But the employees who browsed the goods on Ashley Madison or used the Internet connections in their federal offices to pay membership fees may or may not have been doing anything sexually explicit. They could have spent hours every week on the site, or visited once. They may be actually having an affair, or they may not.

“Is the agency making moral judgments about whether or not it’s okay to be arranging an affair?” asked Joseph Kaplan, a federal employment attorney with Passman & Kaplan in Washington, who says it could be wrong to automatically fire someone or haul them in on misconduct charges just because they got to the site through their government e-mail address.

“Where do they draw the line between what’s acceptable and what’s not?” Kaplan asked.