Journalists face a tough dilemma when reporting on hacked documents. Authentic documents obtained by illicit means and leaked to the public can provide information that is very much in the public interest, but reporting on them can at the same time play into an information operation launched by whomever hacked and leaked the documents. Researchers are trying to understand how to balance those interests, and here Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic and CEPA’s Alina Polyakova talk to Janine Zacharia, a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford, and Andrew Grotto, who is fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, about their new playbook for reporters, which offers recommendations on how newsrooms can responsibly cover hacks and disinformation campaigns without propagating or participating in them.
[…]