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You can read a sensible viewpoint by Chris O'Brien of the Mercury News about the ethics of TC here: http://www.siliconbeat.com/2009/07/15/techcrunch-ethics-and-

• ubernostrum 17y ago
  I have a hard time accepting that documents about Twitter were mentioned in an analogy to the Pentagon Papers. And after that I have an even harder time agreeing with the conclusion that this is somehow newsworthy information which needed to get out. (in other words, even if we grant that there was no breach of relevant law in publishing the documents, we come back to one of my favorite phrases from my philosophy days: having the right to do a thing does not make it right to do that thing)
• barrkel 17y ago
  So in other words, if documents have "news value" (i.e. someone wants to read them) and they have been leaked (the only examples he cites are Pentagon Papers and peanut butter memo), then publishing them is A-OK. Both of those predicates are highly questionable in this case. In the first and most important instance, these are STOLEN documents, not leaked. By taking commercial advantage of these stolen documents TechCrunch is effectively profiting from theft. And that someone (perhaps even many people) would like to read a document, i.e. it has news value, is not a valid ethical reason (forget legality) to breach privacy, much less profit from theft. In my eyes, TechCrunch is little more than theft-condoning scum at this point.