If we only posted things that companies gave us permission to post
this would be a press release site and none of you would be here.
News is stuff someone doesn’t want you to write.
The rest is advertising.
This is what's profoundly wrong with this Arrington character. What an awful, tabloid approach to defining news. New reporting is, quite simply, doing the legwork to bring stories to your attention.
They might not have come to your attention for any number of reasons - distance from the source (too many nodes between you and it for it to get carried to your ears by your social network), original source too small/obscure, information not meme/viral enough (too complex? takeaways not clear? relevance to you is difference to relevance of all the potential, necessary carrier nodes it would take to reach you), you need your information filtered because you're too plugged in; privacy / legal status of the source is just one reason why you might not get information.
Whether a news outlet should carry that last set of info to your ears or not is up for debate; but to see his role as binary - advertising/PR newswire vs. broadcaster of leaked private information... well, how sad.
He's not alone of course. Tabloids have been operating on basically just that model for eons. With the occasional fabrication when they can't get enough leaks to fill the inches.
You sir are right. I should of course trust the officials and you as to wether or not I should know something. Those people didn't get to be official without obviously having the utmost concern for my well-being, and without wanting me to be fully informed of the important stuff. Who do I think I am, wanting to know something that someone else deems improper for me to know?
Don't forget genuine analysis, especially in the sense of placing things in context, historically speaking.
That's something that's hugely missing from the "tech reporting" (ha) of today. Almost no one considers the things that came before.
For example, I saw no one else comparing Google Wave to OpenDoc... or even remarking on the old command-line tool, talk/ytalk. Both of which are extremely relevant to Wave as a product.
Is a newspaper full of what's new, or is it news because it's in the paper?
Most of the front-page articles on HN are not news, they are recycled anti-business school puff pieces. And yet, this is Hacker News.
If Google releases a product that looks suspiciously like Apple's failed OpenDoc initiative from, oh, 12 years ago, that's news. If they're focusing on a communication medium style that totally existed before, but which was largely abandoned because it was incredibly annoying, that's news, too. Those who don't learn, doomed repeat, etc., etc.
The question he was asked was actually whether he would want someone to publish TC's documents. The answer is obviously no. However, that's completely separate from whether he would consider it news. It's news whether or not you want it to be.
I’ve been going over this in my mind and this is what I’ve come up with.
On one hand you can look at it as a straight theft. If a person steals a bunch of computers and then sells them to a computer shop for 25% of the retail price the shop owner is guilty of a crime (selling stolen goods) even if he had no part in the initial theft. In that case I’d say it’s immoral on Techcrunch’s part. Because while the digital copies of files don’t have monetary value like physical computers they have intellectual property value that could do significant damage to Twitter and in doing so cause the company to lose large sums of money.
ON THE OTHER HAND, most of the great scandals both in Government and in Corporate America have been revealed by whistle blowers who essentially stole documents and passed them on to reporters. So there’s a precedent where stealing documents can actually be a very moral thing.
In the end I think it boils down to what the documents reveal. In the case of whistle blowers they're still stealing something but we forgive the theft because it’s done to protect society from a greater harm. The good out weighs the bad. So if these documents reveal some kind of malfeasants on Twitter’s part I could see publishing them as being justified. If not I think you’re probably right and this is an immoral act on Techcrunch’s part.
I think I could agree with airing a companies' dirty laundry if it was dirty enough.
Techcrunch would have mentioned it if they found anything that was more than vaguely interesting, so I feel confident saying that they don't have anything big enough to justify this violation of privacy. Techcrunch is dirtying it's name for private information that is not even newsworthy.
It's a public policy exemption. A greater good call by a grateful society would not punish TC for its crime/immorality if it deemed the leak to be of sufficient value to public interest. That's a risk the publisher/whistleblower takes but it's only a risk if there's an enforcement/judgment process in place, or else TC faces no such risk and can publish anything it damn well likes without having to estimate the value to the public interest of its actions.
Which, quite frankly, is what they frequently failed to do in the past.Their judgement is suspect, to me at least, even if they've never been punished.
I wouldn’t say “ends justify the means” is accurate here. Morality’s a tricky bag no matter how you slice it but one thing most ethical systems have in common is a belief that harming others to benefit yourself is wrong. So, for example, if you’re my boss and someone offers to pay you a million dollars to fire me even though I’m a good worker that would be wrong. Even though you would gain far more than I would lose. Because you’re causing harm to me in order to benefit yourself.
What I was saying is that it’s justified if the benefit is to society. This is based on two principles that are pretty much accepted across the board as far as ethical systems go. One, you are part of society and there’s nothing immoral about defending yourself against harm. Two, societal benefits are in the macro so even if a company is only causing a little harm per person the amount of harm prevented adds up.
So in my eyes and in the eyes of most ethical systems publishing these documents wouldn't be justified even if Techcrunch gains more than Twitter loses. Unless there's information in those documents that would benefit society as a whole (or if Twitter was causing great harm to someone else and it would be stopped by revealing the documents)
It would seem to me that you are effectively treating society as this single entity and saying that so long as an action benefits that entity then it is moral even if the action itself would be considered immoral in another scenario.
However society is not a single entity, but rather a collection of individuals that can be affected by an event in different and often opposing ways. To some it may be beneficial, but to others not so. Sure the group that benefits may be in the majority, but to ignore the minority group and declare that to "society" the outcome was good is to ignore the different views and interests that make up a society.
When making moral judgments you have to treat society as a single entity. Either that or choose to simply not make the judgments at all. Because there are just too many people in society to calculate the exact amount of good or bad a decision will be to them.
Accordingly, you can only really use "it's good for society" if there's a clear benefit. Exposing a chemical company that dumps waste into a town's water supply is a clear benefit. As is making false financial statements in order to inflate your stock to the point where millions will eventually lose their savings. These are clear cases where a whistle blowers in justified.
But yes, as far as what's a clear case there is some judgment involved. As my old ethics teacher used to say Morality isn't a math equation it's an essay question.
Posting this is in techcrunch's best interests. It'll get them a ton of traffic. I'm sure they'll milk it for a 5-6 posts. Then a few weeks down the road, someone will do the same thing to them, and they'll do another 2-3 posts with outrage that their privacy and confidential information was violated.
I'm sure they'll keep all the juicy stuff hidden. Since they are working with twitter on what they will/won't release. Although its kinda stupid, considering the stuff will show up on other websites
I weakly agree with you, but consider a few counterexamples. Were Bernstein and Woodward wrong to publish information they received from Deep Throat about Watergate? If someone were to leak confidential info on the Bush administration's role in Guantanamo Bay, should the press publish that? How about Microsoft's Halloween memo? Was that fair game?
There's a line somewhere. Twitter's financial position somehow seems different than Watergate. I'm kinda curious where you think the line is. It's not a universal "journalists should never publish confidential information", because in many cases, it's very important for the public to know.
Now that we know who Deep Throat was, Woodward and Bernstein are no longer quite the shining example of capital-J Journalism that they remain in the field's hagiography.
They were spoon-fed all their information by the acting head of the FBI -- the free press didn't oust Nixon, the powers that be did.
Don't forget that the anonymous sources are steering the story, and that their agenda is often more interesting than the actual information.
It's very different from Watergate! The Watergate scandal involved the U.S. government, which is accountable to its citizens, and this is about a privately held company, accountable only to itself and its investors. Also, the Deep Throat information helped reveal a major violation of federal law. This kind of information (according to TC themselves) would only be useful to Twitter's competitors.
With that said, I still can't help but be curious. It'll be interesting to see how all of this plays out, and if some of the documents do end up released to the public, I'll probably cave and check up on the juicy tech gossip.
> a privately held company, accountable only to itself and its investors.
Well, no. Companies are also accountable to their customers and to society. If they were dumping large amounts of toxics into rivers, that's something society has a stake in and where the company is accountable to it.
If Twitter were to sell access to protected updates, that's something their users need to know. If they were doing so illegally, that's something that society must know.
It all depends on the information that will be revealed whether or not it's ethical. I'm inclined to not give an "unethical" verdict too quickly. TC is at least caring about individual persons that may be damaged by the revealing of some information.
I agree with you about the customers needing to know about Twitter selling private data, but the TC article mentioned nothing about any nefarious going on inside of Twitter. I'm sure they'd be more than happy to be a whistleblower, but in this case, publishing those docs would amount only to gossip. And that's why this is a totally different situation from Watergate.
The guy (”Hacker Croll”) who claims to have accessed
hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents of
Twitter and Twitter employees, is releasing those documents
publicly
The hacker is releasing the documents publicly. TechCrunch is commenting on public information. They didn't cause the breech, twitter did, and they aren't acting as an exclusive disseminator of information, they just acted the fastest.
If there was no interest from TechCrunch or other "news" sites about this information, the dude would not have his 15 minutes of fame. Arrington's decision to pass on stolen documents is at best highly unethical and at worst criminal.
It's unfortunate that TechCrunch has been blinded with greed and famewhoring enough to not see this.
