The Web has been buzzing over confidential Twitter documents that a hacker stole and sent to some blogs after breaking into Twitter’s corporate network.
The incident has raised age-old questions about the ethics of publishing confidential material, questions that have taken new twists in the age of blogs.
TechCrunch, one of the blogs that received the confidential material, is working closely with Twitter as it determines which pieces of information to publish, said Michael Arrington, TechCrunch’s founder.
“It is within our ethical obligation to help Twitter” in this situation, Mr. Arrington said in interview. He is protecting the identity of his source, the hacker, but is assisting Twitter in other ways “to help them mitigate the damages” that could come as a result of sharing personal documents, he said.
He has sent Twitter all the documents he received and is trying to put Twitter in direct contact with the hacker, he said.
The hacker, who calls himself “Hacker Croll,” sent TechCrunch a zip file Tuesday with 310 private files from inside Twitter. They include business-related documents like financial projections and discussions of competitive threats and potential acquisitions. They also include personal information, like meal preferences and phone call logs of Twitter employees.
In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Arrington said he has been involved in two separate debates. The first is legal. He said that he has lawyers looking at the legal aspects of trade secrets and the receipt of stolen goods, but added that he did not want to discuss the legal issues any further.
The other debate, he said, is ethical. He decided not to publish embarrassing personal information, including call logs and a record of people who interviewed for jobs at Twitter.
However, he said he deems the financial information worthy of publishing. “There’s some really interesting stuff here that I think is newsworthy — revenue projections, draft financials, costs, detailed strategy documents that talk about the Facebook threat and when and how they might sell the company,” he said.
“That is immensely interesting from a news perspective, and that’s where the debate internally here is going on — what’s appropriate to post.”
When TechCrunch told its readers that it would publish some of the material, the blog received hundreds of comments, many from readers who thought TechCrunch should keep the material private.
But Mr. Arrington pointed out in a subsequent post that much of what his blog and many other publications put out is confidential material.
“If you disagree with that, O.K.,” he wrote. “But then you also have to disagree with the entire history of the news industry. ‘News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising,’ is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said. I agree wholeheartedly.”
A French blog called Korben, another site that received the documents, published very little of the material, even blurring out what is written on images of Twitter merchandise like T-shirts and baseball caps. The blogger, Manuel Dorne, said in an interview with my colleague Brad Stone that he did so because “I have a lot of respect for Evan Williams and a lot of respect for Twitter, so I’ll never publish sensitive information about them that could cause them prejudice.”
“I don’t know if TechCrunch has gone too far,” he added. “But what I can say is that the Web is small, everybody knows everybody, and publishing this information shows a lack of respect for the Twitter team.”
Mr. Arrington said that despite his efforts to keep personal documents private, all the documents could very well turn up elsewhere on the Web. “We’re not the only people who have them,” he said. “There’s presumably a young hacker out there who wants to make a name for himself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them wrapped up and thrown on BitTorrent at some point.”
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