Careful being a Good "Sam"

So, what is the lesson here? Or a good reporter. I suppose that the position of the school is that he should have written the story without any evidence to support his point. Because, I am certain that they would have tried to deny it or anything...

Western Oregon University responded today to news reports of disciplinary actions against a student who discovered that the institution had not secured private data about some applicants. The actions, taken last week, have attracted attention as a dispute over freedom of the press because the student was affiliated with a student-run newspaper and helped that newspaper expose the security lapse.

But today Mark Weiss, Western Oregon’s vice president for finance and administration, told The Chronicle that “this was not about press freedom — it was about violating clear policies designed to safeguard confidential information.”

The student, a senior named Blair W. Loving, told campus officials in June that he had accidentally stumbled on a computer file with 100 names of applicants to the university’s College of Education, along with their Social Security numbers. He copied the file, which became the basis for an article published in the student paper, the Western Oregon Journal.

Mr. Weiss noted, however, that “while I’m grateful we found there was a route for people to access this data,” Mr. Loving nontheless violated the institution’s computer-use policies in a number of ways. First, he accessed the file while logged onto the network under another student’s ID, and then he made a copy of the file. Copying sensitive information raises the risk of identity theft. Mr. Weiss said that Mr. Loving could have published an article in the student newspaper without copying the file.