Pop quiz, hotshot: You're an influential media figure in the political arena. Iranian hackers contact you to hand off intel about a candidate you detest. (Or Russian hackers, North Korean hackers, Columbia U hackers ... choose your own betes noires.) Do you wonder whether you're being played by malevolent foreign governments, or do you just hit 'publish'?

Ken Klippenstein chose Door Number 2, and one has to suspect that a lot of media hotshots would have done the same. But he has an explanation for it!

It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.” 

I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself. ...

If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous” like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.

That sounds very high-minded. And to be honest, it could be, but ... one suspects that this was at best a secondary motivation for this decision. In fairness, it's tough to say whether any other journalist would choose Door Number One, at least on a consistent basis. Reportedly, some media outlets did refuse to publish it; the Biden-Harris campaign(s?) chose to ignore it too, at least until now. 

But is that because of high-mindedness, or just simply because the information isn't terribly noteworthy, except as evidence of the hack itself? Klippenstein cops to the latter, noting that almost everything of substance on Vance is already in the public domain:

This is not the Steele Dossier of 2016, with its golden showers and anti-Trump fanfiction. Unlike the Steele Dossier, which was both fraudulent and discredited, the Vance Dossier is factual and intelligently written. No Jason Bourne style capers appear, and there’s no sleaze. Instead, the Vance Dossier enumerates pretty reasonable liabilities as a then-contender for VP nominee...

The Trump campaign advisers who wrote the dossier appreciate the compliment, I'm sure. But that doesn't explain why Klippenstein himself didn't take out the page of the document with Vance's partially redacted Social Security number, home address, and his cell phone number and email address. Klippenstein has since redacted that data, but the first release had all of that data exposed. (I have the original version downloaded.)  What purpose does it serve to make those public, other than to enable harassment? It certainly doesn't serve any high-minded journalistic purpose.

And that prompts the question of publishing the file at all. Perhaps it has some value as a research document, which was its original purpose for the Trump campaign. It could make a handy reference for the next 40-plus days, I suppose. But why bother, when a well-crafted Google search could probably produce the same data? Or more, and better data?

This has the feel of a scoop for the sake of claiming a scoop, and even then an unearned scoop at best. This didn't come from a feat of journalistic legerdemain, after all. The biggest effect will be to rinse this dossier to make it palatable for other media outlets to use; "as reported by Ken Klippenstein" will give other outlets a fig leaf to use the material themselves, even those that sniffed at publishing it directly from the hands of Iranian hackers. That's what happened with the Steele Dossier after BuzzFeed published it, although that looks a lot more like a cautionary tale these days than a journalistic success story.

Or perhaps that will be the second-biggest effect, in terms of immediacy. Klippenstein promoted his scoop on the hacked material on Twitter/X, which promptly suspended his account:

The X (formerly Twitter) account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended Thursday after he shared details of a dossier about Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) that Iran allegedly hacked.

"Here's the dossier the media refused to publish," Klippenstein wrote in a post on X soon before his account was suspended. ...

X CEO Elon Musk has previously likened the alleged suppression of stories about Hunter Biden's laptop to election interference.

True, but that material wasn't hacked, either. Hunter Biden left it at a computer repair shop and then never paid the bill or apparently recalled he had left it in the first place. The default gave the repair service ownership of the laptop and the data on it. It was the media that insisted that the material had either been hacked or stolen in a Russian intel operation, and some media outlets still prefer that narrative to the truth. 

Musk has been clear that he has very few bright lines on account suspensions, but that transmitting hacked material and/or doxxing information is one of them. Klippenstein did both with this release, although he at least has addressed the latter. They'll probably restore the account sooner than later, considering the circumstances; Klippenstein didn't hack the material himself, and he is a known journalist. The material in this case hardly warrants much other than a nominal penalty.

Of course, all of this distracts from the biggest question, which is how this material got hacked in the first place. The Trump campaign looks pretty sloppy, but then again, so do players who should know better. Microsoft had to scramble to respond to a penetration into their ID verification systems last summer by Chinese hackers, Axios reported this week. The federal government has been beset by hackers for more than a decade, culminating in a massive breach at the background check service National Public Data last month. 

Perhaps the mission now is: Do better. And that's not just aimed at Klippenstein.