How 'Doxxing' Became a Mainstream Tool in the Culture Wars

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 31, 2017 at 8:28:46 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How 'Doxxing' Became a Mainstream Tool in the Culture Wars
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How ‘Doxxing’ Became a Mainstream Tool in the Culture Wars
> By NELLIE BOWLES
> Aug 30 2017
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/technology/doxxing-protests.html>
>
> SAN FRANCISCO — Riding a motorized pony and strumming a cigar box ukulele, Dana Cory led a singalong to the tune of 
> “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.”
>
> “You’re a Nazi and you’re fired, it’s your fault,” she sang. “You were spotted in a mob, now you lost your freaking 
> job. You’re a Nazi and you’re fired, it’s your fault.”
>
> “All together now!” Ms. Cory, 48, shouted to a cheering crowd in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood on Saturday. 
> They were protesting a rally planned by far-right organizers about a mile away.
>
> “Dox a Nazi all day, every day,” she said.
>
> Online vigilantism has been around since the early days of the internet. So has “doxxing” — originally a slang term 
> among hackers for obtaining and posting private documents about an individual, usually a rival or enemy. To hackers, 
> who prized their anonymity, it was considered a cruel attack.
>
> But doxxing has emerged from subculture websites like 4Chan and Reddit to become something of a mainstream phenomenon 
> since a white supremacist march on Charlottesville, Va., earlier this month.
>
> “Originally it was little black-hat hacker crews who were at war with each other — they would take docs, like 
> documents, from a competing group and then claim they had ‘dox’ on them,” said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at 
> McGill University who wrote a book about the hacker vigilante group Anonymous. “There was this idea that you were 
> veiled and then uncovered.”
>
> Now the online hunt to reveal extremists has raised concerns about unintended consequences, or even collateral 
> damage. A few individuals have been misidentifiedin recent weeks, including a professor from Arkansas who was wrongly 
> accused of participating in the neo-Nazi march. And some worry that the stigma of being outed as a political 
> extremist can only reinforce that behavior in people who could still be talked out of it.
>
> Doxxing was on the minds of a number of protesters on the streets of San Francisco on Saturday. In the Castro and 
> Mission neighborhoods and Alamo Square, the home of the famous row of houses known as the Painted Ladies, thousands 
> participated in counter-demonstrations to the right-wing rally. There was the energy of a street party — children and 
> dogs joined in, protesters shared baked goods, and the bars nearby were full.
>
> Marla Wilson, 35, of San Francisco, said she was appalled when she saw white supremacists marching so brazenly in 
> Charlottesville. Doxxing, she believed, was an effective way to make people think twice about being so bold with 
> their racism.
>
> “Some of what is happening now will make these white supremacists realize why their grandparents wore hoods,” Ms. 
> Wilson said. “At least then there was shame.”
>
> The ethics — and even the definition — of doxxing is murky. It is the dissemination of often publicly available 
> information. And, some at the protest asked, are you really doxxing a person if he or she is marching on a public 
> street, face revealed and apparently proud? It is not as though they are hiding their identities.
>
> [snip]
>
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