SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists

Re:SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists by tptacek on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @07:19PM (#20521097)

What obligation did Krebs have to be nice to these people? Were they sources of his? Did he have a prior relationship with them? We can stipulate a bunch of scenarios in which Krebs would have been obligated not to publish Canfield's name, but it is not a general principle that he is enjoined from doing so; you have to identify the specific relationship that creates the obligation.

Sometimes those relationships are quite broad! For instance: on HN, it is generally verboten to out people. That's a rule we've adopted to maintain civil discourse on the site, and something we agree to when we decide to participate here. But HN has lots of rules that are not in fact rules in the real world; for instance, 'pvg regularly chides 'dang for enforcing the HN's idiosyncratic (but good) rule about not putting quotation marks around paraphrases of other people's comments.

Does any such circumstance apply here? The professional ethics rules of journalism have more the opposite directionality, cautioning journalists against maintaining anonymity of sources to the detriment of the readership.

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Re:SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists by grandmczeb on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @09:38PM (#20521878)

> What obligation did Krebs have to be nice to these people?

I’ll take that as an agreement that it wasn’t nice then?

Regardless, I don’t think I said anywhere that he had an obligation to be nice, only that his comments were a violation of Twitter’s TOS. Which presumably he does have an obligation to follow since he’s using their platform.

> The professional ethics rules of journalism have more the opposite directionality, cautioning journalists against maintaining anonymity of sources to the detriment of the readership.

Krebs is not posting their names and location as a journalistic act, he’s posting them to serve as retribution for speaking badly about something he has a personal involvement in. I don’t know what the professional ethics rules of journalism say about that, but I think it’s something most people would agree is pretty shitty.

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Re:SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists by tptacek on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @10:06PM (#20522008)

As you can see upthread, it is plainly false that he violated Twitter’s TOS.

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Re:SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists by grandmczeb on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @11:10PM (#20522249)

The only evidence I see up thread is your assertion “Twitter also explicitly exempts information available from public sources“ which is a stronger statement than Twitter’s own privacy page (“If the reported information was shared somewhere else before it was shared on Twitter [...] we may not treat this information as private”.) Twitter uses multiple factors to determine if a post is a violation, not all of which have to be satisfied, and of which being available through other sources is only one. Twitter also has a history of taking action against users who share otherwise publicly available information if the intent is malicious.

While it’s a debatable point, it’s most certainly not “plainly false” that he violated the TOS; Twitter would be well within bounds to take action against his account.

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