Oregon bill would make doxxing a crime | Hacker News Reader

Oregon bill would make doxxing a crime

oregonlive.com

5 pointsrwc96 comments

Not sure Doxxing is an issue, but SWATTING is.

Given the existence of terrorists, private info of almost any public figure or their family is abusable in the same way.

Worse, given the degree of sycophancy in the population, there's always a risk of any viral meme resulting in what happened with King Henry II of England saying "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"[0] (the priest, Thomas Becket, was killed).

[0] or whatever it was in the original, which might have been Latin or Anglo-Norman but even if it had been Early Middle English, that's pretty much incomprehensible to modern speakers, as it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_and_the_Nightingale

I think the key ingredient in the story of Thomas Beckett wasn't the revelation of his identity and location, but the fact that it was the THE KING OF ENGLAND calling for his head.

And you know what? Calling for someone's murder can already be a crime, if it's a plausible threat, that's not what doxxing is.

Nobody, even at the time, believed that Henry directly ordered that Becket be killed — Henry was condemned because his words had started a chain of events that was likely to have such a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

What meaning are people expected to infer, when a rich and powerful man publishes someone's name and address without other context? "This person is great"? "I am here"? The absence of context is going to be interpreted as every possible context, including as a call to action.

If you think this is going to primarily be used to hold rich and powerful people to account for intimidating the less fortunate and well-connected, I think you're going to be surprised. Personally I expect it's far more likely to be used in precisely the opposite way, when it's used at all. Then again the most likely outcome is eventual challenge on free speech grounds, which will probably prevail because as the article points out:

> Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Eugene Democrat and prosecutor, said it’s already a crime to threaten serious physical harm and alarm to others through the state’s harassment statute or to incessantly harass a person by calling them, as laid out in the state’s telephonic harassment law. What Senate Bill 1121 does is make it a crime for the person who encourages others to do that harm through doxxing, Prozanski said.

IMO doxxing is a TOS issue for platforms to manage, not something that requires legislation. Because again, putting aside the historical interpretation of Becket's murder, it didn't involve doxxing, and what it did involve would already be criminal today.

tl;dr The solution to lax moderation by incompetent and greedy companies is not to shift the burden onto the taxpayer and over-burdened legal system, with a callous disregard for existing law.

> I think you're going to be surprised.

You may be surprised by my thinking. I'm expecting famine in the US in 2 years, if too many people are purged for saying "no" to Trump.

I have no idea if too many people will get purged. Everything's a bit crazy now.

> IMO doxxing is a TOS issue for platforms to manage, not something that requires legislation.

Musk owns the platform. What stops him?

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