Doxing is the deliberate exposure of personally identifying information, things like phone numbers and home addresses of individuals—often including family members: wives, husbands, and children—in order for each of those folks to be personally confronted with opprobrium at their homes and schools.
Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims, a Progressive-Democrat, called for precisely that when he confronted and harassed a woman and her two teenaged daughters who were praying outside an abortion clinic in Sims’ Philadelphia district. He went far beyond his on-scene harassment, though. He recorded his verbal assault and posted it on line, with this request for doxing:
So, here’s the deal. I’ve got $100 to anybody who will identify these three, and I will donate to Planned Parenthood.
When he started catching flak for his assault and his call for the dox, Sims posted his follow-on:
I can do better.
He masqueraded that as a sort-of apology.
Here’s one of the results of doxing. Swatting is a false call to emergency facilities claiming a deadly event—usually a domestic violence claim—in progress and please hurry. This is done while identifying a doxed address as the location of the supposed deadliness. For example,
a call from a man who said he had shot his wife and then tied up his children inside his house, where he had several pipe bombs.
And this:
A perpetrator was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for launching a swatting attack in December 2017 in Wichita, KA, against a man who was killed by police responding to the call.
Given the emotional tension and outright violence already extant surrounding the abortion/anti-abortion conflict, it’s ludicrous to the point of insulting our intelligence to consider any premise that Sims didn’t know these risks.
Sims’ subsequent post is, to use the technical term, BS. He was speaking—shouting, really—from his heart when he engaged in his verbal assault and subsequent call for his targets to be doxed. His later commentary is nothing more than words mouthed for his personal benefit, politically spoken to dodge his culpability.
Sims needs to go. He can have no value in a State government purporting to represent its constituents.
