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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I think it's better if some mysteries remained unsolved; can't wait until this is leaked to shark hunters and the "secret" habitat is decimated; humans are "wonderful" and "surprising" all the time...

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It is a huge area in the open ocean. And the sharks are very deep. Anyone looking to harvest them commercially is going to have a very tough time finding them. They are concentrated by open ocean standards, but there are infinitely more sharks per cubic mile of water in other places (seal habitats). If an sport fisher wants to drop a line 1000 feet down in the middle of the pacific, have at it. They will catch/kill fewer at this cafe than they would off the coast.

Don't worry, the mass over fishing of oceans is way ahead of this.

I guess The Discovery Channel is going to save lots of money on travel expenses next Shark Week.

No need for a leak. They make it pretty clear where the area is, so I suppose the paving can begin. If we kill them all then we no longer have to worry about what we don't know about them! /s

This is a persistent problem in the world of journalism, one that is rarely, if ever, addressed, that being the spreading of sensitive information that can lead to the detriment of the main subject of the article. Whether it is shark territory, secret military bases, or archaic socio-cultural enclaves, these pieces have the potential to disrupt them. For intel black sites, most people applaud the effect. For Yazidis and sharks, not so much.

At what point does it become unethical for attention hungry journalists to expose things like Sharklandia?

Information should never be criminalized. Bad behaviors like poaching endangered species, however, should. Information may be able to enable some of that, but it also enables positive behaviors as well. It’s the responsibility of civil society and governments to separate the two and prevent or disincentivize the bad.

Somebody builds a vile criminal enterprise on the back of some 'sensitive' information, and suddenly you cannot expose their atrocities without violating the law. And then you have the beginnings of a dystopian dictatorship.

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