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Comment by myrbergs_army | Hacker News Reader

As tptacek says, I don't view reporting like this as "doxxing." As the series hopefully shows, Le Roux was a hugely newsworthy figure for many different reasons, so reporting his background and how he got there is part of understanding where he is now. As for being nervous, many of the major players in the story are in US custody, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively a lot of people involved want to tell their part of the story. If they have beefs, they are typically with each other not with me. I do try to be careful, though.

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I am completely out of the loop on this guy!!! I can't believe it, other than this article what's the best summary of him??

To me, it's just semantics. Let's say that someone published this much information about you. And let's say that they had whatever justifications. That there was widespread agreement that it was OK. Whatever. How would you feel?

Are moral rules situationally dependent on the personal feelings of the person subject to those rules? I would hate to be in jail, but I think it's morally and ethically valid to put people in jail in certain circumstances. Similarly I think that politicians and public figures should be subject to a high degree of scrutiny and transparency about their personal lives, even though I personally wouldn't enjoy such treatment.

By "feel", I meant more what you might feel justified in doing about it. The key "moral rule" for me is to only mess with people who have messed with me. I don't get into third-party stuff, and I have little sympathy for those who do.

So what you're saying is, it would be moral for this guy's murder victims to dox him, but not a reporter? The funny thing with murderers is that they can only really be stopped by third parties.

I have little use for assessing morality.

Anybody can do whatever they want. And they get whatever they get.

My parent question was more about the reporter's OPSEC. That is, the risks that he's taken.

Wait, what? I was directly responding to your criteria for assessing morality.

Fair enough.

I have little use for assessing the moral opinions of others.

As I wrote recently, stuff that isn't testable isn't worth worrying about.

I can't tell if you're being serious or facetious.

A given moral rule doesn't change because it's held by you versus someone else. Just like it makes no sense to refuse to answer the question of whether a fruit is an apple because it is in my hand instead of yours.

In other words, by having a moral rule yourself, you implicitly have a moral metarule: a rule about how to choose your moral rules.

Your refusal to answer the question doesn't make sense.

People have all sorts of moral rules. It tends to vary by culture, religion, and so on. Maybe you can abstract them all into some overall set. But you lose some subtleties.

But I also don't judge the moral rules that others hold. That's one of my operating principles. You can't judge without knowing that you're right. And there's no canonical source for that. I do have opinions about how well some moral rules work vs others. But that's not about judging, only assessing workability.

Germany has the concept 'people of public interest' for which different rules concerning media appearance and photographs apply. Politicians are an example. You could argue that it applies in this case as well.

Wrong country of course, but the idea as an ethical code is out there, that the public has some right for information on some, and only some, people.

U.S. law has a similar concept; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_figure.

I might feel upset, I guess. If you don't want that to happen, don't do anything newsworthy.

Are you essentially positing that the only relevant consideration to whether publishing information about someone is ethically defensible is whether or not the subject feels good about having that information revealed? It seems to me there is a material difference -- and a vast one at that -- between "I have done serious investigative work and wish to present evidence that Joe Foobar is a criminal kingpin who can be linked with drug-running and murders" and "I am publishing personal information about Joe Foobar because he said something mean about a group I identify with and I wish to screw with his life."

The concept of "criminal kingpin" is entirely based on "a group I identify with". In this case, some nation or government or whatever. So, as I see it, there's arguably no fundamental distinction between your two examples. It's arguably all about power.

Dude, please. Laws are abstractions and relative and whatnot, but Really Bad People do exist and the public has a right to know. Otherwise, why have journalists or even laws at all?

Honestly, I don't have a clue. Who gets to decide? Some murderers are presidents, and others are on trial. There's really no point in arguing about it.

Start here: https://www.congress.gov/constitution-annotated/

What about those of us who aren't US citizens? SOOL?

Use the similar document for $COUNTRYOFCHOICE

OK, but there are lots of them, and they're all hard on foreigners.

Use the Bible. That's something a third of the world agrees on, and the whole west is founded upon it.

But seriously, murder being bad is pretty much a human moral universal. You'll find that basic idea wherever and whenever you look (+/- various caveats).

> Use the Bible. That's something a third of the world agrees on, and the whole west is founded upon it.

http://www.haaretz.com/grounds-for-disbelief-1.10757

Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus. Sorry, that authority is impeached.

I am not arguing that murder is OK. But I do suspect that Paul Le Roux is being railroaded. I also suspect that Barack Obama, who clearly has far more blood on his hands, will never face trial.

Thanks Obama!

I'm not a citizen of the United States nor do I have particular sympathy for their constitution.

Ugh, American Exceptionalism rears its ugly head yet again.

Your constitution is not the epitome of justice or democratic ideals, and is in fact deeply flawed on a fundamental level.

and is in fact deeply flawed on a fundamental level.

I can accept that it has flaws, but on the fundamental level? It seems pretty solid at that level. The creators thought through the problems and difficulties of government more deeply than most.

It's debatable whether this is a "fundamental" flaw, but the American Consitution is basically a set of procedural rules of the game. Civil rights are an afterthought.

Most modern constitutions also need all the procedures, of course, but they put certain "inalienable rights" square in the middle of it all. The procedures are merely there to support those rights.

Different times, different mindset.

The assumption of the time was that it was common-sense that the Constitution was a whitelist, not a blacklist. There was pushback against having an enumerated Bill of Rights because then there would be a whitelist of rights, and the Founders feared this would mean that they'd miss something and in the future their government would become oppressive.

Hilariously ironic how things turned out instead.

No it is not. There are many improvements that could be made to our system, but our reverence for the founding fathers makes that very difficult.

Yes, America is exceptional insofar as every other place is currently less exceptional.

Oh the irony.

I personally give up once a person gets so defensive that they start excusing murderers. That a person will so quickly sacrifice their morals for their face on an internet forum, is disheartening.

All too often, people confuse groupthink with morals. With a little dialog, I suspect that we could identify some accused murderers that you would excuse.

And you're conflating moral absolutism with groupthink. Not everyone subscribes to moral relativism, as much as you might want them to. Groupthink would be to eschew one's morality entirely, and merely subscribe to some sort of prevailing opinion on morality. Which is ironically what you're asking the parent poster to do.

But myerbergs_army's stated rationale was not that Le Roux is fair game for doxxing because he's so bad, it was that he was fair game because his activities are newsworthy.

Don't you know it's only ok when a given journalist has the blessing of the status quo and doesn't use automatic means (google doesn't count anymore of course, but copypasta of random code to help one on one's search is a big no no) of releasing such information?

If such a "journalist" wanted to write (about potentially classified™ information) about people working for defense contractors who create products only a minority of people care to voice dissent but has the blessing of the status quo, it wouldn't be ok because it would put lives at danger™. There is also an exception to this for when a billionaire helps you write about such info, but only less than 1% of it will ever see the light of day, and one must consult with the thought leaders™ of the status quo in order to have a voice where all the token freedom loving organizations also supported by such billionaire will blogspam such carefully vetted position on one's behalf.

> As the series hopefully shows, Le Roux was a hugely newsworthy figure for many different reasons, so reporting his background and how he got there is part of understanding where he is now.

Wasn't this Gawkers main argument in their defense against the hulk.

I do not understand the comparison you are trying to make. Gawker was sued for releasing a clip of the actual sex tape. Everyone involved stipulated that a detailed story about the tape would have been fine.

No, not quite. Their main argument was that it was newsworthy and "it", in particular, was the video and not the article. The article itself could exist, but without the video. The video couldn't as there was a reasonable expectation of privacy.

They were sued because they refused to take down the video and their defense was absolutely terrible in every regard including joking in legally binding statements without going through and marking them as jokes/sarcasm: so they are taken at face value in the court of law.

Making jokes about child porn ("newsworthy if the actor is over the age of four") isn't how you win over jurors.

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