Hacker News Reader

Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

But your partner's government contact info (name and email) is already accessible, either via a government website or via FOIA. The issue here is that the DOGE employee info was not accessible before, and 2600 is being penalized for publishing it. Regardless of what they say in the article (provided it's not incitement to violence or something), the point is that the names and emails should have been public already.

View on HN

> names and emails should have been public already.

Why? Is there a law for this other than being able to request a FOIA?

Regardless of where the information came from, plastering personal information of random people on twitter is not okay.

It's not personal information, and it's not random people. It is the government email addresses of government employees, and yes, that should be public, as is the case for all other government employees at every level.

If it were something personal like a home address or phone number, that would be different.

Spamming random employees gov e-mails on the internet is a disservice to tax payers money to put it lightly.

> that should be public, as is the case for all other government employees at every level.

And I'll ask again: is there a law for that other than being able to request a FOIA?

> Spamming random employees gov e-mails on the internet is a disservice to tax payers money to put it lightly.

They aren't random, they are DOGE employees. And at the moment, we don't even know what the role of DOGE is in the US government. Is Elon Musk a cabinet member, despite not being confirmed by the Senate? If DOGE exists solely as an advisory body, then why do they have the power to fire employees of other agencies (which have been ratified by Congress)?

So rather than being upset about posting public email addresses of public employees, I would say the disservice to taxpayers is allowing an unelected agency to make decisions about other agencies with no Congressional oversight.

As for "is there a law" I think this is implicit in the nature of representation. If you vote for someone to represent you, and after they are elected you have no way to contact them, how do they actually represent you? I'm not suggesting people should harass DOGE employees or say bad things to them, just that we need more transparency in general.

I get your point but posting e-mails on Twitter doesn't help. Even if in protest. It only fuels more polarization.

I just looked this up. I feel like this should have been obvious to me before but Trump has a contact form and Obama has an official email address. Though they probably go through like 12 layers of indirection first.

They are definitely read. I had a bad visit and was accused once of plotting to assassinate Clinton because someone I'd given an account to on a Linux box sent a very detailed manifesto to that email address. ~1996?

Sure, but the ToS wording states you need their permission. I'm guessing their permission wasn't acquired. To me it seems like this wording is to prevent witch-hunts. Which this effectively was. I don't know about you but a good old fashioned witch-hunt is shit behaviour for someone doing their job. I don't verbally abuse parking inspectors (as much as I want to). They are doing it to pay their bills and feed their family.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250304001202/https://help.x.co...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com