If you are interested in learning more about where Steve Blank was likely working, learning more about Pine Gap is a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

I really don't understand his post. What was the point he was making about TechCrunch??

What he seems to be saying, in an elegantly indirect way, is:

A) Um, yeah, PR firms shill for their clients on the Apple Store. Duh. People who didn't see this coming are deluding themselves.

B) Moreover, it's particularly ironic that TechCrunch, a site which sits squarely in the center of the tech PR universe, would profess to be shocked, shocked at the behavior of the people that they chat with every day.

C) If TechCrunch really is shocked by this, they're going to have a nervous breakdown when they figure out (e.g.) what percentage of the stuff they read every day is written by PR staffers.

> it's particularly ironic that TechCrunch, a site which sits squarely in the center of the tech PR universe, would profess to be shocked, shocked at the behavior of the people that they chat with every day.

I would use the word hypocritical rather than ironic, because (and you allude to this with your Casablanca reference) they are firmly in the know. Irony would be them gaming the blogoverse with unethical "journalism" and link-baiting then discovering that they've been gamed themselves by PR firms.

Editorial advice accepted -- thanks! But I'll leave the original as it is, to preserve the record for future historians. ;)

it was about PR companies. does ethics have a place in their business? I think :)

That, and he muses about the relationship between Tech Crunch and the PR firms because this one firm and their shady practices have now been outed. Tech Crunch hasn't done them any favors, or have they, because many PR firm's customers simply don't care how they get results.

My magic decoder ring says the gist of it is that: tech crunch is really a government agency front (PR) pushing intelligence gathering tools (research) such as twitter on the unwary public (wife).

If that's what he's really saying, I think he's also saying ". . . and this is a good thing!"

I'm not so sure that's what he's actually saying, though.

What I think is that he had a great anecdote and felt the need to shoehorn it into the news of the day.

I'm still not sure what his point was about TechCrunch, but I sure did enjoy the story about the hippie wife who didn't know her husband was a spy. (Hmmm, that would make a good movie actually...)

Would you sell your services to a government that is oppressive or a corporation that abuses its employees?

Or would you forfeit that income because it makes you complicit?

Meh. Oppression is in the eye of the beholder. Some would say the US is oppressive because we torture people and start wars. Or that Steve Jobs verbally abuses his employees. Nothing is black and white.

I once had an interviewee walk out of the interview because she thought we charged too much for our software (it started at $2k and was priced lower than the competition). She was so angry she was shaking. For a few seconds I thought about explaining supply and demand or the complexities of building software for a financial services vertical... but instead I thanked her for her time.