Twitter's internal documents: stolen, boring

Some internal Twitter documents were recently compromised by a hacker who offered them to various tech websites for publication. Other than the illicit way they were obtained - via some weak passwords set by Twitter employees, Biz Stone suggests in a blog post - the documents are pretty boring. TechCrunch, as you might expect if you're at all familiar with that blog, has gone ahead and published some of them anyway, because Twitter's financial projections and the details of the Twitter TV show pitch have "so much news value."

Most of the arguments against revealing this information have been made on ethical grounds, resulting in TechCrunch's Mike Arrington responding with a lecture about the history of news, and citing cases where published info has been obtained in similarly shady ways.

Fair enough. That's the news business sometimes, and Twitter can take action if they don't like the decision to publish. In fact, Biz's blog post suggests they're looking into it. "We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents," he writes.

My problem with sites that publish this stuff is that it's ultimately pretty boring, and the attention and extra pageviews that come their way are because of the controversy, not because of some inherently interesting new story. The story here is "hacker compromises Twitter documents" not "we now know a little bit more about the Twitter TV show."

Wake me up when this is all over.

UPDATE: The hack wasn't due to weak passwords, says Twitter's Evan Williams.

Tags: controversy, documents, hacker, news, stolen, techcrunch, twitter