I actually don’t think 60k workers are public figures to be doxxed. In the same way I do not represent my employer to the media or shareholders.

Well, you're wrong. The US has a government of by and for its people. It is not the same as your employer.

Ok. I look forward to your support when Elon starts tweeting the names of individual employees he wants to cut.

I think this is a false equivalence. Announcing to the world that you are being fired is different from stating that you work somewhere.

He’s already done that

And I think that’s bad. This individual thinks it’s holding public servants accountable.

The issue isn’t whether or not their names are public.

The issue is that Elon Musk is highlighting them specifically in a negative way that will lead to very predictable, very personal, very negative outcomes without any recourse.

Is that different when Wired does it?

It depends if you think there's a difference between a self-formed likely illegal group, doing likely illegal things for ideological purposes getting reported on by a reputable news source, and a civil servant who has been doing their assigned job getting picked on personally and publicly by one of the most powerful people in America who owns the media site he is using to attack them.

I see those as different in reality. We can argue that semantically they can get twisted around as the same thing (government employees getting publicly named in a critical way), but that ignores extremely relevant real-world circumstances.

So, to be clear, I do think "who people in government are and what they do" is appropriately public record.

But yes, there is a difference between media reporting on what high-level government officials are doing and government (or quasi-government) officials singling out low level employees for ridicule. It's the difference between punching up and punching down.

But this is not among the worst things Musk is doing, and if it were a right-wing magazine doing reporting on employees in the federal government rather than someone using their role within the government itself to do it, I might find it distasteful but would have no real qualms about it.

I mean, I don't want to claim to be an expert on this, but I'm pretty sure who works for the government and what they do is public record.

I do think it's bad to "doxx" people in the sense of sharing their addresses and phone numbers. But that's not what the article we're discussing does.

This article simply strikes me as normal reporting that is no different than "Treasury Secretary Bessent has hired so and so as an undersecretary for such and such, and this is what so and so has done and said in the past". These people seem to be working essentially at that undersecretary level. We always know who such people are, and we should.

You're conflating several things.

- Public figures are public by influence; public servants are employees and can/should have their information revealed when necessary.

- Revelation of information of employees under public pay is not 'doxxing'. Making it seem as if it's 'doxxing' is stretching the definition, like saying someone merely touching you has committed 'violence'. Your intentional use of a more serious concept for a less serious one is misleading.

- Your private employer has no duty to the public, they answer only to the end stakeholders. In contrast, public servants must be accountable and known to the public - it's literally in their name, 'public' and 'servants'. Why you should confuse your status with that of public servants is bewildering.