Is Publishing Stolen Twitter Documents Fair Game?
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 l
