The hack is done. It appears that Twitter had poor security policies, or that Twitter employees weren't following them. Either way, the information is out the

The hack is done. It appears that Twitter had poor security policies, or that Twitter employees weren't following them. Either way, the information is out there and the person(s) who chose to break in took the evil route. Ev Williams got it. He's handled this situation very well. I'd invest in this company based on his response. He's appealed to the sympathy of all of us and essentially said he can live with the disclosure that TC will deliver despite it being something I'd be happy to toss my life savings at to suppress. Reality: it's out. There's no suppressing. TC is operating as a journalistic outfit. "Unnamed Sources in the Pentagon", "An employee speaking on the condition of anonymity" and "A private investigation firm hired to break into the voicemail accounts of prominent individuals" IS journalism in the 21st century. TC, on the other hand, has been quite transparent. They stated upfront that they received a pile of (unsolicited) juicy information from a person who compromised accounts from Twitter employees. TC could have posted the raw text of every message, removed names, been sued, gotten more publicity for having been sued, shined more light on the topic and become the place everyone pretends to hate but visits anyway because of the "nipples". Thus far, they haven't. They've given an insight into a company that folks on the outside who watch Twitter shouldn't find all that surprising ... it's just more directly stated in the terms of a business person summarizing reality. Which brings up the next inevitable situation: At some point the entirety of what was collected will be made public. Hopefully it will be done after TC has had their last point to make. Maybe those paying attention won't have stopped paying attention, but at this point ... they've begun to feel sympathetic about the situation and grant the benefit of the doubt to Ev and company. I won't go so far as to say that journalism isn't journalism without these tactics, or that ignoring the back channel means just publishing press releases. There's a fine line. I think it's too early to know if TC crossed that line. Full disclosure: I enjoy reading Arrington's posts. He calls out "Elephants in the room" when a lot of the tech media pretends the elephant is invisible. Yes, it's a business advantage that lends itself to accusations of tabloid journalism because calling out elephants irresponsibly results in calling specs of dust "elephants" and TC has been guilty of that.