Reuters' Felix Salmon, wrote a column about media and ethics (no snickering, please) that's titled:  "Did the [NYTimes] hack Fabrice Tourre’s email?"   Mr. Salmon writes about a story in Tuesday's NYTimes, by featured reporters Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson - a long and rambling story about the court case against Goldman’s Fabrice Tourre, which is mainly interesting for how it was sourced.  Mr. Salmon notes (or possibly quotes from the NYTimes article):

"These legal replies, which are not public, were provided to The New York Times by Nancy Cohen, an artist and filmmaker in New York also known as Nancy Koan, who says she found the materials in a laptop she had been given by a friend in 2006.

    The friend told her he had happened upon the laptop discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building. E-mail messages for Mr. Tourre continued streaming into the device, but Ms. Cohen said she had ignored them until she heard Mr. Tourre’s name in news reports about the S.E.C. case. She then provided the material to The Times. Mr. Tourre’s lawyer did not respond to an inquiry for comment."

Mr. Salmon goes on to say he's ... "sure this was extremely carefully formulated, but it does raise a lot of questions without answering them. Tourre’s name was splashed over the newspapers in April 2010, so it stands to reason that the NYT has had some kind of access to Tourre’s private, password-protected email account — not to mention archives going back at least to 2006 — for a good year at this point. I’d also guess that the NYT is going public with its source now because Tourre finally got around to changing his password, and the stream of emails then dried up."

And he consider whether it ... "the NYT, then, hacking into Tourre’s private emails in much the same way as the News of the World was hacking into private voicemails? The NYT certainly didn’t think much of that activity, even when it was done through an outside contractor rather than a newsroom employee. So I don’t think it makes a lot of difference whether the computer was in the possession of Cohen or of the NYT.

To continue reading this provocative article, go to:   [Reuters, 6/1/11]

C-I Note:   In the meantime, we ponder the situation - and accept the "facts of the case," which are that the laptop was, in fact, retrieved from a garbage can in New York City in 2006.  The bigger issue, in our view, is whether Mr. Tourre was set up, say, by a undisclosed whistleblower at Goldman who had it out for his or her colleague.  If you place a laptop in a strategically-located spot, you can determine who the finder will be and anticipate what the finder will do next. 

It's admittedly far-fetched, but, things like this can and do happen in NYC.  While reading the Reuters article, and possibly the NYTimes article by Ms. Story and Ms. Morgenson, let your mind wander - see what you come up with, and let us know.

To access the Times story, go to:   [NYTimes, 5/31/11, S.E.C. Case Stands Out.."]