The publication of stolen internal documents from Twitter on TechCrunch and other sites has raised serious questions about the ethics and legality of doing so.
If you’ve missed the story so far, a French hacker obtained access to multiple accounts held by Twitter employees including co-founder Ev Williams. Using this access, the hacker obtain numerous internal documents that showed company projections, plans for a Twitter reality show, and a lot more.
Dubbed #Twittergate on Twitter, a majority of those offering opinions on Twitter about the publication of the documents have been against their publication. The Wall Street Journal chimes in on the ethics side, and notes Twitter comments such as “Bad juju, TechCrunch. Not ethical to post ANY hacked confidential docs” and “Industrial espionage, cloud hacking, skating on the edge of journalistic ethics: #twittergate has everything!’” “This is the dark side of Silicon Valley.”
Michael Arrington’s only defense so far is to say that whatever lands in his inbox is fair game and to say that other sites do it, so why shouldn’t he. He also flips the negatives around by saying that “Hopefully this situation will encourage Google and Google users to consider more robust data security policies in the future.”
In saying that I agree with the concerns of many over the publication of the information, I can only do so in the context that the issue isn’t black and white. Arrington is right in saying that other publications print this material (notably mainstream media outlets often do as well) but that in itself does not make the decision to publish the documents right.
The bigger question is whether there was a public interest in publishing stolen material that included clearly personal information on employees along with corporate documents (the material included shots of Ev Williams’ Facebook account.) You might be able to mount some defense around the corporate documents, but Ev’s Facebook account doesn’t even come close. Secondly by publishing the documents there may be some legal issues given that they have been illegally obtained; although the liability doesn’t fall with the site publishing the material for the theft itself, the publication of said documents may constitute an offense in a similar way to possessing stolen physical goods.
