A lot of people are having fun with the Dateline NBC producer who was so clueless about how to go undercover:
Dateline NBC associate producer Michelle Madigan was heckled and derided as she ran from DefCon, the world's largest computer hackers conference, and raced away in a car.
They sent a moderately attractive young lady with a purse cam whose mission was to first capture someone on film admitting to a felony, which is really not cool, and second to catch a fed on film," said DefCon spokesman "Priest."
"She was basically trying to do a slam piece."Federal agents openly, and covertly, mingle with hackers at the conference, which features a panel discussion titled "Meet the Fed.""This is the Switzerland of hacking, neutral ground on which hackers and feds meet with a common goal of making computers safer," said Priest.
My profession has become more ethics-conscious in the last couple of decades, and this sort of tactic is generally deplored. I'm not always so sure. We should never misrepresent ourselves to get a story, and we need to be careful not to add to the continuing erosion of privacy. But just hanging around and absorbing information and reporting it later can be justified, depending on what the setting is and what the expectations of the other participants are. This producer was just stupid -- hoping to catch something illegal at a conference at which both hackers and federal agents were together in an electronic DMZ?
One of the great journalistic exposes of my lifetime was the Mirage tavern sting undertaken by The Chicago Sun-Times and a TV station. To get evidence of the corruption of public officials, reporters opened their own bar and filmed various inspectors soliciting and accepting bribes. They were being deceptive in the sense that they did not identify themselves as journalists pursuing proof of corruption. On the other hand, they were engaging in legal activities that any other citizen should have been able to engage in without fear of being shaken down.
