It’s relevant here that “doxxing” here just means “exposing their names and internet posts”, right?
In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public. It’s seen as a worthwhile tradeoff to give taxpayers transparency into how their money is spent.
> It’s relevant here that “doxxing” here just means “exposing their names and internet posts”, right?
No, it quite obviously does not. "Doxxing" specifically involves information that was not intentionally public to begin with. If you write "John Lee Ratcliffe works for the CIA", that's obviously not doxxing, because he's the director of the CIA, which is a public title.
> In that case, yes, the OPM already “doxxes” most federal employees, even making their salary data public.
...which is clearly and categorically different than anything happening here, as OPM is the agency responsible for part of the management of said employees, and the rules that constrains it are decided by the President and/or Congress. That is categorically different than an individual, whether it's Elon or a Wired writer, going out of their way to publish private information that was not already intentionally made public, and who is not in a position of authority to have rightful custody of that information and has the ability to release it - especially if the intent behind publishing the information was to cause the individuals harm out of a political agenda, as in the Wired case.
I really hope we can all agree it is an extremely shitty thing to do for the worlds richest person, somehow entrusted to go in and supposedly save the government some money, to publicize random individuals information he stumbles across in the process because he personally doesn't like their job title. Fuck off with whether it is 'legal' or not, that isn't the issue.
These 5 people are our employees. We pay them with our tax dollars to assist in delivering services to ourselves and our fellow citizens. Unless secrecy is a distinct function of the service they deliver, I expect their names to be public. Transparency and accountability is owed to the taxpayer, if that's not acceptable to people then they are free to lend their talents to the private sector instead.
Part of the problem is we're not sure who is paying them and who ultimately they report to. Are they doing what's best for Musk and his business interests or what's best for the US? Even Altman has called out Musk in a similar fashion.
What's happening now is the exact opposite of transparency and accountability.
Federal employees working at the level these guys appear to be currently working are always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting, yes. This is not "doxxing", it is just reporting on the government. Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests. These aren't spies, they're public servants.
> Federal employees working at the level these guys appear to be currently working are always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting, yes. This is not "doxxing", it is just reporting on the government.
It absolutely is doxxing according to the dictionary definition[1] of "to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge".
These are also not high-level senior officials or elected officials or those with public-facing personas - these are technical engineers whose positions do not mean that they are "always ripe to have their names and photographs in public reporting".
> Even if there was an effort to keep this information secret, it would almost certainly be subject to FOIA requests.
This is just factually wrong. Exemption 6 to FOIA[2] is "Information that, if disclosed, would invade another individual’s personal privacy." - which in practice means personnel names, among other things.
Are you referring to this Wired article as "doxxing", or to something else?
I think the article we're discussing only reported their names, right? That is not "private information" about people who are public employees. And it is the role of journalism to report on public employees, not "a form of punishment or revenge".
They are high level officials! That's exactly the problem. They probably thought they were just taking technical roles, and I'm sympathetic to that, but that's not what they are doing, by the reporting in, again, the article we're discussing. (Did you read the article?)
They are reportedly joining high level meetings and have high level clearances in the agencies where they're working. Again, I'm sympathetic if they got there and were thrust into this stuff and are thinking "this isn't what I signed up for! I'm in way over my head!", but if that's the case, they should have said that and bowed out of this as gracefully as possible. Again, I'm sympathetic that this is a very difficult thing for a very young and ambitious person to have the wisdom to do, after taking what appears to be a dream job with a person they have probably looked up to their whole lives. But that's both exactly why they shouldn't have these high responsibility roles, and exactly why they are such useful patsies for the powerful people using them. This is why powerful people like to use young people (especially young men) to do their dirty work!
Your link on FOIA contains the quoted text, but not the claim that it "in practice means personnel names, among other things". I don't believe that is accurate, but would be interested in further citation.
The issue isn’t whether or not their names are public.
The issue is that Elon Musk is highlighting them specifically in a negative way that will lead to very predictable, very personal, very negative outcomes without any recourse.
It depends if you think there's a difference between a self-formed likely illegal group, doing likely illegal things for ideological purposes getting reported on by a reputable news source, and a civil servant who has been doing their assigned job getting picked on personally and publicly by one of the most powerful people in America who owns the media site he is using to attack them.
I see those as different in reality. We can argue that semantically they can get twisted around as the same thing (government employees getting publicly named in a critical way), but that ignores extremely relevant real-world circumstances.
So, to be clear, I do think "who people in government are and what they do" is appropriately public record.
But yes, there is a difference between media reporting on what high-level government officials are doing and government (or quasi-government) officials singling out low level employees for ridicule. It's the difference between punching up and punching down.
But this is not among the worst things Musk is doing, and if it were a right-wing magazine doing reporting on employees in the federal government rather than someone using their role within the government itself to do it, I might find it distasteful but would have no real qualms about it.
I mean, I don't want to claim to be an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure who works for the government and what they do is public record.
I do think it's bad to "doxx" people in the sense of sharing their addresses and phone numbers. But that's not what the article we're discussing does.
This article simply strikes me as normal reporting that is no different than "Treasury Secretary Bessent has hired so and so as an undersecretary for such and such, and this is what so and so has done and said in the past". These people seem to be working essentially at that undersecretary level. We always know who such people are, and we should.
- Public figures are public by influence; public servants are employees and can/should have their information revealed when necessary.
- Revelation of information of employees under public pay is not 'doxxing'. Making it seem as if it's 'doxxing' is stretching the definition, like saying someone merely touching you has committed 'violence'. Your intentional use of a more serious concept for a less serious one is misleading.
- Your private employer has no duty to the public, they answer only to the end stakeholders. In contrast, public servants must be accountable and known to the public - it's literally in their name, 'public' and 'servants'. Why you should confuse your status with that of public servants is bewildering.
So if an administrator in a school district allegedly violates policy all their employees are open season? (We are also talking about no trial to determine whether your claims are true)
It has nothing to do with whether they are doing anything wrong. They're high level federal employees. Hundreds of years before anyone invented the word "doxxing", newspapers would have printed their names and likenesses. They have chosen employment which puts them into the public interest. No more no less.
What Musk is doing with DOGE is the most unconstitutional power grab any US Citizen has tried is a very long time. The normal rules do not apply anymore.
Actually, the point is that the normal rules _do_ apply, and the normal rules very much encourage the publication of the names and likenesses of civil servants.
I'm kind of surprised that no one has made the argument that there is something special about these individuals, the work they're doing, or the circumstances of their work. There are, after all, exceptions to the "normal rules." But the fact that no one is making this argument is, at the end of the day, quite telling.
Do I need to remind you that Elon Musk has gained unauthorized and illegal access to the federal payment system? It is very possible he will be arrested for doing this if a democrat gets elected unless Trump pardons him. But then his US citizenship can be revoked.
EDIT: "Wasn’t he authorized by the President, the chief executive?"
The President doesn't have the authority to do that.
It's an interesting question. The president's powers are supposed to be limited and checked. That was the whole point of the American Revolution.
One of the ways the president is limited is that the he can't authorize people to commit crimes. e.g. he couldn't instruct his AG to open an investigation into his political opponent under false pretenses in order to hurt his electoral chances. If the AG were to do that, it would be a crime. So the question isn't whether the president has authorized Musk to do something, but whether or not the president even has the power to do the thing he delegated.
And what is the power in question? It's control over spending appropriated by Congress. And that's where separation of powers comes in. Congress is supposed to control the purse strings, and the president is supposed to make sure the money is spent on the priorities of the people, taking care of prosecuting fraud and abuse. The point of giving Congress this power is to give the people a mechanism to set their priorities on how their own money is spent. It shouldn't be the case that one guy comes in and then gets to decide how to spend all our money.
But that appears to be what they are trying to do, in claiming that their cuts are all under the guise of reducing fraud and abuse. But really what they're trying to do is do an end-run around Congress. They want all the money, but they don't want to have Congress vote on it, because they don't actually have the votes to implement the agenda they want to, since Congress is so divided. So instead they're just taking the funding they have and allocating it in ways that support only the agenda items they want to see implemented.
>>One of the ways the president is limited is that the he can't authorize people to commit crimes. e.g. he couldn't instruct his AG to open an investigation into his political opponent under false pretenses in order to hurt his electoral chances. If the AG were to do that, it would be a crime. So the question isn't whether the president has authorized Musk to do something, but whether or not the president even has the power to do the thing he delegated.
ok, but since the investigative (FBI) and the prosecutorial (US Attorney) apparati are under the control of the executive, if the local USA goes along with Trump and against the law, the remedy is....what exactly?
Impeachment, followed by conviction and removal-from-office, in theory.
In practice this is extremely unlikely because the threshold for the vote in the Senate is high enough that you'd need bipartisan consensus, and the US Constitution wasn't really written expecting the party system to exist.
The thing that makes revolutions fail or succeed is whether or not they take control of the money. Trump isn't doing that. He appears to just be auditing for fraud and corruption. If he was trying to control the money, then he'd need to march doge into the federal reserve. But he can't because it's not organized under the executive branch. They claim they're not even part of the government.
" He appears to just be auditing for fraud and corruption."
The constitution gives Congress sole authority to control spending and any payments Musk stops is a extreme violation of the Constitution. I really hope this ends with Musk either in prison for life or with his US citizenship revoked and him deported back to South Africa.
If Musk stops any payment that Congress has approved he is breaking the law. and the US Constitution. Considering he is an immigrant he could have his citizenship revoked and be deported.
You still believe the lies that con artist Musk tells you? He isn't ever going to Mars. Tesla is never going to have FSD so good they are willing to take legal liability for accidents the way Waymo does.
2. The rule of law is not a magical thing that enforces itself, and many people seek to undermine it for their own enrichment, so those of us who believe #1 is correct (which is most people in the US) must understand the levers of power and use them to maintain t
it.
Despite the current struggles, I think we have some real advantages in this fight. One of those is actually just capitalism. We have financialized trust in the US government, via the bond market. That trust is not entirely downstream of the rule of law, but it is to a fairly large degree. We have already seen once that an effort by the administration to squelch on its contractual obligations was quickly reversed, which was this basic mechanism at action. The worst things DOGE could do with this (illegal) control over the Treasury would be unworkable for this same reason.
There are still horrible outcomes that aren't subject to this constraint (and in my opinion, we need to reform the pardon power in order to maintain the rule of law moving forward), but it's not true that there are no constraints.
We added a trillion dollars to the balance sheet a few years back. The USD is not backed by trust, it's backed by power. Power that is enforced through military might and resource control over vassal states like most of Western Europe. If you want to understand how power really works understand that Trudeau just threatened a tariff on maple syrup until one of his wiser advisors pointed out that all Canadian oil pipelines make a pitstop in the good ol' USofA for, checks notes, "refinement". Dunno, sounds important.
Checkmate, Justin.
Meanwhile, in the nursery the rule of law is quietly taking its afternoon nap.
No, the executive branch absolutely does not have the power to just refuse to spend money that Congress has approved or spend money that it has NOT approved. This is the basis for The Iran Contra Affair.
The power of the purse is the authority of the United States Congress to levy taxes and control government spending. It's a key part of the separation of powers in the Constitution and a check on the executive branch.
What Trump and Musk are doing with DOGE and the federal payment system is in blatant violation of this separation of powers.
I can look up every single public employee in my area, and find out what they make. It's not hard to find out where they live. It's called government transparency.
Indeed. One of the highest paid people in my local school district is a librarian who teaches no classes and gets paid 275k. Do you think it would be a good idea to get a wired article published with his name address, and 4 similar teacher profiles?
Are you suggesting that the article we're discussing is "weird"? Does it list anyone's address? I feel like it just says their names and provides some basic bio info. Seems like pretty normal reporting on an important story at the top levels of the federal government.
Yeah I’m not suggesting anything weird either. I just think the community might want to know which teachers are really well paid. They have chosen employment in the public interest. Are you with me?
Yo there’s literally articles regularly published on the names and pay of all local city employees in my city with specific call outs to the top paid ones.
While it seems you are implying that is not cool, it’s actually unremarkable and common government transparency.
Yep. I feel like we should probably be taking more of a "you're one of today's ten thousand!"[0] approach to this thread. I think this person is probably just actually unfamiliar with the history of public interest reporting on government.
Federal pay is already supposed to be public knowledge and is highly regulated based on role https://www.federalpay.org/. Although who knows if that's true anymore. Seems like all precedent is up in the air nowadays
I mean, I don't love it because of my political ideology, but it wouldn't strike me as weird if I saw this kind of story in my local paper...
I got all pissed in college when I read a magazine article about how the football coach at the state school I attended was the highest paid state employee that year. There was nothing weird about that article, and I think it's very similar to your hypothetical.
I do, ideologically, think that it's much better for reporters to focus on powerful people near the top, but I don't think it's weird to report on government employees, in general.
That sounds like a job better suited for your local paper. The scope of national politics is far greater.
But even if Wired did, it still wouldn't be "doxxing", which used to imply publishing not just names but addresses and other PII (like SSNs) for non-public, non-governmental figures.
New stories routinely come out about the highest paid people in colleges typically being the head football coaches. The conservative media has been railing on academic administrator salaries for years.
Public servants name and position and pay are already generally public; major media have published entire state databases of this.
That's not doxxing, that's accountability of the government to the people. Doxxing is when a person is doing a participant in an online discussion group and information they haven't made public about their real world identity, etc., is made public, it is not when people are performing high level government management functions and their identity is attached to their actions.
