The tech blog was sent 310 confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and Twitter employees, including executive meeting notes, partner agreements, financial projections, security passcodes, credit card numbers and phone logs of various Twitter employees, by a hacker called Hacker Croll.
Hacker Croll did not gain access to users' Twitter accounts and the security of Twitter.com was not breached.
TechCrunch said it was not going to release the documents that jeopardised the safety of Twitter employees, such as those that contain security passcodes and floorplans of Twitter's new office space.
But the blog is planning to publish some of the documents including ones detailing Twitter's financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings, as well as the pitch document for the Twitter TV show, news of which broke in May.
News of Twitter's financial projections alone will likey generate much publicity because of the widespread interest in the service, which generates few revenues despite its millions of users.
TechCrunch said: "We've spent most of the evening reading these documents. "There is clearly an ethical line here that we don't want to cross, and the vast majority of these documents aren't going to be published, at least by us. "But a few of the documents have so much news value that we think it's appropriate to publish them."
Hundreds of Twitter users are lambasting TechCrunch's decision to release any of the documents. One user @Awfy wrote: "The recent plans of TechCrunch to post illegally gathered and sensitive documents about Twitter just goes to show Mashable is far greater."
Another user @BenWard wrote: "This is not complicated. Stop interacting with TechCrunch. Shun them. Ignore them. It thrives on negativity that our industry should reject."
TechCrunch has responded to users' reactions It said: "Many users say [these documents] are 'stolen' and therefore shouldn't be published. We disagree.
"We publish confidential information almost every day on TechCrunch. This is stuff that is also 'stolen', usually leaked by an employee or someone else close to the company, and the company is very much opposed to its publication.
"In the past we've received comments that this is unethical. And it certainly was unethical, or at least illegal or tortuous, for the person who gave us the information and violated confidentiality and/or nondisclosure agreements. But on our end, it's simply news.
"If you disagree with that, ok. But then you also have to disagree with the entire history of the news industry. 'News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress, all the rest is advertising', is something Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, supposedly said . I agree wholeheartedly."
Source: Brand Republic