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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't care what you call it. If that's what "doxing" means, then I don't know why Krebs would ever be obligated not to "dox". What I see here is a motte and bailey argument where the argument people seem to want to make is that everyone in the world is obliged to honor message board norms that say the real identities of pseudonymous people can't ever be revealed, but when that's challenged, they retreat to the banal argument that the personal addresses and phone numbers of journalists shouldn't be circulated on sites that encourage SWATting.

I'm not talking about personal addresses and phone numbers. I'm talking about names and public LinkedIn profiles.

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So you think it's okay to connect a pseudonym to a real identity, but not a real identity to a physical address?

I don't know how I feel about the latter case but can stipulate that it's problematic. What does that have to do with the former case?

You're asking what one form of doxing has to do with another? Well... they're both forms of doxing. You seem to arbitrarily consider one form a problem, but not the other.

That is correct. Just because you apply some name with negative message board valence to a set of conduct, that doesn't by itself make it reasonable to condemn every behavior in that set. This seems pretty obvious to me. What am I missing?

I'd say it's pretty reasonable to condemn two ways of exposing people to possible harassment and violence.

That's a way of saying journalists can't report on anyone. After all, it's easy to offend someone, somewhere. And they might harass as a result!

They can report on people using pseudonyms by referring to the pseudonym. This is done all the time when referring to tweets, etc. And, yes, people certainly exist who get offended and decide to harass/threaten others as a result. There's no real downside to making it harder for people to do so.

That's ridiculous. When reporters discover the people behind pseudonymous lobbying fronts, they don't report only the pseudonyms to protect the real identities involved. Why do participants in Internet culture get special dispensation? Isn't this just Reddit's weird norms leaking into the real world?

Or is it just the case that, as one friend said on Slack, "doxxing is when someone you don't like posts information about someone you do like"?

>When reporters discover the people behind pseudonymous lobbying fronts, they don't report only the pseudonyms to protect the real identities involved

Apples and oranges are different, yes. A private individual communicating independently is a much different thing than a lobbying front.

>Isn't this just Reddit's weird norms leaking into the real world?

It could be that online culture might know a thing or two about the downsides of exposing people's identities, especially when done by journalists with large audiences.

>Or is it just the case that, as one friend said on Slack, "doxxing is when someone you don't like posts information about someone you do like"?

Do some people have double standards about doxing? Sure. Double standards are pretty common in general.

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