After report on the Smoking Gun website revealed that the email accounts of the members of George W. Bush's family had been hacked and published online by a hacker called `Guccifer,' the hacking incident is now being investigated by the Secret Service.

According to the Smoking Gun report, `Guccifer' had invaded six accounts in all, including one account that belonged to Bush's sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, and other members of the Bush family and their friends.

With the hack involving the disclosure of confidential addresses, phone numbers, email correspondence and photos of self-portraits painted by former US President George W. Bush, the hack and the publication of the details raises questions about journalism ethics; largely because, going by the old rules of journalism, Bush's private e-mails to his family should never have been published or broadcast without his permission.

While the Smoking Gun site's editor and co-founder William Bastone said that the "extensive and extraordinary" nature of the hack had prompted the site to deem the disclosure of the hack "newsworthy," ethics experts are of the opinion that even prominent people should "enjoy some right of privacy."

Slamming the publication of Bush's emails, Richard Wald - former NBC News president and a professor at Columbia University's school of journalism - raised the `journalism ethics' question, saying: "If the hack had revealed malefaction of a great nature, you'd say `Thank God they published it.' But if it's just trivial, it injures the notion of civility."