Ethics

I posted a link yesterday to a story about the ethics of using misleading tactics to gain access to quasi-private Facebook information.  Today, the ABA eJournal posted this story about a Fordham Law School professor who asked his class to find personal information about Justice Scalia using online sources.  The assignment was designed to demonstrate the availability of private information on the Internet.  It worked.  The students found online photos of Justice Scalia's grandchildren, his home address, his wife's email address, and other personal information.

According to the story, Justice Scalia wasn't too thrilled.  But given the professor's rationale for the exercise and that none of the information was disseminated publicly, I have no problems with the assignment.  I am curious to know, though, how the students uncovered the information.  Did they use any misleading tactics that would give rise to the same sorts of concerns described in my earlier Facebook post? 

Lawyers have at their disposal powerful new resources to uncover information about opponents and witnesses, as the Facebook post and the classroom exercise illustrate.  Going forward, I suspect we're going to need much more guidance from ethics opinions and, ideally, in the rules of professonal conduct concerning the types of investigative tactics that are permissible.  As I suggested in my comments to the earlier post, I think these sorts of investigations should be ethically permissible as long as the lawyer is not breaking the law and the lawyer's investigation is misleading only to the extent necessary to uncover ongoing illegal or impermissible activity (e.g., the "tester" exception).