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

What a clever prediction

[The-Ixian]

I guess this is why Bruce Schneier is a guru and gets the big bucks....

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.

CIA directory

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing". And the inability of top government officials to control even their own, valuable private information is politically highly significant, given how much information the US federal government is increasingly collecting about us: detailed financial and banking information, medical records, detailed census information, and lots more.

Re:Simple counter-measure

[Shoten]

There's a simple counter-measure - don't be ashamed of anything you do. Kind of hard to exert pressure on someone by revealing their personal stuff if they don't give a sh*t.

Interesting. This is effectively the same as the argument put forth by the surveillance hawks who want to monitor everything. "Don't do anything that makes you look guilty, and there's nothing to worry about."

The fact is that it's not just about personal shame. People have been pilloried over things they didn't have any problem with personally, but which in turn caused massive backlash...with real consequences...from the public. And also noteworthy is that in this case, personal information (like SSNs, names of family members, etc.) were also put out in the open. So it's not just about shame.