Of Doxing and The Future of Journalism

Whether or not you believe Newsweek has found the creator of Bitcoin, the significance of this article extends past it's premise. The article may just turn out to be emblematic of converging media.

In the old mass mediums, Newsweek, as we all know, has been around for nearly a century as a weekly news magazine both reverent and controversial for it's investigative journalism.

In the internet age, it's been a past-time of internet communities to solve problems collectively through documentation, known today in netspeak as doxing. Just like investigative journalism, the best examples of doxing have used publicly available information to cast light on figures both public and private. Some of these people have an internet presence, others have not. However, there are plenty of examples where the means of retrieving the information were far more intrusive and even illegal.

So when Newsweek decided to premiere the return of it's print version with an article exposing the seemingly anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, it's only natural that people will start conflating the old and new ways of investigation as standard practice.

For better or for worse, this is all growing pains for the future of Journalism. This is about the perceived incongruity of the internet and the real world. The internet (no, the world) has been increasingly become a culture of open information and anonymity. Entities like Anonymous can have motives without having a clearly defined ideological shape. Bitcoin is more of the same.

When it has come to the point where these entities are starting to shape our world, then what is the place of Journalism in that world? Old-world Journalism depends on these things being finite and without ambiguity.

Which is all the more surprising that the Newsweek article was published at all. In CBS Morning News, the author of the article, Leah McGrath Goodman, says that "based on the conversation I had with him, that was the clincher for me." The clincher quote in that article being:

"I'm no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it". and the L.A. Times has reported that the L.A. County Police Deputies, who witnessed the Goodman's brief interactions with Nakamoto, say that those words are accurate.

Reading the article again, it's clear that this clincher is the thread that is carrying the weight of this  article. There wouldn't be much of a story without it.

People have been wondering about it's legality. Was it OK to publish this article under the weight of that "clincher"? Was it legally OK to publish a photo of Nakamoto's house? To the best of my knowledge, the answer is yes, but with an asterisk.

Under current law, Nakamoto, as a creator of a major form of currency, could possibly be a limited-purpose public figure. But consider "Satoshi Nakamoto" the pseudonym. If Dorian Sakamoto really is Satoshi Nakamoto, then it is a discovery of great luck to Leah Goodman. Had Dorian published Bitcoin by any other name, he may not fit the models of public and private figures created by common law. Could he be, what Journalist Adrian Chen describes as a new class, a "public anonymous" person?

Surely we should have the right to speak out onto the internet anonymously. To "speak out" should absolutely extend itself to things such as the invention of something like Bitcoin. But if a person with a more pseudonymous moniker had invented Bitcoin and were exposed, should the publishing of said expose' legally deny the privacy of that person?

This is the story of privacy being pushed into it's limits, and if we value privacy at all, then the answer should be "no".