The hacking of Twitter CEO Evan Williams’s email account has sparked an ethics debate after TechCrunch said that it would publish some of the confidential documents that the hacker leaked.

The brouhaha began when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington blogged that a French hacker calling himself “Hacker Croll” said he had broken into Mr. Williams’s account as well as those of Mr. Williams’s wife and two Twitter employees.

An English translation of a post on French blog Koren shows that the hacker claims he gained access to Mr. Williams’s Gmail, PayPal, Amazon (AMZN) and AT&T (T) accounts, among others, and thus was able to find documents containing Twitter employee food preferences, credit card numbers, phone numbers and salaries.

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Talk of cyberwar is in the air after more than two dozen high-level websites in the United States and South Korea were hit by denial-of-service attacks this week. But cooler heads are pointing to a pilfered five-year-old worm as the source of the traffic, under control of an unsophisticated hacker who apparently did little to bolster his borrowed code against detection.

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Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) CEO Bob Carr is an unlikely spokesman for tech security. But that’s what he’s emerging as.

The credit card processor suffered one of the largest data breaches ever disclosed last year. But rather than taking the time-honored approach of staying quiet and hoping that the negative publicity goes away, Carr is talking openly about what went wrong, the problems with the industry’s security standards, and a new product his company developed to help merchants protect customer data.

Heartland is the middleman in card purchases. When customers swipe their cards at stores, the data on them are transmitted to processors like Heartland, which passes them on to the banks that issued the cards. The company announced in January that a hacker had managed to gain access to this card information for the 100 million transactions it handles each month.

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Forget the new cyber security czar position that President Barack Obama announced last week.

The real sign that the White House might be finally taking cyber security seriously came in an announcement on Friday that Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent” and the former hacker behind the annual DefCon hacker confab in Las Vegas, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council (HSAC).

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An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday’s hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s, and the official feed for Fox News.

The hacker, who goes by the handle GMZ, told Threat Level on Tuesday he gained entry to Twitter’s administrative control panel by pointing an automated password-guesser at a popular user’s account. The user turned out to be a member of Twitter’s support staff, who’d chosen the weak password “happiness.”

Cracking the site was easy, because Twitter allowed an unlimited number of rapid-fire log-in attempts.

“I feel it’s another case of administrators not putting forth effort toward one of the most obvious and overused security flaws,” he wrote in an IM interview. “I’m sure they find it difficult to admit it.”

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