Should newspapers publish the hacked Sony e-mails and files?

I think it’s a pretty poor idea to release the private information of any person/corporation/group if they are not suspected of actually harming the public. The whole idea of “if they have nothing to hide, it shouldn’t matter” seems in most cases to be hauled out to justify someone else’s prurient interests. All those that demand an “all transparency all the time, full disclosure” kind of thing across the board seem to me to be pretty naive about just how damaging that could be.

I don’t see why it should be published. We don’t need to know the content of what was hacked. If the hacking affects people in a broad way (such as when stores are hacked for credit card information) a general statement is plenty. We don’t need the specific information from the Sony hacks.

In a technical sense, whatever information is revealed via the hacking is stolen property. On that basis I don’t see why – other than in a broad sense to demonstrate that “yes, an actual security breach was effected and property was taken” – the information is widely published.

Yes, absolutely.

The test when there’s a question over whether something should be published or not, is whether the information is in the public’s interest. In this case I see no public interest value in this material. It’s no different to sharing naked photographs stolen from an actresses private account. If the content showed Sony were behaving in an unethical fashion, or illegally, there would be justification for publishing, but the content I’ve seen has been about how much individuals were paid and nasty comments made by executives who thought they were communicating privately (pretty stupid to assume anything in an email is private but still – they wrote them as private communications). I’ve seen nothing that passes the public interest test.

@Earthbound_Misfit I agree.

No they should not be made public. The fallout would only encourage more hackers to do the same thing as was done here.

Would any of us want our emails to be made public? I would guess not. Even if referring to work emails, would we want them made public? I wouldn’t. Even if it’s email, up in some cloud, even if work email, where the IT Department can access it if they wanted to, there is some expectation of privacy with email.

Well, I haven’t seen them but apparently they are being published by some papers, according to NPR.

No. We don’t need to know more about Sony’s dirty laundry and Sony doesn’t need worse publicity than they already have

This is Sony.. A hack a few years ago released a bunch of info on customers users accounts. PSN was down for like a week.

This isn’t just employees info.. This is your info.

The Sony CTO said this:

“The cost to harden the legacy database against a possible intrusion could come to $10 million, he says. The cost to notify customers in case of a breach might be $1 million. With those figures, says Spaltro, “it’s a valid business decision to accept the risk” of a security breach. “I will not invest $10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss,” he suggests.”

If this is their attitude with your credit card numbers and email and passwords they need to be slammed into the ground so fucking hard all they can eat is applesauce.