AG wrong on doxing

THE EDITOR: Devant Maharaj has come into the spotlight recently for releasing the otherwise private phone numbers of public officials. Once those numbers have been published, various public officials have reported being inundated with messages, death threats and salacious imagery.

Over the weekend Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi indicated that Maharaj was “doxing.” Doxing, according to the AG, “is when you go out of your way to crash a system using certain truths” which is “akin to a cybercrime.”

With the greatest of respect, this is untrue. This is not what doxing is.

Doxing is the use of the internet to find and/or publish information about an individual. The information could be public – public but difficult to find – or private. Doxing can be malicious, or for benevolent purposes like social activism and news reporting.

In fact, both the interim report and the report of the Joint Select Committee on the Cybercrime Bill 2017, which the AG himself chaired, defined doxing as “the practice of searching for and publishing private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.” Therefore it is even more surprising that the AG would define the term in such an odd manner.

The AG then suggested that doxing is “akin to a cybercrime.” That statement is also curious since both JSC reports on the Cybercrime Bill were inconclusive on this point. They simply noted stakeholder concern as to whether section 18 (1) of the bill encompassed doxing (section 18 (1) would criminalise a “person who uses a computer system to communicate with the intention to cause harm to another person”).

To suggest that doxing is “akin to a cybercrime” despite such legislative ambiguity might be a worrying glimpse into the purported reach of the Government’s proposed cybercrime legislation.

DR EMIR CROWNE

barrister and attorney