Federal government to outlaw doxxing, impose up to seven years' jail

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-12/albanese-government-will-outlaw-doxxing/104340372

by aussieguy1234 • 2 years ago

56 52 2 years ago

abc.net.au

talldayo• 2 years ago

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to outlaw the practice after the details of a private WhatsApp group involving hundreds of Jewish Australians were published online in February.

Uploading "the details" of an online group is not doxxing. It is an unhelpfully broad superset of interpretations that include anything from inside jokes to someone's cellphone number. Doxxing means what it always has - posting someone's physical location or credentials that lead to that information. This is a perversion of the term.

ranger_danger• 2 years ago

You should see their "coercive control" law.

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

So publishing a telephone book is now a crime against humanity?

Retric4• 2 years ago

Inclusion in a phone books was optional. Edit: And required setting up a phone line with the company distributing this information.

klyrs• 2 years ago

Wild, isn't it? Just recently they criminalized calling 911 and lying to them about being in distress at somebody else's house. Free speech!

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

or credentials that lead to that information.

Including names and/or phone numbers. What exactly was leaked from the WhatsApp group? Did it include names and/or phone numbers?

viraptor3• 2 years ago

Names, images, professions, social media accounts at least. Not sure about phone numbers. But it was enough for some to be identified and threatened enough to make them hide away from their home.

viraptor3• 2 years ago

Doxxing means what it always has - posting someone's physical location

That's not really what it always meant. Publishing the real name of someone maintaining anonymity online is also doxing. Wikipedia uses "providing personally identifiable information" for example. There's lots of cases historically of social media users, streamers, creators getting doxed, as in their identity being revealed.

FooBarBizBazz• 2 years ago

More context:

Pro-Palestinian advocates who shared the transcript from the WhatsApp group have defended the move as being in the public interest and rejected the suggestion it was doxxing. They argue personal details beyond names were largely redacted.

(From [1].)

The immediate question is: Ok, what information was in those transcripts? Presumably it was something that would have supported the Palestinian cause, or else the activists wouldn't have released it. So what was it?

Those "targeted" would not have reacted so strongly if the contents had not, in fact, made them look very bad.

So we can make a decent guess about what the transcripts contained. To be specific, we can infer that the chat probably contained a lot of dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians coming from powerful Australians.

In fact, after looking around a little more, this appears to be part of a larger back-and-forth. It looks like there was a campaign, by a group of lawyers, to get fired a number of prominent people who had expressed pro-Palestinian views (to make an example of them, we must assume), e.g., Antoinette Lattouf of the ABC (she was indeed fired). If I'm understanding correctly, this document release came from the pro-Palestinian side, to show the workings of this group.

Some other sources like Matt Chun appear to be firing broadsides from the pro-Palestinian direction [2]. His sub stack is a little too long on left-cant and a little short on content, but there is some information there.

I am left unsure as to what exactly is going on between these various factions in Australia, but this gives some idea.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/federal-government-to...

[2] https://mattchun.substack.com/archive

globalnode3• 2 years ago

I have not read your links, but I can only assume from watching events unfold elsewhere that what is happening in Australia is a subset of the global situation.

patmcc• 2 years ago

Australian federal government, if anyone else didn't recognize the domain immediately.

aussieguy12342• 2 years ago

I wanted to add this to the title, but the guidelines don't allow editorialising the title, for better or worse.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

I think that this is very much a case where one should say "fuck the guidelines" and add it.

shwaj• 2 years ago

Editorializing is defined (by one dictionary) as: “making comments or expressing opinions rather than just reporting the facts”.

By this definition, changing the title to “Austrialian Federal government…” doesn’t run afoul of the policy because there is not opinion involved. It’s just clarifying which federal government is the subject.

eduction• 2 years ago

I know the guidelines ask not to modify the title. But just fyi editorializing is when you go beyond merely adding information:

editorialize verb ed· i· to· ri· al· ize ˌe-də-ˈtȯr-ē-ə-ˌlīz editorialized; editorializing Synonyms of editorialize intransitive verb 1 : to express an opinion in the form of an editorial 2 : to introduce opinion into the reporting of facts 3 : to express an opinion (as on a controversial issue)

It’s somewhat contradictory for the guidelines to ask for no modifications then tell people not to editorialize. Those are two very different guidelines, separated by a semicolon as though they are closely related.

(To editorialize for a moment, I believe this is what happens when a STEM organization led by people fundamentally hostile to the press gets into the business of editing news, whose nuances they are basically just dismissive of. This isn’t directed at you but at the guidelines.)

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

Fascinating that my old phone books could become contraband worth thousands of years of jail time!

Starting to feel I'm entering the life phase where you think the world has gone mad. Happens to most of us, why would I be immune?

AStonesThrow• 2 years ago

Phone books were sanitized. City directories would list occupations and they would be by area/address, so you could find neighbors.

Also, newspapers would report on the doings of ordinary people, not just the society pages, e.g. "John Smith was in town today from Peoria, visiting friends for three days."

AsmaraHolding• 2 years ago

In UK reporting it's still normal to include the street name of convicted criminals.

Mr Smith of Agraria Road Guildford was today sentenced to 3 years in prison for...

hiddencost• 2 years ago

What a profoundly dishonest comparison.

There has to be an attached harm and apparent intent.

dugite-code• 2 years ago

"malicious" is the key word here. It's a common distinction used in many Australian laws meaning if you are prosecuted they need to build a case that you were not doing so for a legitimate useful reason like a phone book and knew it would cause harm. A unsurprisingly difficult task. This also gives you a fairly robust method of defence against any frivolous prosecution.

big-green-man• 2 years ago

outlaw doxxing
require ID to use the internet

Strange times in Australia these days.

bilbo0s• 2 years ago

In fairness, just as any ban, it's obviously not really a ban.

It's more of a codification of the government retaining for themselves the exclusive right to take such actions.

I mean, that's just kind of the world we live in. As a general rule, over time, governments are not going to legislate themselves less power.

SkinTaco• 2 years ago

Quite funny that the headline omits which federal government it is referring to. As a non-Australian reader (we actually exist on the Internet!), it wasn't the federal government of my country.

viraptor3• 2 years ago

Welcome to reading the news on the internet as a non-US person basically every day.

Incipient• 2 years ago

I assume you're American? The vast majority of article titles posted in non-local environments I have to figure out what country they're referring to.

Often we see "WA" news, which is just not the "Western Australia" of my country! Oh the indignation.

For clarity. I was referring to Washington.

cjbgkagh• 2 years ago

friendlyjordies did a video on this doxxing; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VstcyWVtGt4

aussieguy12342• 2 years ago

his house was firebombed some time ago after he said "undesirable things" about a supposedly corrupt politician.

ungamedplayer3• 2 years ago

My first thought after reading this was. Did friendlyjordies somehow doxx a government official?

russelg• 2 years ago

Jordies hit the nail on the head here. This legislation is just another tool for people with money to use to silence any opposing voices. One only has to look at how our defamation laws are used to see the exact same thing happening here.

Leaking a private chat is doxxing? Grow up. The modus operandi of the Aus govt. is to warp these already fairly well-defined terms for their own use, removing their original meaning completely.

Certainly wouldn't have been classed as doxxing if it was a Palestinian group chat being leaked by Jewish Australians, the Jewish lobby would instead be screeching "hate crimes!!!!"

supersanity• 2 years ago

Governments generally seem relatively happy to restrict the rights of average citizens to share other people's personal information yet large corporations are pretty much able to collect, store, share, and sell our information with near impunity.

hed• 2 years ago

Precisely

azinman2• 2 years ago

The motives are completely different. You cannot ignore that, even if you don’t like what corporations do with your data.

mullingitover• 2 years ago

A lot of folks here are, willfully or out of ignorance, missing the point that the thing that makes doxxing a criminal activity is the malicious intent.

ungamedplayer3• 2 years ago

Because intent is in the mind of the observer, not the mind of the person allegedly committing the crime.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

I may be misunderstanding you, but taking your statement at face value:

Legally, no. The legal question of intent is exactly the question of what was going on in the mind of the person allegedly committing the crime.

snakeyjake• 2 years ago

The observer has very little to do with establishing intent.

I even looked up Australia's definition to make sure it was the same as everyone else's: https://www.ag.gov.au/crime/publications/commonwealth-crimin...

(it's the same)

The only reason I used "very little" is because it is possible for an observer to witness the subject yelling "I intend to kill you!!!!" at the top of their lungs and in that case the observer could be useful at establishing intent.

anarchogeek• 2 years ago

Yeah, I wish i could downvote this purely because of the deceptive title.

mihaic• 2 years ago

The dimensions of these punishments have no reason other than pure intimidation. While I'm against the practice of releasing private data, years of prison without needing to even prove damage but only intention is absurd beyond all measure.

globalnode3• 2 years ago

its a weapon

globalnode3• 2 years ago

this isnt going to stop organised people from doxxing others, they'll just outsource the work to people in jurisdictions that have no extradition agreement with australia -- it will catch the unorganised though, so basically the ones no one cares about anyway. i.e. organised self interest groups with international reach (kek) will be unaffected by this law

synicalx• 2 years ago

Excellent so as an Australian when an Australian-based company I do business with, lets call them "Optus", leaks all my personal data right down to the 100 points of ID I was forced to provide them, the CEO will wind up in jail? If that's the case I 100% support this.

andrewinardeer• 2 years ago

I find it fascinating that somewhere at sometime, someone used the word 'doxxed/doxxing' in this context for the very first time and now it is part of the vernacular.

And just as William Burroughs postulated that 'language is a virus' this 'virus' has now spread so far and wide it is the parlance of our times.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

My guess is this law will only be enforced if you doxx the rich and/or powerful. Doxx Joe Smith who works at McDonalds, no enforcement.

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

How did we get to the point where Experian can have trash security practices and leak the private information of millions but you can't out a sex predator online? Is this hanging entirely on motive?

Federal government to outlaw doxxing, impose up to seven years' jail

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