JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A day after a local judge admitted he logged onto the cheating website Ashley Madison, News4jax has obtained the names of other public employees who also registered for the site, some of them using government email accounts, others using their personal emails.
On the list are the names of police lieutenants, upper brass in a local fire department and high school and elementary school teachers.
Some of the individuals used government emails to register, which is a violation of policy. News4Jax is only identifying Ashley Madison users who were voted into office.
The St. Johns County Sheriff's Office is just one of several agencies looking into what employees are looking at on the Internet after finding out one of their lieutenants registered on the site.
That lieutenant's name, along with 30 million others, was released by Internet hackers. Locally, that list includes:
- 6 Duval County teachers
- 1 St. Johns County Fire Rescue lieutenant
- 1 Duval County school security guard
- 1 St. Johns County school safety coordinator
- 1 corrections officer
- 1 a city worker
Duval County Judge Waddel Wallace admitted on Tuesday that he accessed the site because he was curious. In a statement he said he never got on the site from a government email account, never had an affair, never released his identity to anyone and apologized to his wife.
Social media expert Dwann Rollinson said the hack is a wake-up call for anyone online. She said it should shock people into the reality that nothing you put on the Internet is truly private.
"What it shows is that even in society, no matter how much people look up to you, there are some core issues of immorality that we all deal with whether we want to admit it or not. And because we are finding preachers on this site, public officials, teachers and people who we look up to, it's disheartening. But what it shows is that people are having moral failures," Rollinson said.
The man who uncovered the list, Andrew Ladanowski, is a South Florida IT specialist who said he went through the list specifically looking for names of state attorneys or judges. But as the list is published on other websites, social media experts say it's only a matter of time before searching for Ashley Madison users is made easier.