Media throughout the country carried news recently that a half-dozen email accounts belonging to ex-President George W. Bush and several of his friends and relatives had been hacked. The words and images that were pilfered werenât all that interesting, so all in all it wasnât a huge story.
But to me, a fan of the vanishing right to privacy, this was still a reasonably big deal. I was struck by the way the former presidentâs right to chat with intimates, free of eavesdroppers, was barely acknowledged. Comments he had made privately and paintings he had kept from public view were exposed worldwide as if the propriety of doing so was beyond question.
And I think thatâs worth considering more carefully.
Weâll leave to the FBI and Secret Service the question of whether the hacking warrants legal reprisal. My interest is in what sort of respect Bushâs privacy deserves from the media that received the hacked materials.
The first report of the hacking came in a Feb. 7 posting on The Smoking Gun, a website owned by Time-Warner that tilts toward what was once called tabloid journalism (Among recent headlines: âMan stabbed as mĂ©nage a trois goes wrong,â or âMom charged for letting son, 3, pump gasoline.â)
The Smoking Gun handled the material well, I thought, by foregrounding its invasiveness. The hack âexposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush familyâŠâ The site said it had obtained confidential materialâincluding home addresses, cell phone numbers, email addresses for Bush family membersâbut didnât republish any of it.
In fact, most of the media I saw seemed aware that this material was pretty personal.
But they then turned around and squeezed every bit of even marginally interesting detail from it: Family concern about the declining health of the Continue reading “Hidden dangers of the Bush email hacking”
