It has been a day since Michael Arrington's Techrunch published excerpts from "leaked" documents apparently stolen from the Google Apps account of a Twitter Employee (or so they say).

The documents included over 300 confidential files meant for "internal" Twitter consumption. Things like Twitter's expansion plans, financial forecast, interview schedules, agreements with key companies and more were revealed and laid bare. According to TechCrunch, a hacker had sent them the information, apparently stolen from a Twitter employee e-mail account. Soon after the receipt of the information, it was duly published by TechCrunch, with a claim that had talked to Twitter to figure out a "right way" to go about publishing them. The blog post, more importantly, adds that they have talked to Twitter and have been given the go ahead to post the information. This was, however, contested by Twitter CEO Evan Williams in the form of a tweet and Biz Stone who made it clear in a blog post that no permission was given for publishing the information. According to TechCrunch, the hacker, whose identity has not been revealed, sent TechCrunch a zip file with 310 private files from inside Twitter. The hacker called himself, "Hacker Croll", by the way.

As for TechCrunch, one of the most widely read Technology blogs, they have gone ahead and published a rather lengthy blog post detailing Twitter's plans to counter the "threat" from Facebook, Google and the likes. The post also shows many interesting tidbits on how the Twitter team works. Techcrunch has also stated that the stuff published were just "rough drafts" and meeting notes - which means that some of the "plans" detailed there might just be on the board and not implemented yet. That, in any case, is a different story altogether.

Another thing that has been raised is the usage of Google Apps by Twitter employees. Some have even raised questions regarding the security of Google Apps. The important thing to notice here is that any application is as secure as how the user wants it to be. Biz Stone too, in his blog post, addressed the hack as a "web-wide" issue. In this case, the employee, whose account was hacked into used the same password for more than one service, thereby giving access to almost everything the hacker wanted.

The current incident has also raised a debate over the journalistic ethics in case of stories like this. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, on his part, has offered to work closely with Twitter to help them "mitigate" the damage that could have been cased by the sharing of personal documents. The face-off continues. Unabated, so will the debate.