Employee group urges centralized response to increase in doxxing and threats against federal workers

An employee association within the Justice Department is urging departmental leaders to take new steps to combat the recent uptick in instances of doxxing and threatening federal employees on the Internet.

Doxxing refers to the malicious publication of a person’s personal information, such as home address, phone number and other contact information, and as such is often closely tied with an uptick in online threats made against the practice’s target. Officials at the Department of Justice Gender Equality Network, an employee group representing nearly 2,000 Justice Department workers, said the workforce has seen an uptick in both doxxing and online threats against individual employees as federal law enforcement began investigating and prosecuting cases in relation to the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Management Division Jolene Lauria, first reported by Politico, the group urged leadership create a new centralized “triage team” to tackle doxxing, threats and other online attacks on career federal workers.

In the letter, DOJGEN President Stacey Young and member Jay Sinha said that career employees tasked with prosecuting January 6 defendants, attorneys representing the administration in legal challenges to the Biden administration’s immigration policy and FBI agents serving search warrants on “high profile-individuals”—in an apparent reference to former President Trump—have all been targeted for threats and other online harassment in the last three years.

“Novel threats that extend well beyond senior Department leadership have intensified employees’ fears,” Young and Sinha wrote. “For example, DOJ employees have recently appeared on online “target” lists, and reporting revealed that organizations are planning to doxx hundreds of federal servants for their perceived political or ideological leanings. Beyond doxxing, recent studies showed the ease with which federal employees’ movements can be tracked through the purchase of phone location data.”

The doxxing career civil servants is not just concentrated on the Justice Department. The American Accountability Foundation, a right-wing “oversight and research” organization, published the names of more than 50 career employees at the Homeland Security Department, and described them as “targets.” The group’s work is funded through a grant from the Heritage Foundation.

The group argued that creating a centralized “triage team”—and a centralized location to report instances of doxxing and other online threats and harassment would be more effective than the department’s current patchwork of officials across its many subcomponents.

“The department’s vast array of offices and subject matter experts who are key to responding to doxxing and other online threats are currently dispersed throughout DOJ’s more than 40 separate component organizations and 115,000 employees,” they wrote. “We urge the department to quickly create a centralized triage team to leverage and coordinate resources so it can more nimbly respond to the fast-moving, multi-faceted problem. Such a team would also telegraph to the workforce and the public the seriousness of doxxing and other online threats against DOJ employees and underscore the department’s commitment to combatting them.”

The organization also urged the department to update its guidance on what employees should do if they are targeted, and it suggested the department offer to subsidize victims’ purchase of commercial identity protection services.

“Employees who are particularly vulnerable to doxxing and other online threats have greatly benefited from commercial services that provide individualized counseling and support, and initiate [personally identifiable information] removal requests from public websites,” Young and Sinha wrote. “One DOJ GEN member who prosecutes high-profile January 6 cases described these services as a ‘lifesaver’ after she was doxed and threatened online. Just as DOJ helps subsidize malpractice insurance for attorneys who need it, it should do the same for employees who need the protection that commercial PII removal and counseling services provide.”