How ‘doxxing’ became a mainstream tool in the culture wars

[TalkRadio]

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 misidentified in 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.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/technology/doxxing-protests.html

 

[Lancecastor]

"Culture Wars"....what nonsense.

The wealthiest country in the history of the planet has so little to worry about that they have regressed to fighting with each other about an overblown never ending series of nothings.

Losers all.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Not too far from the truth Spearchucker...





Yeah, I watched MASH yesterday.

Suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes...