Recently a Twitter’s employee’s personal account was hacked and the hacker was able to gain access to quite a few Twitter’s internal confidential documents. The documents had minutes of various meetings, employee’s and partners’ thoughts and ideas, Twitter’s future growth strategies, regarding corporate partnerships, etc. These stolen documents were forwarded to TechCrunch’s inbox supposedly by the hacker. Though, TechCrunch has shown restraint by not publishing all the sensitive information but it did published quite a few sensitive information. TechCrunch is a widely popular technology blog and news website.

Check out the related posts on TechCrunch:

• In Our Inbox: Hundreds Of Confidential Twitter Documents
• Twitter’s Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be “The Pulse Of The Planet”
• Our Reaction To Your Reactions To the Twitter Confidential Documents Post
• Twitter’s Financial Forecast Shows First Revenue In Q3, 1 billion users in 2013
• Another Security Tip For Twitter: Don’t Use “Password” As Your Server Password

UPDATE:(07/19/2009) TechCrunch is out with more details “The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack“.

All over the web this events has again started a heated debate on the “ethics of journalism”. Majority of the people are criticizing TechCrunch for publishing the  Twitter’s internal documents. Since, it now exposes there strategies out to all the rivals and potential partners. At the time of publishing, the people at TechCrunch were very well aware that the documents were stolen.

Check out a recent poll on twtpoll. It clearly shows majority of people agree that it was unethical on TechCrunch’s part to publish those documents. Check the screen-shot below:

The editor of TechCrunch Michael Arrington says in his post (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/our-reaction-to-your-reactions-on-the-twitter-confidential-documents-post/):

If you disagree with that, ok. 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.

Now the most interesting part of the whole debate is that Michael also claims in his post that (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/):

It’s important to note that we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information – They aren’t happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say (more on why they did that in our later post).

So, as a TechCrunch reader I thought that Twitter was taken into confidence before publishing the confidential information. But to my surprise this wasn’t the case. Read the blog post by Twitter’s co-founder @Biz (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/07/someone-call-security.html):

Someone Call Security

Early yesterday, we were contacted by two blog journalists who had just been offered internal business documents stolen from Twitter by a hacker.

First, it’s important to note how these documents were stolen. In this case, a Twitter employee used the same non-unique password on multiple services. A hacker gained access to our business documents because this common password was retrievable on an unrelated system. If you’ve ever used the same password on more than one service, you’ve made the same mistake that lead to this theft—it’s a web wide issue. Random password generators as well as two-factor authentication for more sensitive systems are now mandatory at Twitter, Inc.

Twitter is more than jotted-down notes from a handful of meetings. Our future will be shaped by the passion and inventiveness of everyone who uses Twitter and through the execution of our ideas. Nevertheless, the publication of stolen documents is irresponsible and we absolutely did not give permission for these documents to be shared. Out of context, rudimentary notes of internal discussions will be misinterpreted by current and future partners jeopardizing our business relationships.

We are pursuing a path to address the harm caused by these actions and as noted yesterday, we’ve already reached out to the partners and individuals affected.

Also see this tweet from Twitter CEO Evan William (@EV):

My personal opinion: Is it ethical/legal to steal from a home if you find the doors open? Is it ethical/legal to rape a girl if you find her alone in a deserted street? Do I need to say anything more?

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