When Doxing Becomes the Price of Power
There’s a peculiar kind of irony that’s been gnawing at me ever since I read about the recent hack targeting hundreds of DHS, ICE, and FBI officials. The headlines scream about doxing, threats to government workers, and the supposed wave of violence against law enforcement families. But buried in the details is something that deserves more attention than the performative outrage typically gets.
Let me be clear upfront: doxing—publishing private information with the intent to incite harassment or violence—is generally wrong. Full stop. It doesn’t matter who the target is. The moment you cross from whistleblowing into targeting people’s home addresses and phone numbers for harassment campaigns, you’ve ventured into ethically murky territory that I’m uncomfortable with, even when I deeply disagree with what those people do.
But here’s where it gets complicated, and why I can’t just accept the framing at face value.
The DHS has claimed that its officers are facing a “more than 1000% increase in assaults” and that their families are being doxxed and threatened. These are serious allegations. Except the agency hasn’t provided any transparent methodology for how they’re calculating those numbers. What does a 1000% increase mean when you don’t know what the baseline was? It’s a statistic designed to shock rather than inform, and frankly, it reeks of the kind of fear-mongering we’ve become accustomed to from this administration.
More troubling is how the government has responded to apps and websites it claims were doxing ICE officials. Apple removed an app called Eyes Up that was simply aggregating publicly available videos of ICE operations and abuses. The Department of Justice pressured Apple, and the company complied. Now here’s the thing that should worry anyone who cares about the first amendment: many of these apps were engaged in protected speech. They weren’t doxing anyone—they were documenting activities by public servants operating in public spaces.
Think about that for a moment. We’ve reached a point where documenting government activity is being conflated with targeting people’s families. It’s Orwellian, really.
The hacking group responsible for the data dump—Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, an offshoot of various loosely affiliated communities—even mocked the DHS’s claim about Mexican cartels offering bounties. Their Telegram messages joked about the government’s allegation, making light of a claim that has no evidence behind it. And you know what? Their skepticism wasn’t entirely unwarranted. The government made an extraordinary claim without providing extraordinary evidence.
What’s particularly galling is the context. ICE has been conducting raids across the country using masked agents who refuse to identify themselves, plucking people off streets with minimal explanation. They’ve shot priests in the head with projectiles. They’ve flooded neighborhoods with chemical irritants. They’ve detained and threatened U.S. citizens. And when people started documenting this, sharing videos, organizing—the government’s response wasn’t to investigate these abuses. It was to suppress the documentation.
The privacy argument cuts both ways, doesn’t it? We’re being asked to be deeply concerned about ICE officers’ home addresses becoming public, yet we’ve allowed mass surveillance of ordinary citizens to become normalized. We’ve accepted warrantless wiretapping, metadata collection, and algorithmic profiling as the cost of security. But when government workers’ information leaks, suddenly everyone’s concerned about privacy violations.
I’m not arguing that doxing is therefore justified—it isn’t. But I am saying the moral panic feels selective and opportunistic.
Here’s what actually concerns me: the trajectory we’re on. The government clearly has a vulnerability in its digital infrastructure. Rather than address that systematically, it’s using the breach as justification for cracking down on dissent and documentation. It’s using the leak to argue for more surveillance, more control, more suppression of speech that challenges what government agents are doing.
The real question isn’t whether a few hackers managed to compile information about government officials. The real question is: why is the government’s first response to transparency not to reform its behavior, but to suppress our ability to document and discuss that behavior?
That’s the bit that keeps me awake, frankly. Not the doxing itself, but what it represents about the direction we’re heading. And what it suggests about whose privacy actually matters in this country.