Edit: I don't agree with what ProPublica is doing here, but I can understand how the ends might justify the means from their perspective.
What’s next, some news org wants Biden out, they don’t have a legit source, but a foreign source has dirt on him, now that’s cool cuz they want to change public opinion of Biden?
Was the pearl clutching around Biden’s son’s laptop material being illegally obtained just a flimsy excuse? [uh oh, it’s doxxing, it’s doxxing... suspend their Twitter, Jack are you listening?]
Public interest is the right threshold. Just because somebody has done something illegal, does not mean that their privacy is worthless. Likewise, hypocrisy is not illegal, but documenting the hypocrisy of the powerful is often in the public interest.
You can be a perfectly moral denteologian (that is, a person that believes in moral rules, not in moral objective functions) and be a billionaire.
A second possibility: you can be a utilitarian, and believe that positive sum trades should always be taken (untenable position as this is (1)) and think you are taking one such trade. That is the claim Elon Musk seems to be making: This money today will save human lifes (electric cars reducing climate change) and increase the future number of lifes worth living in the cosmos (spacex)
(1) On the untenability and self-destructiveness of "always take positive sum choices, even if they harm you"
1) living an American middle class life while children starve might be similarly morally reprehensible
2) Not killing oneself and donating ones organs (saves what? 10 lives?) might be similarly morally reprehensible
Retort from first year philosophy: "if this is the case, why aren't you donating most of your disposable to starving kids in africa? Surely that would have higher utility than buying yourself an iphone or macbook?"
Is this really the case? The wealth of most millionaires is probably mostly in bank accounts, but only once you have hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in one place are you able to coordinate megaprojects: space travel, vaccine manufacture, clean transport, chip fabs, Stuxnet...
The claim is that poor people’s use is better for society (positive externalities) not for the poor person. That billionaires are better at assuring that any negative impacts of their transactions are externalized, and insuring internalized gains, is clear, but not the point.
How do you know this is better than the billionaire providing a service to society that's so valuable, it made him a billionaire?
I don’t, and I’m not making the claim that it is.
I’m saying that the fact that billionaires get to be billionaires by a combination of ability and inclination at maximizing their personal benefits from transactions, while true, doesn’t provide even slight counterevidence to the claim it was offered to rebut.
“Norms” don’t define things as right. I’m pretty sure we can think of some dark examples.
[1]I think I read about something called “The Watergate Scandal” about illegal gathering of information...
That aside, I guess I just don’t have much sympathy. If certain “rules” are gonna apply to billionaires and not normal people, that seems fine by me. It might seem “biased” or “unfair” to some people, but hey: Who ever said we were operating in a “fair” context to begin with? Sure this kind of bias could be turned against more vulnerable people, it already is, it’s about time it got turned against the people at the top.
On certain public things, yes. On illegally obtained private finance info - no.
For instance, an aggregate number of only 10 data-points is enough for people inside those 10 data-points to band together and out the real information of the remaining people through collective action, as an example. There are thousands of similar contingencies planned for.
So if you publish this data redacted, it's still a violation of the privacy laws because you can figure out easily who is whom since there are only a few billionaires and there's enough information provided to narrow down people's identity by looking at public information.
As for Twitter or whatever, I believe the law technically was violated only by the person who handed the data to the journalists. After that the journalists can't be held accountable unless they aided in some way in obtaining or they directly requested the data from the individual or group or whomever it was that did this.
Honestly, though, this is why people in these positions are held to extremely high standards and it ends up being frustrating when others fall through like this. It's too easy to occur, and these roles are rarely compensated well or have any "backup" for technical tasks since it's all based on who organizations trust, so they can't hire anyone to help and we end up thinly spread.
Add a small dash of political or financial incentive and suddenly the data you have been working to design to protect from Russian hackers becomes technologically meaningless when someone just leaks it who has direct access. I'm surprised there aren't more of these happening given the dire straits many of us are in, out in the wild-west on our own with nobody to even talk to about it and nobody willing to work in government (or to not be assumed to be trustworthy enough to have access).
I don't see why they couldn't have anonymized the data [bracketed] and have the same impact. Exact figures are less relevant than providing a picture of what's going on. I think the only reason is to doxx and "shame" or whatever unrelated rationale they have.
And why isn't Twitter suspending their account for doxxing --which they appear to apply unevenly but usually not levelled against birds of a feather.