Federal government to outlaw doxxing, impose up to seven years' jail | Hacker News Reader

Federal government to outlaw doxxing, impose up to seven years' jail

abc.net.au

56 pointsaussieguy123454 comments

Governments generally seem relatively happy to restrict the rights of average citizens to share other people's personal information yet large corporations are pretty much able to collect, store, share, and sell our information with near impunity.

The motives are completely different. You cannot ignore that, even if you don’t like what corporations do with your data.

Precisely

Australian federal government, if anyone else didn't recognize the domain immediately.

I wanted to add this to the title, but the guidelines don't allow editorialising the title, for better or worse.

I know the guidelines ask not to modify the title. But just fyi editorializing is when you go beyond merely adding information:

editorialize verb ed· i· to· ri· al· ize ˌe-də-ˈtȯr-ē-ə-ˌlīz editorialized; editorializing Synonyms of editorialize intransitive verb 1 : to express an opinion in the form of an editorial 2 : to introduce opinion into the reporting of facts 3 : to express an opinion (as on a controversial issue)

It’s somewhat contradictory for the guidelines to ask for no modifications then tell people not to editorialize. Those are two very different guidelines, separated by a semicolon as though they are closely related.

(To editorialize for a moment, I believe this is what happens when a STEM organization led by people fundamentally hostile to the press gets into the business of editing news, whose nuances they are basically just dismissive of. This isn’t directed at you but at the guidelines.)

Editorializing is defined (by one dictionary) as: “making comments or expressing opinions rather than just reporting the facts”.

By this definition, changing the title to “Austrialian Federal government…” doesn’t run afoul of the policy because there is not opinion involved. It’s just clarifying which federal government is the subject.

I think that this is very much a case where one should say "fuck the guidelines" and add it.

Fascinating that my old phone books could become contraband worth thousands of years of jail time!

Starting to feel I'm entering the life phase where you think the world has gone mad. Happens to most of us, why would I be immune?

"malicious" is the key word here. It's a common distinction used in many Australian laws meaning if you are prosecuted they need to build a case that you were not doing so for a legitimate useful reason like a phone book and knew it would cause harm. A unsurprisingly difficult task. This also gives you a fairly robust method of defence against any frivolous prosecution.

Phone books were sanitized. City directories would list occupations and they would be by area/address, so you could find neighbors.

Also, newspapers would report on the doings of ordinary people, not just the society pages, e.g. "John Smith was in town today from Peoria, visiting friends for three days."

In UK reporting it's still normal to include the street name of convicted criminals.

Mr Smith of Agraria Road Guildford was today sentenced to 3 years in prison for...

What a profoundly dishonest comparison.

There has to be an attached harm and apparent intent.

Excellent so as an Australian when an Australian-based company I do business with, lets call them "Optus", leaks all my personal data right down to the 100 points of ID I was forced to provide them, the CEO will wind up in jail? If that's the case I 100% support this.

> outlaw doxxing

> require ID to use the internet

Strange times in Australia these days.

In fairness, just as any ban, it's obviously not really a ban.

It's more of a codification of the government retaining for themselves the exclusive right to take such actions.

I mean, that's just kind of the world we live in. As a general rule, over time, governments are not going to legislate themselves less power.

friendlyjordies did a video on this doxxing; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VstcyWVtGt4

Jordies hit the nail on the head here. This legislation is just another tool for people with money to use to silence any opposing voices. One only has to look at how our defamation laws are used to see the exact same thing happening here.

Leaking a private chat is doxxing? Grow up. The modus operandi of the Aus govt. is to warp these already fairly well-defined terms for their own use, removing their original meaning completely.

Certainly wouldn't have been classed as doxxing if it was a Palestinian group chat being leaked by Jewish Australians, the Jewish lobby would instead be screeching "hate crimes!!!!"

his house was firebombed some time ago after he said "undesirable things" about a supposedly corrupt politician.

My first thought after reading this was. Did friendlyjordies somehow doxx a government official?

The dimensions of these punishments have no reason other than pure intimidation. While I'm against the practice of releasing private data, years of prison without needing to even prove damage but only intention is absurd beyond all measure.

its a weapon

> Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to outlaw the practice after the details of a private WhatsApp group involving hundreds of Jewish Australians were published online in February.

Uploading "the details" of an online group is not doxxing. It is an unhelpfully broad superset of interpretations that include anything from inside jokes to someone's cellphone number. Doxxing means what it always has - posting someone's physical location or credentials that lead to that information. This is a perversion of the term.

> Doxxing means what it always has - posting someone's physical location

That's not really what it always meant. Publishing the real name of someone maintaining anonymity online is also doxing. Wikipedia uses "providing personally identifiable information" for example. There's lots of cases historically of social media users, streamers, creators getting doxed, as in their identity being revealed.

So publishing a telephone book is now a crime against humanity?

Inclusion in a phone books was optional. Edit: And required setting up a phone line with the company distributing this information.

In the US at least, sort of but not really. It was definitely opt-out--for a fee.

There's a huge amount of information that is public as a matter of law. I'm sure that many people here don't like the degree of that information being public but nonetheless it is. See also recent discussion on salary information.

It was always free to not be a customer. The fee applied to customers who wanted an unusual service.

Yes. You could not have a landline telephone. Which was not very practical for most people pre-cell phones.

Not initially, phone’s have been around long enough it’s easy to forget ubiquity took time. At the beginning you just said the name and location of the person you wanted to call.

Publishing names addresses and phone numbers was a useful feature after phone numbers existed but before everyone had a pocket supercomputer. Callers avoid needing to talk to an operator and addresses distinguished between different John Smith’s. So being included was just part of the service.

Sure some people with unusual requests were charged more, but it’s inherently a different situation from doxxing. If you pay a carpenter to build you a deck you can’t exactly sue them for trespassing while they’re doing what you asked for.

Also, the world changes over time. Phone books do seem to have included a bit more info than it is currently prudent to share. It was before industrial-scale scamming.

Didn’t schools used to use social security numbers as student IDs. And then use them to post grades, or something like that? (I might be mixing up stories).

If I offer an opt-out option for my doxxing website, it'll be fine?

No.

Phone companies only included actual customers, and it was clear when signing up what would happen. Your doxxing website has no relationship with a random celebrity or such implied consent.

Wild, isn't it? Just recently they criminalized calling 911 and lying to them about being in distress at somebody else's house. Free speech!

More context:

> Pro-Palestinian advocates who shared the transcript from the WhatsApp group have defended the move as being in the public interest and rejected the suggestion it was doxxing. They argue personal details beyond names were largely redacted.

(From [1].)

The immediate question is: Ok, what information was in those transcripts? Presumably it was something that would have supported the Palestinian cause, or else the activists wouldn't have released it. So what was it?

Those "targeted" would not have reacted so strongly if the contents had not, in fact, made them look very bad.

So we can make a decent guess about what the transcripts contained. To be specific, we can infer that the chat probably contained a lot of dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians coming from powerful Australians.

In fact, after looking around a little more, this appears to be part of a larger back-and-forth. It looks like there was a campaign, by a group of lawyers, to get fired a number of prominent people who had expressed pro-Palestinian views (to make an example of them, we must assume), e.g., Antoinette Lattouf of the ABC (she was indeed fired). If I'm understanding correctly, this document release came from the pro-Palestinian side, to show the workings of this group.

Some other sources like Matt Chun appear to be firing broadsides from the pro-Palestinian direction [2]. His sub stack is a little too long on left-cant and a little short on content, but there is some information there.

I am left unsure as to what exactly is going on between these various factions in Australia, but this gives some idea.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/federal-government-to...

[2] https://mattchun.substack.com/archive

I have not read your links, but I can only assume from watching events unfold elsewhere that what is happening in Australia is a subset of the global situation.

>or credentials that lead to that information.

Including names and/or phone numbers. What exactly was leaked from the WhatsApp group? Did it include names and/or phone numbers?

Names, images, professions, social media accounts at least. Not sure about phone numbers. But it was enough for some to be identified and threatened enough to make them hide away from their home.

You should see their "coercive control" law.

My guess is this law will only be enforced if you doxx the rich and/or powerful. Doxx Joe Smith who works at McDonalds, no enforcement.

I find it fascinating that somewhere at sometime, someone used the word 'doxxed/doxxing' in this context for the very first time and now it is part of the vernacular.

And just as William Burroughs postulated that 'language is a virus' this 'virus' has now spread so far and wide it is the parlance of our times.

How did we get to the point where Experian can have trash security practices and leak the private information of millions but you can't out a sex predator online? Is this hanging entirely on motive?

this isnt going to stop organised people from doxxing others, they'll just outsource the work to people in jurisdictions that have no extradition agreement with australia -- it will catch the unorganised though, so basically the ones no one cares about anyway. i.e. organised self interest groups with international reach (kek) will be unaffected by this law

A lot of folks here are, willfully or out of ignorance, missing the point that the thing that makes doxxing a criminal activity is the malicious intent.

Because intent is in the mind of the observer, not the mind of the person allegedly committing the crime.

I may be misunderstanding you, but taking your statement at face value:

Legally, no. The legal question of intent is exactly the question of what was going on in the mind of the person allegedly committing the crime.

Right. But the judgement comes from a third party.

We as a society definitely judge peoples intent without knowledge into peoples mind, assumptions are made ( correctly or incorrectly ).

The observer has very little to do with establishing intent.

I even looked up Australia's definition to make sure it was the same as everyone else's: https://www.ag.gov.au/crime/publications/commonwealth-crimin...

(it's the same)

The only reason I used "very little" is because it is possible for an observer to witness the subject yelling "I intend to kill you!!!!" at the top of their lungs and in that case the observer could be useful at establishing intent.

Yeah, I wish i could downvote this purely because of the deceptive title.

Quite funny that the headline omits which federal government it is referring to. As a non-Australian reader (we actually exist on the Internet!), it wasn't the federal government of my country.

I assume you're American? The vast majority of article titles posted in non-local environments I have to figure out what country they're referring to.

Often we see "WA" news, which is just not the "Western Australia" of my country! Oh the indignation.

For clarity. I was referring to Washington.

Welcome to reading the news on the internet as a non-US person basically every day.

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