Unknown hackers may have dropped private and sensitive information on several members of President Trump’s inner circle onto an open source forum called Hastebin. While the exact time stamp has been masked, the information contains personal phone numbers, email addresses, parking tickets, moving violations, the names of people related to them, and even Amazon Wish Lists. (Disturbingly, obtaining someone’s Wish List on Amazon is as easy as having the email address he uses to sign into his account. Are Amazon customers aware that their wish lists are open to anyone who knows their email address?)

Linking to the source is not something PJ Media will do because the information was clearly released to intimidate not only the targets but their entire families. These kinds of attacks are getting out of hand.

More research was required, so PJ Media reached out to the targets using the numbers from the document dropped on Hastebin. None of the numbers appear to be connected anymore. The email addresses also came back undeliverable, so it’s quite possible this list was a fake. Whether or not the phone numbers belonged to the targets, it’s a clear attempt at intimidation — and it happens all the time. More troubling than the phone numbers and email addresses were the names and addresses and phone numbers of all of their relatives. These are people who are not in the public eye and have no apparent political relevance.

Doxxing is a scourge in our modern life. Digital social justice warriors release private information as a form of payback for whatever misdeed they’ve attributed to the target. In this case, the “crimes” related to their support for the president. Normally, when private individuals are doxxed by online criminals it is to make them suffer social and economic consequences. Recently, attendees of the “Unite the Right” rally have been the subjects of a doxxing website specifically set up to “out” them to their employers and cause them to lose their jobs. Several of the rally attendees have been fired as a result. Innocent people have also been targeted in cases of mistaken identity and now fear for their lives. Doxxing has become the new weapon of totalitarian wannabes whose main goal is the suppression of speech they don’t like. An article called “Whatever Your Side, Doxing is a Perilous Form of Social Justice” explained the problem with doxxing perceived enemies.

“Doxing is a sloppy form of justice that often hurts many beyond the intended target,” says Jared Colton, who teaches about ethics and technology at Utah State University. “It punishes their families and even people who look like them or have similar names.”

Victor Davis Hanson wrote a must-read article called “Innocent Words (and Names) are Under Attack,” which illustrates the level of absurdity this kind of mob action produces, including pulling down statues, destroying history, and attacking innocent people for no reason at all.