But still, it's like when I would steal your own belongings, then contact you and "talking to you directly" that I will return some of them back to you, and use others for my own benefit, even if it might do harm to you. We are still talking about publishing stolen documents, whether they contacted twitter or not.
The information is out. It was sent to other people than TechCrunch, and those people will publish it. However, those people probably won't be as visible as TechCrunch. Thus, TechCrunch has decided to act as Twitter's PR department and publish, of the information they got, exactly the right subset of that information to make Twitter look good, hoping that once everyone hears the TechCrunch PR version, they won't be so interested in hearing the rest. If Twitter said "publish nothing", that's exactly what TechCrunch would do—but in this case that's not the best idea.
Yes, it does ignore the ethics of the situation, because when information leaks to the public you no longer have an ethical decision to make, but a strategic decision of damage control. It becomes an exercise in pure game theory, as you can't assume that any given individual in the public will cooperate with you or be convinced by your arguments toward sympathy.
TechCrunch will only publish what Twitter lets them. In practice, in terms of who gets to make the decisions, this is the same situation as if Twitter found out they had been exploited and contacted TechCrunch to "leak" some PR for them. If Twitter wanted to do their damage control through some other outlet at this point, they could just tell TechCrunch to publish nothing, and then pick another news site and send the documents they choose to them. If Twitter wanted to do nothing, they could tell TechCrunch to do nothing, and then do nothing themselves. However, in both of these situations, once the information was published (and it would be—news is one of the most competitive businesses in the world, and one of the most cut-throat), TechCrunch would pick it up, because it would then be public and already available. The only difference, in this case, is that TechCrunch can publish the information "first." But that doesn't matter, really; as long as the information gets out, does it matter who did it first?
If Twitter said "publish nothing", that's exactly what TechCrunch would do
This claim is not supported by any statements from TechChrunch or Twitter, and contradicts Ev's claim, quoted above, that they haven't given TechChrunch a green light to publish anything.
I think you're just spreading misinformation to defend TechChrunch's quite indefensible actions. I call bullshit on your claim that TechChrunch would have published nothing if Twitter asked them that.
