The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, says his government will propose legislation to crack down on doxing after the publication of details of a WhatsApp group of Jewish Australians.
Albanese said on Monday that the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, was developing amendments to privacy laws and also looking at how to “strengthen laws against hate speech”.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry called for legislative changes after it condemned the publication of the log of a group chat of more than 600 Jewish writers and artists.
The Nine newspapers, which first reported the story, alleged that the link also contained a spreadsheet of links to social media accounts and another file that contained the photos of over 100 Jewish people.
Writer and commentator Clementine Ford last week published a link to the log of the group chat to her 239,000 Facebook followers, although she was not involved in the initial leak and was not the only person to post a link.
Ford told her followers that she was posting the transcript of the leaked chat to provide an insight into “how coordinated efforts are to silence Palestinian activists and their allies”.
Albanese signalled his intention to pursue legislative changes in an interview with 2GB on Monday.
“I’ve asked the attorney general to bring forward legislation in response to the Privacy Act review, including laws that deal with so-called doxing, which is basically the malicious publication of private information online,” the prime minister said.
“And let’s be very clear, these are 600 people in the creative industries … who had a WhatsApp group, not heavily political, to provide support for each other because of the antisemitism we’ve seen.”
Albanese said the publication of the details had led to people being “targeted”.
“Now these people have a range of views about the Middle East. What they have in common is they are members of the Jewish community,” he said.
“The idea that in Australia someone should be targeted because of their religion, because of their faith, whether they be Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu or Catholic – it’s just completely unacceptable.
“And that’s why I’ve asked as well the attorney general to develop proposals to strengthen laws against hate speech. This is not the Australia we want to see.”
When asked for a response to Albanese’s comments, Ford said: “This fixation on rewriting narratives in order to obfuscate the truth is yet another tactic to conceal Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.”
Ford said there was a wider effort aimed at “the demonisation of people who cannot stand to see any more children be killed” in Gaza.
She asked: “How many children need to die before Albanese remembers he once had a backbone?”
The leaked WhatsApp chat log allegedly included several messages about Ford, including a comment from a user: “One of my big goals is taking down Clementine, either by making her have to issue a public apology, or getting her dropped by her publisher, or preferably both.”
On Sunday Ford posted a “collective statement regarding the leaked chat, and the pernicious attempts by individuals, lobby groups and the media to frame it as ‘doxing’”.
The statement said the group chat had been “leaked by a whistleblower” and no addresses, phone numbers or emails had been shared.
“Many of us were shocked and disturbed by the contents of the transcript as we read the tactics discussed to target and harm the livelihood and reputation of good and just people, some for simply being Palestinian, and almost all for calling for an end to the genocide against the people of Gaza,” said the statement posted by Ford on Sunday.
However, the Labor MP Josh Burns said last week that the publication of the details had led to death threats and forced one family into hiding.
“This has resulted in really serious consequences where people have received death threats,” he said.
Dreyfus has long been working on reforms to the Privacy Act, and it is understood the government is planning to create a new criminal offence of “malicious doxing”.
Dreyfus said the government would bring forward legislation “as soon as possible” to protect Australians from “the malicious use of their personal and private information”.
Earlier, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry called for “reform of the Criminal Code to make it unlawful to post private or identifying information about an individual or group with the intent that the information be used to cause harm to the victim”.
The president, Daniel Aghion KC, said many within the Jewish community in Australia were “fearful for their physical security and loss of livelihood”.
“In the last few days this has been caused by the publication of lists containing the names, faces and other personal information of hundreds of individuals, whose only common trait is that they are Jewish,” he said on Monday.
In addition to legal changes, Aghion called on social media platforms “to permanently deactivate the accounts of those found to have used their accounts for the purposes of doxing”.
“Social media is intended to connect individuals and communities and allow the rapid exchange of information,” he said.
“Where accounts are used to threaten the lives and livelihoods of others, the platforms have a duty to act.”
