I'm not sure which comedy shows you're watching, but I've never seen then use non-famous people's leaked personal correspondence to make fun of them, nor would I find that very funny.

I was thinking more along the lines of reading a message about a dress/laundry, etc that's followed up by a joke about Bill Clinton.

this is why you don't have a comedy show.

>> "I expect the staff of the various network evening comedy shows to be combing through this for raw material"

I would be disgusted if they did. It's private information. Just because someone stole it and made it public doesn't mean you should propagate it further.

You're absolutely correct, but I really wish we could get away from this idea that anything on the Internet can be private. If it's on the Internet, it should be considered public, especially if it's on someone else's servers. Maybe some day this won't be true, but today in 2016, it is. Don't put private data on the Internet.

>> "You're absolutely correct, but I really wish we could get away from this idea that anything on the Internet can be private."

I don't think that's possible. It's too integral. Think about communications you make that are intended to be private between you and the person receiving it (your doctor, the government). No matter how important the communication I think in 10-20 years there will be no option to snail mail that. Snail mail could be 'hacked' much easier but there are laws in place to prosecute people for violating that expected privacy. The same thing should happen with communications online. Of course this all depends on your views on privacy. I believe privacy is a essential right, one which we must defend or there will be severe consequences. It's very difficult to do that online but just saying 'anything you post online should be considered public' erodes privacy rights massively as it is such an important communications mechanism.

Sure, that's the ideal, but that's not the reality on the ground. People treat logins to websites like it's a guarantee of privacy, and it's just not. Maybe once we have standardized and widely used end-to-end crypto (keybase), have some real authentication (extension of end-to-end crypto), and take computer security seriously (stop using C and C++, to start) we can start to consider things communicated via the Internet to be private. But we're not there yet and we need to get across to people that if you put your name and photos up on a dating site, that information is public and you should be prepared to deal with the consequences.

I think "this one guy writes said $stuff" "and she replied $morestuff" followed by a punch line that draws on some fairly recent gaff by a (Muslim) head of state, diplomat, CEO, etc is sufficiently within the envelope of what's acceptable. You don't have to reveal names and details to be funny.

Except that then encourages people to go through the leaked info to find more "funny" stuff.

the people that will dig through this for negative purposes will do it regardless of who makes jokes about it.

If my info (I'm not muslim) was leaked in a dump I wouldn't care if some intern in an office somewhere went through it to find something useful as long as long as a large fraction of it isn't published all together.