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Comment by Blahah | Hacker News Reader

The author of the piece can be reached in these ways:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zpmo8/the_face_beh...

If you think this article is a dangerous invasion of privacy, tell her and her employers (Newsweek).

Forget Dangerous... it's down right irresponsible They list the guys entire family including kids and where they work etc.

Beside that the article has very little content other than "he's a little bit weird" an observation that is not exactly original, it's almost a stereotype that really smart people are often a "little bit weird" .

Are you missing the part where his family happily talked to the reporter?

Brother: "My brother is an asshole. What you don't know about him is that he's worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You're not going to be able to get to him. He'll deny everything. He'll never admit to starting Bitcoin."

Daughter: "He would keep his office locked and we would get into trouble if we touched his computer," she recalls. "He was always expounding on politics and current events. He loved new and old technology. He built his own computers and was very proud of them."

etc etc etc.

That's exactly my point. It's dangerous because she's made his address, car registration and all his family's details public. I'm saying we should raise it with the people responsible if we think it's a problem.

edit: now you've edited for clarity, it's clear we're saying the same thing.

Yeah sorry about that, original wording looked like I was questioning your comment where I intended to whole-heartedly agree with it.

They just put a 400 million dollar bounty on this guy and his entire family for no apparent reason.

This poor guy. Does the US have no legislation in regard to protection privacy?

For better or worse, you can say almost anything you want, especially if you are a professional journalist.

"Doxing" is just an Internet term for extremely offensive behavior, but it's not illegal.

Well, she's also rather helpful in giving us things like these:

http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Jer...

Which may or may not be out of date

http://leahmcgrathgoodman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/vis...

Which has other useful info on it.

This has a tinge of pettiness to it, don't you think?

> This has a tinge of pettiness to it

I don't think it's petty at all to link to publicly available information, when others have requested that information. Google-fu differs between individuals.

I do find it particularly petty that someone would go to great lengths to expose the private details of the life of a man who just wants to be left in peace.

So it's OK for you to use your Google-fu, but not for her to do the same thing?

I, for one, am quite interested to know more about Satoshi Nakamoto and this article is responsive to my curiosity about him. As someone else has pointed out, a great deal of information is public anyway in the form of property tax records and what not. If this were not the case I would get much less direct mail.

Well that line of reasoning is exactly what I was referring to. The reporter doing due diligence and fact gathering is in ill taste, but responding in kind and releasing personal information about her is justified? That doesn't hold water, logically. I don't think anyone is that naive. It's alright if you're upset about divulging Nakamoto's personal details, it's the tit-for-tat mentality that comes across as childish.

Well there seems to be some misunderstanding about who released what. I have not released anything because I didn't have to.

All I have done is link to some items that she released into the public domain on a previous occasion.

Sharing the stupidity of others is a long-lived internet tradition. It's almost adage status; be careful what you post, it may come back to haunt you later. The same is true of this, I suppose.

I really don't think this is appropriate material in the comments of an article about Satoshi Nakamoto. If you want to write an article about the Author's important contribution to the history of Bitcoin which includes her home address, you might have a leg to stand on.

> If you think this article is a dangerous invasion of privacy, tell her and her employers (Newsweek).

How adorable! You think Newsweek is going to give Leah a talking to, because of the piece constituting a 'dangerous invasion of privacy'? That's just really too cute.

We live in the age of the Facebook. We live in a place where dollar rules, and folks like Zuck and Jobs, and other actors of questionable ethics excel. No, Newsweek is not going to punish Leah, Newsweek has actually just recognized an employee who's able to expertly stir the pot, attract attention, and sell a lot more rags. She's getting a nice raise.

> We live in the age of Facebook

And how is this relevant, does this Satoshi has a facebook profile? Did the journalist send a fried request and article's Satoshi accepted? If none of this happened then I see no connections.

> We live in a place where dollar rules, and folks like Zuck > and Jobs, and other actors of questionable ethics excel.

Agreed. Mandela and Ghandi excelled too, in areas more important than business... Of course being rogue helps you excel in some areas, but it's not the only or main characteristic.

> No, Newsweek is not going to punish Leah, Newsweek has actually just recognized an employee who's able to expertly stir the pot, attract attention, and sell a lot more rags. She's getting a nice raise.

Given the fact that NW is a failed magazine, both financially and morally, I believe they probably give her a raise cut. But I don't think this is going to revamp their sales... Their articles, in all areas, are of very poor quality. If the magazine doesn't upgrade the content quality swiftly, it will face extinction soon enough.

Total agreement, Newsweek is so tenuously even a magazine at this point, but in the recent past I emailed the editors of a very large newspaper that did something similarly irresponsible to someone living in an arguably more dangerous place - and heard back nothing.

Why are you mocking them? At least they're trying to do something about it. You just come off as a cynical asshole.

But oh wait, this is hacker news.

While I empathise withe guy and understand his discomfiture at being discovered, I don't have any particular problems with the ethics of the piece.

Really? From the photo of his house, people on reddit have already got his address. And the photo shows his car registration.

They also explicitly state he's got keys worth ~$400 million.

Seems like painting a target on him.

The photo of the house and the car is extraneous, I agree. However, there is he, apparently posing for a photo. This is a man who decided to use his own family name in the Bitcoin papers, and the journalist simply searched people with the family name to find a decent match and did a lot of leg work.

I'm not sure it's a photo she or Newsweek took. If this was a print article there would be a photo credit. Maybe she found it somewhere?

In the article she says she only saw him once with the cops, and then had a very very short discussion with her when cops were present.

If the photo implies (as it did to me and apparently you) that he consented to an interview he didn't actually consent to, that's misleading journalism.

Do you realize there is not the beginning of a proof he's the original author of bitcoin?

Being good at science doesn't count.

If the article is correct, Nakamoto only spoke to her in person at his house and with the police present. The photo would have to have been taken by a family member or some other person, and acquired by the author through someone else (probably family).

They basically published not only his full name and home address, but that of his whole family. What journalistic purpose does that serve?

They could have written exactly the same story, but without giving away exactly where he and his family lives, and it wouldn't have suffered in any way.

> They basically published not only his full name and home address, but that of his whole family.

I might argue that it's often difficult to publish someone's home address without publishing his family's address too.

And I might argue that that is an excellent reason to not publish his home address in the first place.

Given a full name, it is trivial for anyone to find someone's home address on account of it is already published, most often by local governments.

We already knew his full name. You can find the family names of the Wal-Mart family also. Could Newsweek done it better? Yes, but his address would have become public within days of this story being published. Posted on reddit maybe with in hours.

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