You talk to your boss. Your boss talks to the NSA. The NSA will find a way to silence the white-hat. Problem solved.
Philosophical dilemmas are fun to talk about, but only as long as you take the premises as granted. People who carry swords tend not to waste time trying to disentangle knots that they can simply cut in half. Most "technical" solutions to "human" problems suffer this vulnerability.
> You talk to your boss. Your boss talks to the NSA. The NSA will find a way to silence the white-hat. Problem solved.
Seems you're assuming the white hat hacker is from USA. I'm not so sure the NSA is going to be able to silence a white hat hacker from say Russia, or anywhere out of USA for that matter.
Silencing somebody doesn't need to involve sending him a legally binding gag order. Nor does it necessarily require killing him.
There are lots of carrots (e.g. job offer, lucrative contract) and whips (e.g. a threat to ruin his business or professional reputation) that a government agency can use to persuade someone, even a foreigner, to keep something a secret for a certain length of time.
This obviously won't work on someone who is under Putin's protection, for example, but then we're talking about cyberwar, not a lone white-hat.
Philosophical dilemmas are fun to talk about, but only as long as you take the premises as granted. People who carry swords tend not to waste time trying to disentangle knots that they can simply cut in half. Most "technical" solutions to "human" problems suffer this vulnerability.