasing a country's GDP, will take a dim view of people with disabilities of any kind, and will see nothing wrong with, for example, aborting any baby with Down's syndrome, or refusing health care to an old useless guy with only a high-school education who's probably going to die in a few more years anyway, in preference to a young productive college grad. 

 

Essential to doing engineering ethics right is the cultivation of one's moral imagination.  The easy way out is simply to do what you're told, acting as a small cog in the large organizations that most engineers are a part of, and not asking about the wider implications or effects of one's work.  But it's attitudes like that which have allowed China to start constructing their social-credit system, which Smith cites as an egregious example of technocracy gone bad.

 

For those unfamiliar with it, think of social credit as your credit score, only applied to your whole life instead of a narrow aspect of your financial behavior.  The Chinese government, with input from their technocrats, decides what kind of citizen they want.  Then they set about giving points to people who behave the way they want, and taking away points from those who don't.  Intrusive technologies such as GPS tracking, facial recognition, and of course, informants, are deployed to find out who you associate with, what you do in your spare time, and what websites you visit.  (Even here in the West, our technocratic watchers in the private sector have perfected the website part of the business.)  And for people who do things the government doesn't like, such as going to church or meeting with other Christians or Muslims, loss of social credit score can mean restrictions in travel, loss of employment, or worse, not only for yourself but for your children as well, who had the bad judgment to be born to such ne'er-do-wells.

 

It can't happen here, can it?  Wesley Smith doesn't seem to think so, at least not in the full-bore prison-camp variety, because the Constitution would prevent it.  Well, I'm not so sure, because lately the Constitution has been found by its nine Supreme Court interpreters to say a lot of things that most people didn't think it was saying.

 

But one thing is for sure:  if engineers, who are vitally necessary to any sort of technocracy, individually and collectively refuse to destroy democracy and replace it with technocracy, that will be the end of technocracy.  Idealistic?  Maybe.  But the first step is to understand what technocracy is and what its goals are, and only then can you decide to oppose it.

 

Sources:  Wesley J. Smith's article  "Defeating Technocracy is Crucial to Life," appeared in Human Life Review, vol. 47, Winter 2021, pp. 30-38.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on technocracy.

Light On the Dark Side: Planned Parenthood and Ashley Madison

In the last few weeks, an organization called the Center for Medical Progress posted videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing cash transactions involving the body parts of aborted fetuses.  And just last week, a hacker group calling itself the Impact Team posted personal information on 32 million users of Ashley Madison, a website that advertises itself as a matchmaker for those wishing to have extramarital affairs.  In both of these cases, the hackers or investigators "went to the dark side" technologically, using spy technology or hacking abilities to penetrate secrets of the target organizations.  What can we say about the use of technology in this way?  Does the end justify the means?  Or are we not permitted to do evil, even if good may come from it?

Though the technology is new, the moral dilemma posed by these cases is very old.  Both St. Augustine (354 - 430 A. D.) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 -1274 A. D.) took up the question of whether good intentions can justify an evil act.  In fact, Aquinas cited Augustine approvingly as he considered this question:  ". . . Augustine says that there are some actions which neither a good end nor a good will can make good." 

For those familiar with digital logic, we can express what Aquinas says about the matter in terms of an AND function of three inputs A, B, and C.  All inputs  have to be true in order for the output of the AND gate to be true.  For Augustine and Aquinas, not only must the will (intention) of the actor be good.  And it's not sufficient even if the outcome of the action (the end) is good.  The act itself has to be good, or at least not on a list of intrinsically evil acts, for the overall action to be permissible.

What does the list of intrinsically evil acts look like?  Well, most moral theorists include lying on the list.  Right there, the anonymous investigator of Planned Parenthood who posed as a buyer for a fetal-tissue company ran afoul of the no-evil-acts principle.  He wasn't telling the truth—there was no such company.  And he was wired with audio and video recording equipment that took down every word spoken by the Planned Parenthood representatives, who wouldn't have been so forthcoming if they had known the guy they were talking with was a spy, basically. 

How about the Impact Team, those Ashley Madison hackers?  We're on softer ground here.  About the worst moral transgression they committed was theft of the Ashley Madison records, though it is theft of a peculiarly digital kind, because Ashley Madison still has all the records they used to have.  They're just exposed to public view now, for curious spouses to peruse in case they have had some suspicions about whether their partner has been straying, or trying to.  As it turns out, there were a lot more wanna-be adulterers signed up than real ones.  One of the embarrassing things the Impact Team revealed about the website was that about 85% of the site's customers were men, and it's likely that many of the female profiles on the site were fabricated.  Add that to the fact that the site charged users $19 to allegedly remove all their personal data from the site, only they didn't, and Ashley Madison's business model looks to be coming apart at the seams.  Which is probably just what the Impact Team hoped would happen. 

Now, I happen to believe that the planet would be a better place if neither Planned Parenthood nor Ashley Madison existed as organizations, at least in their present forms.  If the actions of hackers or investigative journalists move circumstances in the direction of ending or diminishing the influence of these outfits, I think that outcome would be a good thing.  Does this mean I disagree with Augustine and Aquinas that a good end sometimes does justify intrinsically evil means?  Not necessarily.

Just to show how complicated things can get, let's consider St. Thomas's views on war, specifically, killing in the context of war.  He allowed as how there were sometimes "just wars" and in such cases, killing was justified in that context, even though murder was on that list of intrinsically evil acts. 

The people at the Center for Medical Progress may view what Planned Parenthood does in its abortion clinics as a war on unborn children.  They, along with virtually everyone else in the prolife community, reject violence as a means of stopping abortion.  But nobody was physically injured by their investigations.  Instead, the statements of Planned Parenthood personnel that were intended for a private audience have been exposed to the world—brought to the light, in other words.  The same happened with Ashley Madison's client lists.  Both organizations have issued strenuous condemnations of the people who exposed them, which is not surprising.  It's just like Jesus said:  "For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed." 

There is a difference between deciding that you would do a thing yourself and observing the actions of someone else in a historical process.  The radical abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859) killed numbers of slavery supporters and was captured as he tried to take over a Federal armory in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.  He was tried and executed for his crimes, but his actions brought attention to slavery in a way that moved the mysterious processes of history forward, and may have hastened the day when slavery was abolished throughout the entire U. S.  The U. S. Civil War was not a good thing in itself, but the outcome of ending slavery was.

I would not personally go around hacking somebody's private customer lists or carrying spy cameras to get the goods on somebody engaged in nefarious dealings.  But other people have already gone and done these things.  The Impact Team and the Center for Medical Progress knew what they were getting into, and I hope they are prepared for the legal and moral repercussions of their actions.  I'm not them, and I can't presume to say what natural or supernatural motives stirred them to their actions. 

But I can say that the exposure of evil deeds, leaving aside the means by which they are exposed, is a good outcome.  The vulnerability of sites like Ashley Madison to hacking is now known.  The fact that Planned Parenthood exchanges fetal tissue for money in long-standing contracted relationships with outside organizations is also known.  And while I might have advised the Impact Team and the Center for Medical Progress not to do what they did, they didn't ask me before they did it.  And maybe that's a good thing, too.

Sources:  My sources for information on the Ashley Madison hack included the Defense One military site (a lot of the users turned out to be military personnel) at http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/08/ashley-madison-hack-opm-government-military/119279/ and Wired.com articles at http://www.wired.com/2015/08/happened-hackers-posted-stolen-ashley-madison-data/

and http://www.wired.com/2015/08/ashley-madison-hack-exposes-wait-lousy-business/.  The latest Center for Medical Progress video as of this writing can be viewed at http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org.  I also referred to St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica (First Part of the Second Part, Question 20, Article 2) from which the above quotation from St. Augustine is taken (Anton C. Pegis, Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, Random House, 1945).  I also referred to an article on the Planned Parenthood videos on Yahoo at https://www.yahoo.com/health/with-release-of-6th-undercover-video-evidence-of-126520215477.html.  The quotation from Jesus is from the New Testament book of John, chapter 3, verse 20 (Revised Standard Version).