CNet Should Apologize To Wired
Last night, Kevin Poulsen filed a story for Wired titled FBI’s Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats, followed this morning by FBI’s Magic Lantern revealed.
Several hours after the first Wired story appeared, Declan McCullagh broke the same story on the CNet News Blog …without any mention of the earlier article in Wired.
This FBI spyware story, an important one to anyone concerned about privacy, has been on the tech news radar since since MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan first wrote about the rumored development of the Magic Lantern spyware in November of 2001, and has been followed by Wired since then.
Reporters and journalists work hard to break news, get the facts straight, and deliver them first.
So CNet’s blog posting needs, at the very least, an update acknowledging the original source of today’s story.
We need more, not less, ethical journalism on the internet. We enjoy unprecedented speed of communication here, as well as unprecedented freedom of speech. I believe that it is up to us who use and appreciate this medium to do everything we can to contribute to civil and ethical standards of behavior online in order to protect that freedom.
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A related post 2 days later.
