The Rise of Political Doxing (schneier.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Security guru Bruce Schneier predicts a new trend in hacking: political doxing. He points to the recent hack of CIA director Jack Brennan's personal email account and notes that it marks a shift in the purpose of email hacking: "Here, the attacker had a more political motive. He wasn't out to intimidate Brennan; he simply wanted to embarrass him. His personal papers were dumped indiscriminately, fodder for an eager press." Schneier continues, "As people realize what an effective attack this can be, and how an individual can use the tactic to do considerable damage to powerful people and institutions, we're going to see a lot more of it. ... In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful."

Comments

Political Doxxing has been going on forever

[jmac_the_man]

This isn't the rise of political doxxing, simply because it has been going on forever.

Going through Sarah Palin's emails (either the official ones the judge ordered released and the New York Times attempted to crowdsource finding embarassing stuff OR the ones that the 4chan hacker whose father was an elected Democrat released) was an attempted doxxing.

What Bradley Manning did was a doxxing. Hell, so was the release of the Pentagon Papers.

Jumping even further back, the XYZ Affair was revealed by a doxxer leaking details to the (partisan) press.

Releasing your opponent's embarrassing documents has probably been going on for as long as we've had written language.