Anti-fascist research group the White Rose Society has warned the Australian government that its push for new anti-doxing laws are a “quick fix” for complex problems that could be weaponised against reporting and have negative consequences for society.
In March the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, announced consultation for new laws that would include a right to sue for serious invasion of privacy and a criminal offence of doxing.
It was first flagged by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in February after a spreadsheet was posted online containing the names, professions and social media accounts of 600 Jewish writers and artists who were members of a WhatsApp group. The details were posted in response to some of the members of the group actively targeting pro-Palestinian writers and their publishers over their coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
The White Rose Society, which routinely investigates neo-Nazi groups and unmasks those groups in its reporting, told the attorney general’s department in a submission that not all doxing is harmful and therefore bad or undesirable.
“We believe that doxing responsibly, carefully and with a definite end in mind – the disruption and exposure of neo-Nazi, extremist, and far-right activities for the purposes of community and public safety – is a much-needed and valuable service,” the group said.
“Over the last five years, we have engaged in this service and have even been thanked in NSW parliament for our efforts.”
The group said its work had led to the exposure of neo-Nazis in the NSW Young Nationals and Australia’s military forces, and revealed that Australians had joined the international terror organisation The Base, which is now a proscribed terror group in Australia.
The White Rose Society said the leak of the members of the WhatsApp group constituted an example of poor doxing. White Rose said it supported the leaking of the redacted chat log, but not the “poorly vetted list” of members.
“We understand the motivations of the activists who took this action and while sympathetic, we think their actions were hasty and poorly thought through,” the group said. “Our experience in working with large data breaches has involved months of work in verifying identities and names linked to online accounts.
“We make every effort not to get it wrong.”
However, the action to release the list was in response to a “very vicious campaign of doxing” of pro-Palestinian supporters by pro-Israel activists, White Rose said.
The group argued existing law is sufficient to deal with intentionally harmful doxing, but enforcement tends to be “generally inadequate and frequently useless”, with police often not understanding the issue.
The group said it was concerned this was a “quick-fix” law to a complex problem.
“We do not believe that these [laws] are effective and may have serious negative consequences for both victims and society,” the White Rose Society said. “We are concerned that anti-doxing legislation may be weaponised to shut down the reporting of journalists when defamation law already applies to what stories are and aren’t published and how they are reported.”
The concerns of White Rose were echoed by digital rights groups in their submissions.
“This consultation is, to our mind, a kneejerk reaction by the government in response to, what we can reasonably infer, may be a vocal minority seeking to stifle and make lopsided public debate on the Israeli military action in Palestine,” Electronic Frontiers Australia said in its submission. “The problem of doxing is broader, deeper, and more nuanced than it appears through this over simplified and reductionist lens.”
Digital Rights Watch said there were already existing avenues for dealing with the harm caused by malicious doxing, and the leak of the WhatsApp chat logs was not a good catalyst.
“As a highly politically potent issue, using this incident as the political tool to garner momentum may actually undermine the government’s efforts toward privacy law reform.”
A spokesperson for Dreyfus said the government was carefully considering the feedback before next steps.
“We sought submissions from people with lived experience of doxing, media organisations and others interested in this to ensure we get this right,” the spokesperson said.
“The Albanese government has no higher priority than the safety of the community.”
