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Information made public after a data breach—that is, a security failure resulting in an institution’s confidential information being accessed by a third party (Romanosky 2016)—can provide crucial insight into elusive but important questions. For example, WikiLeaks’ release of diplomatic cables presented novel information about US foreign policy and its machinations (Roberts 2012) and the Paradise Papers, which disclosed financial dealings of political and business elites (Shaxson 2018), are both useful for studying influence networks.
However, researchers who seek to use leaked information must first address a difficult issue: Can unethically produced data be used ethically? Although it may seem that researchers should be free to use publicly available information, use of information released through illicit activity without the permission of the data owner or subjects should be subject to heightened ethical scrutiny. While other professions have addressed this issue (Jamieson 2019), political science has not yet reckoned with whether leaked data can be used within the discipline’s ethical guidelines.
By presenting a framework and recommendations for the ethical use of leaked data in research, this article provides guidance to investigators and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) tasked with identifying and analyzing these ethical concerns.
By presenting a framework and recommendations for the ethical use of leaked data in research, this article provides guidance to investigators and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) tasked with identifying and analyzing these ethical concerns. We base this analysis on our interpretation of the ethical obligations placed on researchers by the Belmont Report (National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research 1979) and the Common Rule, a uniform federal policy on the ethical treatment of human subjects (45 CFR §46.101 et seq. 2018). However, from the beginning, it is worth noting that both sets of guidelines have been criticized, particularly because they may fail to account for ways in which research can exacerbate harms faced by vulnerable communities (Rogers and Kelly 2011) or paternalistically deny these communities opportunities to participate in research (Gustafson and Brunger 2014). Consequently, the framework developed in this article should be viewed as a tool to help researchers grapple with the ethical issues posed by using leaked data in research rather than a universal and inviolate set of rules.
ETHICAL FRAMEWORK FOR USING LEAKED...