Any public servant is open season for doxxing? (Teachers, soldiers, IT feds)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.