Hack journalism

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A Data Breach Exposes the New York Times

LAST MONTH, A hacker broke into Columbia University's computer systems and stole the personal information of 2.5 million people who'd applied to Columbia, spanning decades. The hacker, who told Bloomberg that they stole the data to try to find evidence that Columbia was favoring nonwhite people in admissions, left campus computer screens displaying a photo of Donald Trump. 

On Thursday, the New York Times cooperated with what it said was the hacker's intermediary—a racist blogger obsessed with promoting the idea that Black people have inherently lower intelligence than white people—to publish a story using the stolen material. The blogger, Jordan Lasker, apparently informed the Times that Zohran Mamdani, the Ugandan-Indian winner of New York City's Democratic primary, had, as a high school senior applying to Columbia, checked off boxes identifying himself as both "Asian" and "African American or Black." 

In July of last year, the Times was among the major media outlets that reportedly received a collection of documents stolen from Donald Trump's presidential campaign, including a dossier on JD Vance that the campaign had assembled to evaluate the senator, once harshly hostile to Trump, as a potential running mate. The Times kept the contents of those materials to itself, publishing a story instead about the fact that the campaign had been targeted by hackers, possibly Iranian ones, and wrote that the leaks could "portend a more intense period of foreign interference" in the presidential race. When CNN wrote a story about how the various publications had all chosen not to publish the dossier, the Times declined to comment beyond a statement that, as CNN wrote, "the newspaper doesn’t discuss editorial decisions about ongoing coverage."

But now the Times had deemed what a teenager put on a college application 16 years ago to be a matter of public interest. (One of my own children applied to Columbia in the most recent cycle, so presumably his personal data would have been among the stolen files, along with personal identifiers and possibly financial information for the adults in the household.) Despite the hacker's professed goal of exposing racial preferences in higher education, Mamdani had not been admitted to Columbia—a piece of information that the Times stuffed inside parentheses—and the Times could find no evidence that he had ever referred to himself as "African American" in his entire life afterward. 

Nevertheless, the story went up, under the headline "Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application," with three bylines on it. The URL, more bluntly, went with "mamdani-columbia-black-application.html."