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TechCrunch plans to release illegally obtained documents about Twitter

Via timoni I found this:

<snip>

How do you think we learned about yellowcake, or the pentagon papers, or that Apple is planning a tablet PC? Someone, somewhere, broke a law to learn these things or leak these things. <snip more>

— rickwebb

Rick, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Learning about some secret product a highly-secretive company like Apple is working on tends to happen only because someone broke a contract. An employee thought it would be okay (or whatever they may think) to share some insider information with someone else, someone else leaks it onwards to the press, and the information goes public.

Learning about all the company-private communications through means of someone hacking into private accounts and private systems and obtaining said communications, that is illegal. It is also an outsider forcing their way to the inside, which is not how most of the news is obtained in the world. Investigative reporting is rarely done by hacking, because very few established magazines (online and print) would risk their entire business printing a story that makes them accomplice to a crime.

There are a couple, read, a couple of examples where hacking into government systems uncovered crucially important secret plots by the government. In those cases, it is not a matter of “newsworthiness” that magazines and newspapers use to consider whether or not to print the story, it’s a matter of the safety of the population and the rules that the government itself sets—for itself and for its citizens. It is, to some extent, what the media was originally intended for: to inform the citizenry of the actions of its governance.

Most of the time, however, government cover-ups are actually leaked to the press by insiders, still. An aide or such who gets wind of an operation and can’t in good consciousness allow it to continue unnoticed. You’d be surprised to find out just how many major stories start with an insider’s tip.

The point is, in the end, that a business like Twitter—and their plans or operational schematics—is simply not comparable to a Government that might be spying on its own citizens or plotting to kill systematically for greater control.

On top of that, however, Arrington has a history of douchebaggery under the guises of “reporting” and “breaking newsworthy stories” (sidebar: “newsworthy” is very questionable when it comes to TC to begin with), and has a long record of crossing the lines of ethical, moral and respectable conduct. This whole thing with Twitter is just a big example of it all, and the outcry is partly because so many people have just had it with him and his scummy site.

Lastly, I removed the link to TechCrunch and replaced it with a link to FML, because the only way to get TC to stop being the worst kind of scum on this side of the Internet is to stop giving them attention.

Source: nickdouglas