6 ms·

Any public servant is open season for doxxing? (Teachers, soldiers, IT feds)

andy_xor_andrew 2y ago
Essentially yes, because they work for you and me. Why would you expect that people who serve the public could remain unknown to the public ?
- liontwist 2y ago
  I actually don’t think 60k workers are public figures to be doxxed. In the same way I do not represent my employer to the media or shareholders.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Well, you're wrong. The US has a government of by and for its people. It is not the same as your employer.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      Ok. I look forward to your support when Elon starts tweeting the names of individual employees he wants to cut.
      - drewbeck 2y ago
        He’s already done that
        liontwist 2y ago
        And I think that’s bad. This individual thinks it’s holding public servants accountable.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        dghlsakjg 2y ago
        The issue isn’t whether or not their names are public. The issue is that Elon Musk is highlighting them specifically in a negative way that will lead to very predictable, very personal, very negative outcomes without any recourse.
        sulam 2y ago
        Is that different when Wired does it?
        sanderjd 2y ago
        So, to be clear, I do think "who people in government are and what they do" is appropriately public record. But yes, there is a difference between media reporting on what high-level government officials are doing and government (or quasi-government) officials singling out low level employees for ridicule. It's the difference between punching up and punching down. But this is not among the worst things Musk is doing, and if it were a right-wing magazine doing reporting on employees in the federal government rather than someone using their role within the government itself to do it, I might find it distasteful but would have no real qualms about it.
        dghlsakjg 2y ago
        It depends if you think there's a difference between a self-formed likely illegal group, doing likely illegal things for ideological purposes getting reported on by a reputable news source, and a civil servant who has been doing their assigned job getting picked on personally and publicly by one of the most powerful people in America who owns the media site he is using to attack them. I see those as different in reality. We can argue that semantically they can get twisted around as the same thing (government employees getting publicly named in a critical way), but that ignores extremely relevant real-world circumstances.
      - mattnewton 2y ago
        I think this is a false equivalence. Announcing to the world that you are being fired is different from stating that you work somewhere.
      - sanderjd 2y ago
        I mean, I don't want to claim to be an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure who works for the government and what they do is public record. I do think it's bad to "doxx" people in the sense of sharing their addresses and phone numbers. But that's not what the article we're discussing does. This article simply strikes me as normal reporting that is no different than "Treasury Secretary Bessent has hired so and so as an undersecretary for such and such, and this is what so and so has done and said in the past". These people seem to be working essentially at that undersecretary level. We always know who such people are, and we should.
  - knighthack 2y ago
    You're conflating several things. - Public figures are public by influence; public servants are employees and can/should have their information revealed when necessary. - Revelation of information of employees under public pay is not 'doxxing'. Making it seem as if it's 'doxxing' is stretching the definition, like saying someone merely touching you has committed 'violence'. Your intentional use of a more serious concept for a less serious one is misleading. - Your private employer has no duty to the public, they answer only to the end stakeholders. In contrast, public servants must be accountable and known to the public - it's literally in their name, 'public' and 'servants'. Why you should confuse your status with that of public servants is bewildering.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
UltraSane 2y ago
No, just the ones violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act like Musk and DOGE employees are doing right now.
- liontwist 2y ago
  So if an administrator in a school district allegedly violates policy all their employees are open season? (We are also talking about no trial to determine whether your claims are true)
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    What Musk is doing with DOGE is the most unconstitutional power grab any US Citizen has tried is a very long time. The normal rules do not apply anymore.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - UltraSane 2y ago
        Do I need to remind you that Elon Musk has gained unauthorized and illegal access to the federal payment system? It is very possible he will be arrested for doing this if a democrat gets elected unless Trump pardons him. But then his US citizenship can be revoked. EDIT: "Wasn’t he authorized by the President, the chief executive?" The President doesn't have the authority to do that.
        epicureanideal 2y ago
        Wasn’t he authorized by the President, the chief executive?
        ModernMech 2y ago
        It's an interesting question. The president's powers are supposed to be limited and checked. That was the whole point of the American Revolution. One of the ways the president is limited is that the he can't authorize people to commit crimes. e.g. he couldn't instruct his AG to open an investigation into his political opponent under false pretenses in order to hurt his electoral chances. If the AG were to do that, it would be a crime. So the question isn't whether the president has authorized Musk to do something, but whether or not the president even has the power to do the thing he delegated. And what is the power in question? It's control over spending appropriated by Congress. And that's where separation of powers comes in. Congress is supposed to control the purse strings, and the president is supposed to make sure the money is spent on the priorities of the people, taking care of prosecuting fraud and abuse. The point of giving Congress this power is to give the people a mechanism to set their priorities on how their own money is spent. It shouldn't be the case that one guy comes in and then gets to decide how to spend all our money. But that appears to be what they are trying to do, in claiming that their cuts are all under the guise of reducing fraud and abuse. But really what they're trying to do is do an end-run around Congress. They want all the money, but they don't want to have Congress vote on it, because they don't actually have the votes to implement the agenda they want to, since Congress is so divided. So instead they're just taking the funding they have and allocating it in ways that support only the agenda items they want to see implemented.
paulgb 2y ago
It’s relevant here that “doxxing” here just means “exposing their names and internet posts”, right? In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public. It’s seen as a worthwhile tradeoff to give taxpayers transparency into how their money is spent.
- liontwist 2y ago
  There is a difference between 5 names in an article and 100k names in a database.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    The names of all public employees are public records (unless some exemption to do with say, national security, applies).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - LastTrain 2y ago
      I really hope we can all agree it is an extremely shitty thing to do for the worlds richest person, somehow entrusted to go in and supposedly save the government some money, to publicize random individuals information he stumbles across in the process because he personally doesn't like their job title. Fuck off with whether it is 'legal' or not, that isn't the issue.
  - realce 2y ago
    These 5 people are our employees. We pay them with our tax dollars to assist in delivering services to ourselves and our fellow citizens. Unless secrecy is a distinct function of the service they deliver, I expect their names to be public. Transparency and accountability is owed to the taxpayer, if that's not acceptable to people then they are free to lend their talents to the private sector instead.
    - 2y ago
nxobject 2y ago
Federal salaries are public information.
- liontwist 2y ago
  Indeed. One of the highest paid people in my local school district is a librarian who teaches no classes and gets paid 275k. Do you think it would be a good idea to get a wired article published with his name address, and 4 similar teacher profiles?
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Are you suggesting that the article we're discussing is "weird"? Does it list anyone's address? I feel like it just says their names and provides some basic bio info. Seems like pretty normal reporting on an important story at the top levels of the federal government.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      Yeah I’m not suggesting anything weird either. I just think the community might want to know which teachers are really well paid. They have chosen employment in the public interest. Are you with me?
      - the_arun 2y ago
        I suspect they read "wired" as "weird".
      - mint2 2y ago
        Yo there’s literally articles regularly published on the names and pay of all local city employees in my city with specific call outs to the top paid ones. While it seems you are implying that is not cool, it’s actually unremarkable and common government transparency.
        sanderjd 2y ago
sanderjd 2y ago
Federal employees working at the level these guys appear to be currently working are always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting, yes. This is not "doxxing", it is just reporting on the government. Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests. These aren't spies, they're public servants.
- throw10920 2y ago
  > Federal employees working at the level these guys appear to be currently working are always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting, yes. This is not "doxxing", it is just reporting on the government. It absolutely is doxxing according to the dictionary definition[1] of "to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge". These are also not high-level senior officials or elected officials or those with public-facing personas - these are technical engineers whose positions do not mean that they are "always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting". > Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests. This is just factually wrong. Exemption 6 to FOIA[2] is "Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy." - which in practice means personnel names, among other things. That's three falsehoods in a single paragraph. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doxxing https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doxxing [2] https://www.justice.gov/d9/what_are_the_9_foia_exemptions.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/what_are_the_9_foia_exemptions.pd...
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Are you referring to this Wired article as "doxxing", or to something else? I think the article we're discussing only reported their names, right? That is not "private information" about people who are public employees. And it is the role of journalism to report on public employees, not "a form of punishment or revenge". They are high level officials! That's exactly the problem. They probably thought they were just taking technical roles, and I'm sympathetic to that, but that's not what they are doing, by the reporting in, again, the article we're discussing. (Did you read the article?) They are reportedly joining high level meetings and have high level clearances in the agencies where they're working. Again, I'm sympathetic if they got there and were thrust into this stuff and are thinking "this isn't what I signed up for! I'm in way over my head!", but if that's the case, they should have said that and bowed out of this as gracefully as possible. Again, I'm sympathetic that this is a very difficult thing for a very young and ambitious person to have the wisdom to do, after taking what appears to be a dream job with a person they have probably looked up to their whole lives. But that's both exactly why they shouldn't have these high responsibility roles, and exactly why they are such useful patsies for the powerful people using them. This is why powerful people like to use young people (especially young men) to do their dirty work! Your link on FOIA contains the quoted text, but not the claim that it "in practice means personnel names, among other things". I don't believe that is accurate, but would be interested in further citation.
RIMR 2y ago
I can look up every single public employee in my area, and find out what they make. It's not hard to find out where they live. It's called government transparency.
ceejayoz 2y ago
Musk appears to have thought so, quite recently. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740
dragonwriter 2y ago
Public servants name and position and pay are already generally public; major media have published entire state databases of this. That's not doxxing, that's accountability of the government to the people. Doxxing is when a person is doing a participant in an online discussion group and information they haven't made public about their real world identity, etc., is made public, it is not when people are performing high level government management functions and their identity is attached to their actions.

Essentially yes, because they work for you and me. Why would you expect that people who serve the public could remain unknown to the public ?

liontwist 2y ago
I actually don’t think 60k workers are public figures to be doxxed. In the same way I do not represent my employer to the media or shareholders.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Well, you're wrong. The US has a government of by and for its people. It is not the same as your employer.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Ok. I look forward to your support when Elon starts tweeting the names of individual employees he wants to cut.
    - drewbeck 2y ago
      He’s already done that
      - liontwist 2y ago
        And I think that’s bad. This individual thinks it’s holding public servants accountable.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        dghlsakjg 2y ago
        The issue isn’t whether or not their names are public. The issue is that Elon Musk is highlighting them specifically in a negative way that will lead to very predictable, very personal, very negative outcomes without any recourse.
        sulam 2y ago
        Is that different when Wired does it?
        sanderjd 2y ago
        So, to be clear, I do think "who people in government are and what they do" is appropriately public record. But yes, there is a difference between media reporting on what high-level government officials are doing and government (or quasi-government) officials singling out low level employees for ridicule. It's the difference between punching up and punching down. But this is not among the worst things Musk is doing, and if it were a right-wing magazine doing reporting on employees in the federal government rather than someone using their role within the government itself to do it, I might find it distasteful but would have no real qualms about it.
        dghlsakjg 2y ago
        It depends if you think there's a difference between a self-formed likely illegal group, doing likely illegal things for ideological purposes getting reported on by a reputable news source, and a civil servant who has been doing their assigned job getting picked on personally and publicly by one of the most powerful people in America who owns the media site he is using to attack them. I see those as different in reality. We can argue that semantically they can get twisted around as the same thing (government employees getting publicly named in a critical way), but that ignores extremely relevant real-world circumstances.
    - mattnewton 2y ago
      I think this is a false equivalence. Announcing to the world that you are being fired is different from stating that you work somewhere.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      I mean, I don't want to claim to be an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure who works for the government and what they do is public record. I do think it's bad to "doxx" people in the sense of sharing their addresses and phone numbers. But that's not what the article we're discussing does. This article simply strikes me as normal reporting that is no different than "Treasury Secretary Bessent has hired so and so as an undersecretary for such and such, and this is what so and so has done and said in the past". These people seem to be working essentially at that undersecretary level. We always know who such people are, and we should.
- knighthack 2y ago
  You're conflating several things. - Public figures are public by influence; public servants are employees and can/should have their information revealed when necessary. - Revelation of information of employees under public pay is not 'doxxing'. Making it seem as if it's 'doxxing' is stretching the definition, like saying someone merely touching you has committed 'violence'. Your intentional use of a more serious concept for a less serious one is misleading. - Your private employer has no duty to the public, they answer only to the end stakeholders. In contrast, public servants must be accountable and known to the public - it's literally in their name, 'public' and 'servants'. Why you should confuse your status with that of public servants is bewildering.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

UltraSane 2y ago

No, just the ones violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act like Musk and DOGE employees are doing right now.

liontwist 2y ago
So if an administrator in a school district allegedly violates policy all their employees are open season? (We are also talking about no trial to determine whether your claims are true)
- UltraSane 2y ago
  What Musk is doing with DOGE is the most unconstitutional power grab any US Citizen has tried is a very long time. The normal rules do not apply anymore.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - UltraSane 2y ago
      Do I need to remind you that Elon Musk has gained unauthorized and illegal access to the federal payment system? It is very possible he will be arrested for doing this if a democrat gets elected unless Trump pardons him. But then his US citizenship can be revoked. EDIT: "Wasn’t he authorized by the President, the chief executive?" The President doesn't have the authority to do that.
      - epicureanideal 2y ago
        Wasn’t he authorized by the President, the chief executive?
        ModernMech 2y ago
        It's an interesting question. The president's powers are supposed to be limited and checked. That was the whole point of the American Revolution. One of the ways the president is limited is that the he can't authorize people to commit crimes. e.g. he couldn't instruct his AG to open an investigation into his political opponent under false pretenses in order to hurt his electoral chances. If the AG were to do that, it would be a crime. So the question isn't whether the president has authorized Musk to do something, but whether or not the president even has the power to do the thing he delegated. And what is the power in question? It's control over spending appropriated by Congress. And that's where separation of powers comes in. Congress is supposed to control the purse strings, and the president is supposed to make sure the money is spent on the priorities of the people, taking care of prosecuting fraud and abuse. The point of giving Congress this power is to give the people a mechanism to set their priorities on how their own money is spent. It shouldn't be the case that one guy comes in and then gets to decide how to spend all our money. But that appears to be what they are trying to do, in claiming that their cuts are all under the guise of reducing fraud and abuse. But really what they're trying to do is do an end-run around Congress. They want all the money, but they don't want to have Congress vote on it, because they don't actually have the votes to implement the agenda they want to, since Congress is so divided. So instead they're just taking the funding they have and allocating it in ways that support only the agenda items they want to see implemented.

paulgb 2y ago

It’s relevant here that “doxxing” here just means “exposing their names and internet posts”, right? In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public. It’s seen as a worthwhile tradeoff to give taxpayers transparency into how their money is spent.

liontwist 2y ago
There is a difference between 5 names in an article and 100k names in a database.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  The names of all public employees are public records (unless some exemption to do with say, national security, applies).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - LastTrain 2y ago
    I really hope we can all agree it is an extremely shitty thing to do for the worlds richest person, somehow entrusted to go in and supposedly save the government some money, to publicize random individuals information he stumbles across in the process because he personally doesn't like their job title. Fuck off with whether it is 'legal' or not, that isn't the issue.
- realce 2y ago
  These 5 people are our employees. We pay them with our tax dollars to assist in delivering services to ourselves and our fellow citizens. Unless secrecy is a distinct function of the service they deliver, I expect their names to be public. Transparency and accountability is owed to the taxpayer, if that's not acceptable to people then they are free to lend their talents to the private sector instead.
  - 2y ago

nxobject 2y ago

Federal salaries are public information.

liontwist 2y ago
Indeed. One of the highest paid people in my local school district is a librarian who teaches no classes and gets paid 275k. Do you think it would be a good idea to get a wired article published with his name address, and 4 similar teacher profiles?
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Are you suggesting that the article we're discussing is "weird"? Does it list anyone's address? I feel like it just says their names and provides some basic bio info. Seems like pretty normal reporting on an important story at the top levels of the federal government.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Yeah I’m not suggesting anything weird either. I just think the community might want to know which teachers are really well paid. They have chosen employment in the public interest. Are you with me?
    - the_arun 2y ago
      I suspect they read "wired" as "weird".
    - mint2 2y ago
      Yo there’s literally articles regularly published on the names and pay of all local city employees in my city with specific call outs to the top paid ones. While it seems you are implying that is not cool, it’s actually unremarkable and common government transparency.
      - sanderjd 2y ago

sanderjd 2y ago

Federal employees working at the level these guys appear to be currently working are always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting, yes. This is not "doxxing", it is just reporting on the government. Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests. These aren't spies, they're public servants.

throw10920 2y ago
> Federal employees working at the level these guys appear to be currently working are always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting, yes. This is not "doxxing", it is just reporting on the government. It absolutely is doxxing according to the dictionary definition[1] of "to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge". These are also not high-level senior officials or elected officials or those with public-facing personas - these are technical engineers whose positions do not mean that they are "always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting". > Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests. This is just factually wrong. Exemption 6 to FOIA[2] is "Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy." - which in practice means personnel names, among other things. That's three falsehoods in a single paragraph. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doxxing https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doxxing [2] https://www.justice.gov/d9/what_are_the_9_foia_exemptions.pdf https://www.justice.gov/d9/what_are_the_9_foia_exemptions.pd...
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Are you referring to this Wired article as "doxxing", or to something else? I think the article we're discussing only reported their names, right? That is not "private information" about people who are public employees. And it is the role of journalism to report on public employees, not "a form of punishment or revenge". They are high level officials! That's exactly the problem. They probably thought they were just taking technical roles, and I'm sympathetic to that, but that's not what they are doing, by the reporting in, again, the article we're discussing. (Did you read the article?) They are reportedly joining high level meetings and have high level clearances in the agencies where they're working. Again, I'm sympathetic if they got there and were thrust into this stuff and are thinking "this isn't what I signed up for! I'm in way over my head!", but if that's the case, they should have said that and bowed out of this as gracefully as possible. Again, I'm sympathetic that this is a very difficult thing for a very young and ambitious person to have the wisdom to do, after taking what appears to be a dream job with a person they have probably looked up to their whole lives. But that's both exactly why they shouldn't have these high responsibility roles, and exactly why they are such useful patsies for the powerful people using them. This is why powerful people like to use young people (especially young men) to do their dirty work! Your link on FOIA contains the quoted text, but not the claim that it "in practice means personnel names, among other things". I don't believe that is accurate, but would be interested in further citation.

RIMR 2y ago

I can look up every single public employee in my area, and find out what they make. It's not hard to find out where they live. It's called government transparency.

ceejayoz 2y ago

Musk appears to have thought so, quite recently. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740

dragonwriter 2y ago

Public servants name and position and pay are already generally public; major media have published entire state databases of this. That's not doxxing, that's accountability of the government to the people. Doxxing is when a person is doing a participant in an online discussion group and information they haven't made public about their real world identity, etc., is made public, it is not when people are performing high level government management functions and their identity is attached to their actions.