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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

I have seen video of similar (arguably worse) behavior from police in the US.

I’ve also personally witnessed a policeman on horseback in the UK striking a peaceful and stationary protester in the head with a baton resulting in profuse bleeding.

If it’s true in Belarus, then it’s also true in the UK, and US.

But, what isn’t clear is that a Telegram group doxxing officers is a clean way to deal with it.

How do we know which officers were doxxed and for what reason? How do we know what will happen to them? Would you feel comfortable if the officer in your video was killed?

Doesn’t seem clean to me.

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Knowing who breaks the law and applies violence to civil protesters will allow to have a fair trial later.

I completely agree.

Keep a dossier, have a trial.

Doxxing is not that. Indeed I could see it even being raised as a defense against future culpability.

“The officer was in fear for his life because he was being personally targeted by protestors.”

How exactly do you keep a dossier on someone you can't identify?

How do you doxx someone you can’t identify?

Keep a dossier, have a trial.

When? Your approach is to limit political autonomy to zero and offer an institutional solution that will probably not be available. What if the compilation or possession of such a dossier is treated as evidence of conspiracy to commit sedition?

“Straw man arguments are not conducive to discussion and insult the people they are directed towards.“

If compilation of a dossier is treated as evidence of a conspiracy to commit sedition, then surely doxxing would be too.

That's not a straw man argument.

Doxxing might well be used as evidence of a conspiracy to commit sedition, but by distributing the information widely it's strategically superior to holding it in isolation. It's easy to act with impunity against a lone individual, but if some unknown number of people are possession of the same information the marginal benefit of arrest is vastly reduced.

“Your approach is to limit political autonomy to zero and offer an institutional solution that will probably not be available.”

That is a straw man argument, undeniably so. It in no way represents my position.

I agree with you distributing information widely is superior to holding it in isolation, and I agree with you about reducing the benefit of arrest. Nobody said anything about just one person holding all the dossiers.

There are many ways to accomplish this which are not doxxing if the goal is real accountability.

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