The revelation of clandestine personal information has occurred for as long as clandestine personal information has existed. This has been practiced throughout human history as intelligence gathering by states and private firms, investigation of crimes, security testing, harassment, social shaming, blackmail, and vigilantism.[1] In the age of the Internet, the researching and broadcasting of private, personally identifiable information about individuals and organizations has become easier than ever, and thus a more serious problem. Let us consider the nature of the practice known as doxxing, the possible effects on victims, and potential countermeasures.

The Nature and Effects of Doxxing

By using publicly searchable databases, social media, social engineering, and hacking, a doxxer can gain access to private information about a person or organization. The term doxxing to refer to the publication of a dossier of such information derives from the Internet slang “dropping dox”, dating to the 1990s. Black-hat hackers in that era would sometimes dox one another in order to expose someone to harassment and/or criminal prosecution.[2] In a 2003 presentation at West Point, Adam Young and Moti Yung presented a novel type of computer virus known as doxware. Such a virus does not encrypt files and demand ransom for a decryption key, as traditional extortion programs do; rather, it simply copies private information and threatens to publicize it unless payment is made.[3,4] Doxxing entered mainstream public awareness through the Internet-based group of activists known as Anonymous, who frequently use the tactic.[5]

Once a doxxer has a compiled dossier on an individual or group, a variety of tactics are possible, with a wide range of outcomes: mobs can be directed to protest at a person’s home or business, an employer can be harassed into firing the person, advertisers and investors can be coerced into ending their association with a person or group, a public figure can be intimidated into silence, fake sign-ups for deliverable goods and services can be made, a police raid can be sent with a false tip of a bomb threat or hostage situation, social media and financial accounts can be hacked, or criminals may be sent to harm or even assassinate someone.[6]

The aforementioned effects can completely ruin a person’s life. Aside from the possibility of direct bodily harm from misaimed vigilante mobs or police raids under false pretenses, a person’s family can be left without sustenance if doxxing leaves one unable to find employment or sponsorship and one does not qualify for state assistance. Leaving or being expelled from university because of doxxing can alter a person’s entire life trajectory. Fixing identity theft that can occur as a result of personal information being publicized can consume a vast amount of time, effort, and resources. Exposing the identity of a political or religious dissident living under a hostile regime can cause harm or death to that person. The shame and social alienation following doxxing and association with a negative behavior or vilified political cause can cause depression and even lead to suicide.[7]

In recent years, doxxing has increasingly been carried out by journalists who claim that they are revealing information that is in the public interest. Many journalists who work for establishment media firms seem to believe that they are somehow entitled to do what is considered wrong for anyone else to do, especially if they strongly disagree with the politics of a person or organization. The ethics of doxxing in journalism and the relationship between journalism and activism are matters of ongoing debate and controversy.[8,9]

When Doxxing is Legitimate

Despite the extreme damage that doxxing can cause, there are situations in which it can be a legitimate tactic. First, turnabout is fair play. Doxxing someone who is known to dox innocent people is not only acceptable, but in need of encouragement. No one can rationally complain about a taste of one’s own medicine, and the legal doctrine of estoppel should take care of any claims made by the victimizer-turned-victim. Establishing the norm that what goes around will come around should reduce the number of innocent people who have to endure the horrors of such exposure. The end result will either be a sort of peace through mutually assured destruction or a flood of doxxing that reduces the repercussions for each doxxed individual due to information overload.

Second, as noted earlier, doxxing can expose hidden criminals to legal repercussions. If one sees a pedophile, terrorist, financial criminal, or other such villain bragging on an Internet forum about their exploits and one is able to piece together the criminal’s real identity, it is best to provide such information to the authorities. In the physical world, civil unrest caused by masked groups of assailants can be countered by tearing off their masks, photographing the rioters, and forwarding the information to law enforcement. In either case, should they be unwilling to pursue a criminal investigation, going public in the hope that extrajudicial punishment will occur is sub-optimal, but superior to letting society’s worst continue to harm the innocent.

Third, doxxing can be an effective weapon against corrupt government officials. Some people who get into positions of state power abuse people above and beyond the extent to which states abuse people as a matter of course. Revealing damaging personal information about such people can lead to their resignation, firing, or being voted out of office. Failing this, it may lead them to change their behavior for the better out of fear that continuing to abuse their powers may be detrimental to their well-being.

An Overview of Countermeasures

Unfortunately, most cases of doxxing do not occur against the aforementioned legitimate targets. Whereas legal repercussions for doxxing are currently lacking in most jurisdictions, protecting innocent people from the antics of misguided and/or unscrupulous activists and journalists requires direct action as of this writing. Therefore, let us explore the options available to counter malicious doxxing.

To begin, let us remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. There is much that one can do to make oneself harder to dox, such as using strong passwords for all important accounts and reducing self-disclosure of personally identifiable information. If one has social media accounts, it is best not to divulge more information to strangers than is necessary. Using a virtual private network or other means to hide one’s IP address, deleting photo and video metadata before publicizing them, conducting all sensitive personal business on non-public computers, and using private registration for one’s websites.

Even so, enemies who have enough time and resources at their disposal can still manage to dox someone. As discussed earlier, doxxing doxxers is a valid countermeasure. Once they are exposed, all of the tactics that they use or hope others will use against their victims can be used against them. If doxxers receive the ostracism, shaming, hacking, and trolling that they hope to inflict on others, then they will be less keen to engage in the practice in future.

Legal remedies may be available in some cases, and these should be explored and exhausted before taking matters into one’s own hands. Doxxers may be in violation of various statutes when they gather or release information, depending on the methods used in compiling and releasing a particular dossier as well as the applicable laws in the doxxer’s jurisdiction. Unfortunately, civil suits in such matters tend to be difficult to win and prohibitively expensive to pursue. It is possible that a public outcry against the practice may lead to stricter privacy laws and more serious punishments for doxxing innocent people.

Of course, the greatest deterrence against a particular behavior is effective capital punishment, whether official or extralegal. Some people who have been victimized by a doxxer will effect a lethal response, and some people who oppose doxxing in general will seek to impose this ultimate sanction upon doxxers. Killing someone for an action that does not demonstrably end another person’s life may seem unjustifiably disproportionate, but a historical analogy may make more sense of this practice. Livestock theft in the American frontier in the 19th century was considered a serious offense and was sometimes punished by hanging.[10,11] Severe punishments for stealing horses and cattle were also practiced in Europe since ancient times.[12] Since people depended on their livestock to provide transportation, labor, meat, milk, wool, and money, losing them to thieves was a great handicap. In the worst cases, this loss could deprive an entire family of their means of survival.[13]

For these reasons, vigilantes would put livestock thieves to death whenever authorities refused to deal with the problem. For example, a cattle rustling gang in Kansas in the 1880s known as the Homesteaders grew to eighteen men and posed a major threat to peace and order in the area. By late 1888, the cattlemen had had enough of the gang and the unwillingness of the sheriff to do anything about them. They told the gang to leave or be hanged, which caused thirteen to leave. Of the remaining five, three were captured and hanged while two escaped. This ended large-scale rustling in the area.[10] This examples demonstrates an effective use of ultraviolence to suppress crime, and is instructive on how doxxing of innocent people might be reined in.

Doxxing in modern times can be viewed as the same sort of theft of livelihood, in that it can result in deprivation of a person’s means of support. There are also certain elements of cowardice and indecency involved, in that seizing a person’s livelihood has a significant chance of causing death without requiring the killer to face the victim, and a death from lack of sustenance is slow and agonizing. Thus, killing a doxxer in the 21st century is on the same moral footing as hanging a cattle rustler in the 19th century. It may not strictly adhere to principle, but it protects economic interests and enforces good social norms where established authority is lacking. Note that because people whose lives are ruined by a doxxer may commit an act of terrorism while those victimized by livestock thieves generally lacked the desire or means to respond in that fashion, a lethal response against doxxers makes more sense in terms of preventing general mayhem.

Once a few heads of journalists and activists roll for doxxing the wrong people, it is likely that they will become more fearful of retribution for their misdeeds and that the authorities will step in to suppress the practice with new laws and regulations. Like the Homesteaders incident, it is probably only necessary to make examples of a few of the worst doxxers to end major problems with doxxing.

Conclusion

While it would be unfortunate if the problem of doxxing must be resolved violently and extrajudicially, the high bar to criminal prosecution and civil suit enjoyed by leftist activists make a peaceful resolution unlikely. Furthermore, that which does not cause deaths tends not to gain the attention of government officials and public awareness groups, as other matters that do are viewed as more urgent.

The journalists and activists who use doxxing as a political weapon that wreaks havoc upon the innocent as well as the guilty are both playing with fire and throwing gasoline upon it. Those who abuse freedom of the press risk destroying it, and along with it the customs that protect them from the very harms they inflict upon others. The left has spent the past century exerting effort to destroy certain traditional values, and this is a game that their opponents can also play.

References:

Bright, Peter (2012, Mar. 7). “Doxed: how Sabu was outed by former Anons long before his arrest”. Ars Technica. Honan, Mat (2014, Mar. 6). “What Is Doxing?”. Wired. Young, A. (2003). Non-Zero Sum Games and Survivable Malware. IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Information Assurance Workshop. p. 24–29. A. Young, M. Yung (2004). Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology. Wiley. “Anonymous’s Operation Hiroshima: Inside the Doxing Coup the Media Ignored”. Ibtimes.com. Jan. 1, 2012. Cohen, David S.; Connon, Krysten (2015, May 21). “Strikethrough (Fatality); The origins of online stalking of abortion providers”. Slate. Nark, Jason. (2014, Apr. 30). “The Boston bombing’s forgotten victim”. Philadelphia Daily News. “Rethinking the ethics of doxing”. Background Probability, Dec. 14, 2014. Ingram, Mathew (2014, Mar. 6). “Of Bitcoin and doxxing: Is revealing Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity okay because it was Newsweek and not Reddit?”. Chrisman, Harry E. “Cattle Rustling”. Old Meade County. “Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society”. Ohio History Central. Rachel Ginnis Fuchs (2005). Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth Century Europe. Cambridge University Press. p. 97. Luckett, Matthew S. (2014). Honor among Thieves: Horse Stealing, State-Building, and Culture in Lincoln County, Nebraska, 1860 – 1890 (Ph.D.). University of California Los Angeles.

Support The Zeroth Position on Patreon!

Like this: Like Loading...