I hope people condemning the former also condemn the latter.
When Musk does it:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858916546338590740
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1858914228624924963
When others do it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/1igw3cs/elon_m...
https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1886479301081522599
(The names it includes are already in the Wired article)
This is reporting in the public interest. Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.
But then again... these are people outright breaking the law and I sure do want to know who's potentially tampering with my data. If the courts won't do it, someone has to put names and faces to this.
U.S. Code § 1924 - Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material
U.S. Code § 371 - Obstructing or Impairing Legitimate Government Activity
Executive Order 14117 of February 28, 2024, “Preventing Access to Americans' Bulk Sensitive Personal Data and United States Government-Related Data by Countries of Concern” (“the Order”) (though this may be rescinded by Trump)
If any of those BS Crypto plans[0] have any weight to them That's a straight out constitutional overstep
Article I, Section 8, Clause 5: "The Congress shall have Power . . . to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; . . ."
I'm probably only scratching the surface here. I'm not surprised if there's a dozen other laws with legal ledger around this. You don't want any one man messing with the economy.
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2025/02/02/this-...
>Now, as fears emerge Trump’s administration is “dangerously” undermining the U.S. dollar, Musk has confirmed he wants to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies—including Musk’s pet project dogecoin.
They're acting in official capacity. I've lived in towns where the mayor is not elected. They're still public figures.
They chose this approach. No one is under any obligation to abet and protect them.
I'm still not sure if the kids were actually hired though.
This might be true, however...
> Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information.
... collating publicly available information and publishing it in one place would still meet my definition of doxxing.
(In this case, the doxxing _might_ be entirely justified and be in the public interest. I don't know.)
Yes, I explicitly did not challenge that. (Though I have no clue whether I should agree with it, either.)
I challenged the justification of "Nothing they revealed isn't available already as verifiable public information."
Something being a good thing (or true or whatever), doesn't automatically make all arguments in favour of that thing good arguments.
It looks like you can't believe that there are bad arguments for good causes; and instead want to keep arguing that the cause is good, and thus all arguments must be good?
No, you did express an opinion. Reporting on people carrying out unconstitutional and illegal orders is clearly in the public interest and framing that as "doxxing" reveals that opinion.
The issue is that Elon Musk is highlighting them specifically in a negative way that will lead to very predictable, very personal, very negative outcomes without any recourse.
But yes, there is a difference between media reporting on what high-level government officials are doing and government (or quasi-government) officials singling out low level employees for ridicule. It's the difference between punching up and punching down.
But this is not among the worst things Musk is doing, and if it were a right-wing magazine doing reporting on employees in the federal government rather than someone using their role within the government itself to do it, I might find it distasteful but would have no real qualms about it.
I see those as different in reality. We can argue that semantically they can get twisted around as the same thing (government employees getting publicly named in a critical way), but that ignores extremely relevant real-world circumstances.
I do think it's bad to "doxx" people in the sense of sharing their addresses and phone numbers. But that's not what the article we're discussing does.
This article simply strikes me as normal reporting that is no different than "Treasury Secretary Bessent has hired so and so as an undersecretary for such and such, and this is what so and so has done and said in the past". These people seem to be working essentially at that undersecretary level. We always know who such people are, and we should.
- Public figures are public by influence; public servants are employees and can/should have their information revealed when necessary.
- Revelation of information of employees under public pay is not 'doxxing'. Making it seem as if it's 'doxxing' is stretching the definition, like saying someone merely touching you has committed 'violence'. Your intentional use of a more serious concept for a less serious one is misleading.
- Your private employer has no duty to the public, they answer only to the end stakeholders. In contrast, public servants must be accountable and known to the public - it's literally in their name, 'public' and 'servants'. Why you should confuse your status with that of public servants is bewildering.
I'm kind of surprised that no one has made the argument that there is something special about these individuals, the work they're doing, or the circumstances of their work. There are, after all, exceptions to the "normal rules." But the fact that no one is making this argument is, at the end of the day, quite telling.
Why on earth do you think the people destroying the system would be excluded from criticism?
In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public. It’s seen as a worthwhile tradeoff to give taxpayers transparency into how their money is spent.
Part of the problem is we're not sure who is paying them and who ultimately they report to. Are they doing what's best for Musk and his business interests or what's best for the US? Even Altman has called out Musk in a similar fashion.
What's happening now is the exact opposite of transparency and accountability.
These aren't low level federal employees doing menial work with the Medicare claims.
No, it quite obviously does not. "Doxxing" specifically involves information that was not intentionally public to begin with. If you write "John Lee Ratcliffe works for the CIA", that's obviously not doxxing, because he's the director of the CIA, which is a public title.
> In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public.
...which is clearly and categorically different than anything happening here, as OPM is the agency responsible for part of the management of said employees, and the rules that constrains it are decided by the President and/or Congress. That is categorically different than an individual, whether it's Elon or a Wired writer, going out of their way to publish private information that was not already intentionally made public, and who is not in a position of authority to have rightful custody of that information and has the ability to release it - especially if the intent behind publishing the information was to cause the individuals harm out of a political agenda, as in the Wired case.
While it seems you are implying that is not cool, it’s actually unremarkable and common government transparency.
https://cthrupayroll.mass.gov/#!/year/2025/card/1
Federal pay is already supposed to be public knowledge and is highly regulated based on role https://www.federalpay.org/. Although who knows if that's true anymore. Seems like all precedent is up in the air nowadays
I got all pissed in college when I read a magazine article about how the football coach at the state school I attended was the highest paid state employee that year. There was nothing weird about that article, and I think it's very similar to your hypothetical.
I do, ideologically, think that it's much better for reporters to focus on powerful people near the top, but I don't think it's weird to report on government employees, in general.
Just unfortunate that the resources are going there.
But even if Wired did, it still wouldn't be "doxxing", which used to imply publishing not just names but addresses and other PII (like SSNs) for non-public, non-governmental figures.
It absolutely is doxxing according to the dictionary definition[1] of "to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge".
These are also not high-level senior officials or elected officials or those with public-facing personas - these are technical engineers whose positions do not mean that they are "always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting".
> Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests.
This is just factually wrong. Exemption 6 to FOIA[2] is "Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy." - which in practice means personnel names, among other things.
That's three falsehoods in a single paragraph.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doxxing
[2] https://www.justice.gov/d9/what_are_the_9_foia_exemptions.pd...
I think the article we're discussing only reported their names, right? That is not "private information" about people who are public employees. And it is the role of journalism to report on public employees, not "a form of punishment or revenge".
They are high level officials! That's exactly the problem. They probably thought they were just taking technical roles, and I'm sympathetic to that, but that's not what they are doing, by the reporting in, again, the article we're discussing. (Did you read the article?)
They are reportedly joining high level meetings and have high level clearances in the agencies where they're working. Again, I'm sympathetic if they got there and were thrust into this stuff and are thinking "this isn't what I signed up for! I'm in way over my head!", but if that's the case, they should have said that and bowed out of this as gracefully as possible. Again, I'm sympathetic that this is a very difficult thing for a very young and ambitious person to have the wisdom to do, after taking what appears to be a dream job with a person they have probably looked up to their whole lives. But that's both exactly why they shouldn't have these high responsibility roles, and exactly why they are such useful patsies for the powerful people using them. This is why powerful people like to use young people (especially young men) to do their dirty work!
Your link on FOIA contains the quoted text, but not the claim that it "in practice means personnel names, among other things". I don't believe that is accurate, but would be interested in further citation.
That's not doxxing, that's accountability of the government to the people. Doxxing is when a person is doing a participant in an online discussion group and information they haven't made public about their real world identity, etc., is made public, it is not when people are performing high level government management functions and their identity is attached to their actions.
Sometimes HN really confuses me.
When it comes to these people specifically, they need to be publicly called out. What's happening is unprecedented and possibly illegal. I know most of the press has been bought off or strong-armed to look the other way by the new administration, but at least someone is still doing reporting.
Mocking != doxing.
Musk was horrid to do that, but it's a different thing.
"This community has been banned
This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate."
Reddit banned it because they were threatened by Elon. And the 'doxing' everyone is talking about is the naming of Elon's rightwing goons who took over federal systems lol. He said the same 'tHeY aRe cOmMItTinG a CrImE' bullshit against wired and other outlets who reported on his goons.
As for violent content on reddit lets be real please. If you want to talk about violence open a Israel-Palestine thread not /r/whitepeopletwitter lol..
Why? Its ok when our betters engage in such behavior and who could be better than the rich?
When some poors like "journalists" try to do this, they're just upending the system for their own gain. It would really be tolerating corruption if you just tolerated them ripping up our current system of governance just because they preferred a different set of rules. Elections have consequences and its just gauche to ignore the results like this.
That doesn't mean it's OK to call for violence against them! But Wired isn't doing that. It does mean that news outlets need to report on who they are and what they're doing, even if they fear (even if they know) that third parties might issue death threats.
The way it's supposed to work is the executive sends an aspirational budget to congress that embodies his policy agenda, our representatives vote on the budget, the congress appropriates the money that we send the government to the executive branch, and then the executive branch spends that money, again, faithfully. That's the oath he took. What that means operationally is that he can't just defund things we voted for in the budget that doesn't match his political agenda. Doing so should be impeachable, because it would represent a breach of his oath. It doesn't matter that he has a different agenda, he's the president for everyone.
Since he's not doing it this way, that's why people are pointing it out as unconstitutional, and illegal.
For DOGE to be legal what it needs to operate in just an advisory capacity. It should recommend things to cut, but there has to be reasons, an auditable process, transparency, and meaningful oversight. For starters, Musk has a massive conflict of interest in that he's a recipient of government contracts. So he himself shouldn't even be part of this process without first answering to that. If we keep going down this path, the people advocating for it now will not like being on the receiving end when that level of capriciousness is directed against them.
Finally, this is not capricious, this is absolutely well considered. If you haven’t realised the government has spent vast quantities of money, printed advanced quantities of money to do it, and caused record in inflation.
It’s a fundamental matter of opinion driving the discourse - not the misappropriation of some objectively correct morality.