Home addresses
Federal law enforcement authorities say they are aware of a website that sprang up over the weekend and began doxxing federal and state government officials at odds with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
That is, government officials doing their jobs as opposed to helping Trump trash everything.
The site, which appears to have been created on Sunday, contains the home addresses, pictures of homes, personal emails, and photos of state and local officials who have pushed back on or questioned the president’s legal campaign.
The FBI confirmed it knows about it but wouldn’t say anything more.
Among the officials targeted—literally—by the enemiesofthepeople website were Govs. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Brian Kemp (R-GA), Doug Ducey (R-AZ), multiple people affiliated with the company Dominion Voting Systems, and Christopher Krebs, the former top federal cybersecurity official who was fired last month for publicly debunking many of the conspiracy theories floated by Trump and his legal team.
“If blood is spilled, it is on the hands of the president,” Krebs’ attorneys wrote in a Wednesday statement regarding the website. The specific threats, they noted, “may be domestic or foreign actors trying to stoke the violence.”
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Doxxing is the worst. I remember my shock in the early blogging days of seeing it done to some person with idiotic opinions. Is there legal redress against it in the USA?
Pre the digital age I remember vile Orange Order Loyalists shouting “We know where you live” to equally vile Irish Republican supporters. It’s grossly intimidating – the power of the mob (or rather, dangerous individuals) to be feared more than the power of the state in democratic countries.
It depends on the details, but generally no. A couple of problems here:
Publishing any information lawfully obtained from a public source is protected by the First Amendment. In Florida Star v. BJF, 491 U.S. 524 (1989), a Florida Sheriff’s department screwed up and, in violation of state law, included a rape victim’s name in its standard “police blotter” report. The Florida Star newspaper printed the item, apparently inadvertently as well, contrary to its own internal policy of not publishing the names of rape victims. The victim sued under a Florida law that made it illegal to publish such information. The Supreme Court held that the law was unconstitutional as applied to these facts — the government (intentionally or not) made the information public, and the paper did not obtain that information illegally.
There is still a branch of invasion of privacy law known as “public disclosure of private facts,” but that tends to cover situations like a news reporter publishing a piece about his neighbor’s extramarital affair when it isn’t newsworthy in any way. (And even that might be dubious, depending on the details.)
A hell of a lot of information that people label as “doxxing” is actually public information. Between property tax records, voting registrations, and many other government sources, a lot of people’s “private” address isn’t really that private. Add in non-government but readily accessible sources such as credit reporting services, and in most cases it’s hardly a secret. Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that most people’s addresses and phone numbers were printed in a big book that was delivered every year to every home and business in the area. And that’s to say nothing of the information that people disclose themselves on social media. If I can learn what neighborhood you live in from ten minutes on your Facebook page, and pin down the exact house with another twenty minutes comparing your Instagram photos to Google Earth images… is that really private information?
There’s a separate issue if, either through the specific language or the context, someone is doing more than simply revealing the information, i.e. if they’re soliciting or inciting a crime, or making threats. But the First Amendment (at least as currently interpreted) gives a pretty wide berth in these areas, too. A lot of things that get described informally as “threats” don’t meet the definition of “true threats” for First Amendment purposes. And incitement requires a direct call to imminent lawless action. Soliciting/participating in a conspiracy to commit a crime is very much a murky area and highly fact-dependent — it’s probably a crime for Tony Soprano to tell a trusted lieutenant that “something should happen to that guy,” and it’s probably not a crime for some random person to tweet “I wish somebody would assassinate [insert name of famous politician].”
And yes, I’m aware that a lot of states have adopted “cyberbullying” laws that might purport to cover this kind of thing. Those laws — like the Florida law that SCOTUS struck down in the rape victim case — are all subject to First Amendment limitations, and a lot of them have other deficiencies (like vagueness and overbreadth) that haven’t been tested in court yet.
Just to add my own view: I find “doxxing,” like “cyberbulling” or “online harassment” to be one of those terms that is not terribly helpful, because they’re used to cover a broad range of conduct, from stuff I think is or should be illegal, through stuff I think shouldn’t be illegal but is still shitty behavior, to stuff I think is perfectly acceptable discourse.
I would put “here’s a public official’s home address” in the middle category, though of course if you add enough context (“public official X has committed treason and someone needs to made a citizen’s arrest and execute him — here’s his address….”) I would move it to the first category.
Thanks Screechy. I would argue that public officials shouldn’t have private addresses disclosed in any circumstances. There seems no legitimate reason that others should have access to this information outwith friends, family, doctors, dentists, government and council etc. Re the telephone book – that does seem to come from happier times. However I do take your point that if you know what you’re doing you could find someone’s address.
I discovered that my personal information was on HuffPo, which I never read, because of a donation I had made to a political candidate. That stuff also often becomes public, which probably is legal and there are good reasons for it, but can certainly become uncomfortable when you live in a state that is politically opposed to everything you stand for, and willing to be violent about that opposition.
We have always been unlisted in the phone book; we discovered about our address when an old high school chum of my husband’s contacted him. Not anyone we would want to hide from, but it was a shock. Usually they went through his mother, because they didn’t know where to look for us; now they find us without difficulty, and our names are unusual enough to narrow it down pretty quickly. (I have found 2 other people with my name, and none with my husband’s.)