There’s an interesting debate afoot about TechCrunch‘s decision to publish selected documents it received from someone who hacked into the email accounts of Twitter CEO Evan Williams and other Twitter employees. There’s already been some good coverage of the journalism ethics side of the debate, but I wanted to weigh in with some detail on…
Category: Misc
Sotomayor on “right to privacy”
During Senator Orrin Hatch’s questioning of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the nominee discussed the “right of privacy:” She said the “right to privacy” is actually a misnomer. “I’ve not viewed what the court has been doing as creating a right that doesn’t exist in the words of the Constitution. What I understand the court…
More on Twittergate
Many of the headlines today discuss a story mentioned earlier today on this site — how Twitter got hacked and TechCrunch decided to publish some of the documents they were sent by the hacker. Steve Ragan of Tech Herald provides coverage of the ethical controversy raised by Tech Crunch’s decision and agrees with their stance,…
Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave
I first met Jeremy Bentham as a newly arrived philosophy student walking through the South Cloisters of University College London. Behind the plate glass of a huge mahogany case, I looked in upon a seated life-size wax figure of a man in an 18th Century coat and knee britches, happily wearing a straw hat. Only…