A former clerical assistant of the Immigration Department was recently sentenced to almost four years in prison for doxing. The neologism derived from a misspelling of the abbreviation for ‘documents’ and/or the MS Word file suffix ‘.docx’ as ‘dox’ refers to compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone, often done maliciously—with the intention of causing stress and drawing unwanted publication attention to the ‘outed’ party.
In this case, an immigration assistant obtained the personal data of 215 public officers, including government officials, judges, police officers and their family members, from the Immigration Department’s computer system without authorisation and provided the data to the administrator of the social media platform, Telegram, for publication. The defendant pleaded guilty earlier to one count of “misconduct in public office” and was sentenced on 27 September 2021 to imprisonment for 45 months.
The Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Ms Ada Chung Lai-ling welcomed the court ruling and said, “This is the heaviest sentence imposed by a court in a doxing case so far. Doxing acts can bring very serious legal consequences. The cyber-world is not beyond the law. Once again, I urge members of the public not to break the law.”
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
