In the Vox piece, Kelsey says she emailed Sam to confirm he had access to his Twitter account and this conversation had been with him. It’s not completely clear to me that Sam should have interpreted this as an implicit request for permission. In his reply, Sam only confirmed that it was him who had responded and not an impersonator (“Still me, not hacked!”); he doesn’t give an indication that he is consenting to the release of the conversation. See also Peter Slattery’s comment.
I don’t disagree with any of that. To be clear, I wasn’t using that tweet as evidence she asked permission, but rather that they had little prior relationship.
What I’m confused by is why he assumed that he had any presumption of privacy in the first place, given the fact that she’s a journalist and they don’t have a significant prior friendship. In my opinion, that’s not a situation where Kelsey is obligated to explicitly check if he’s ok with this being on the record. That ought to be the default assumption.
Yes, based on Kelsey’s subsequent tweets, it seems like it would be a stretch to call their relationship one of friendship. If they were not friends, the main apparent reason against releasing the conversation is that Sam would probably have declined to give consent if Kelsey had asked for it. But based on Sam’s extensive experience with journalists, it’s hard to see how he could not have formed the expectation that, by engaging in an exchange with Kelsey, he was tacitly consenting to the publication of that exchange. Maybe he was deluded about the nature of their relationship and falsely believed that they were friends. Overall, it now seems to me that Kelsey probably did nothing wrong here.
The claim that Sam considered it an informal chat between friends seems hard to square with this tweet from Kelsey
In the Vox piece, Kelsey says she emailed Sam to confirm he had access to his Twitter account and this conversation had been with him. It’s not completely clear to me that Sam should have interpreted this as an implicit request for permission. In his reply, Sam only confirmed that it was him who had responded and not an impersonator (“Still me, not hacked!”); he doesn’t give an indication that he is consenting to the release of the conversation. See also Peter Slattery’s comment.
I don’t disagree with any of that. To be clear, I wasn’t using that tweet as evidence she asked permission, but rather that they had little prior relationship.
What I’m confused by is why he assumed that he had any presumption of privacy in the first place, given the fact that she’s a journalist and they don’t have a significant prior friendship. In my opinion, that’s not a situation where Kelsey is obligated to explicitly check if he’s ok with this being on the record. That ought to be the default assumption.
Yes, based on Kelsey’s subsequent tweets, it seems like it would be a stretch to call their relationship one of friendship. If they were not friends, the main apparent reason against releasing the conversation is that Sam would probably have declined to give consent if Kelsey had asked for it. But based on Sam’s extensive experience with journalists, it’s hard to see how he could not have formed the expectation that, by engaging in an exchange with Kelsey, he was tacitly consenting to the publication of that exchange. Maybe he was deluded about the nature of their relationship and falsely believed that they were friends. Overall, it now seems to me that Kelsey probably did nothing wrong here.
It is often the explicit job of a journalist to uncover and release publicly important information from sources who would not consent to its release.