Comment by pc86
17 hours ago
Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.
> Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally
Citation needed, but even if we say for the sake of argument this is accurate, that doesn't naturally lead to this outcome.
What makes violence political?
Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.
Is stopping that political violence worth the worst case scenario where we make it harder for the public to get this type of information?
I'd argue that employers shouldn't have access to employee's home addresses either, outside of situations where it's needed (e.g., employee chooses to get paycheck by mail instead of direct deposit). Most employers keep access to personal employee information (PII) restricted to HR/timekeeping/payroll departments anyway.
Why would my direct supervisor need my home address?
To match more closely the question about politicians, why would you need the home address of your direct supervisor? Seems quite suspect to me.
> Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.
I don't think any employer has any right to know their employee's home address, to be honest.
> Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.
I think this question is rather besides the point. Random acts of violence are bad, so let's not make anybody's home address public information. In the age of the internet, we routinely observe millions of people fixating on one person for some perceived grievance or another, wherein it only takes one lunatic among those millions having access to private information to result in a tragedy. We don't have to make it so easy for these tragedies to happen.
> I don't think any employer has any right to know their employee's home address, to be honest.
Regardless of whether this should be the case or not, it is the case is every country I can think of.
I agree I think we're straying from the point a bit. When is the last time you can point to an act of political violence that would not have occurred had some public servant or elected official's address not been on a website or spreadsheet somewhere?
These things simply don't happen enough to warrant further limiting government officials' accountability to the public.
> Regardless of whether this should be the case or not, it is the case is every country I can think of.
And we are specifically talking about advocacy for legislation to change that. The report advocates for changing legislation to benefit government employees as a privileged class, while I think the common-sense position is to ensure the privacy of every citizen.
> When is the last time you can point to an act of political violence that would not have occurred had some public servant or elected official's address not been on a website or spreadsheet somewhere?
These attacks happen often, but a particularly notable case was that in the US, June 2025, where a mentally unhinged terrorist assassinated two public servants in their home, shot two others in another home (although they survived), and had a hitlist of other legislators' homes to target, although he was stopped before he could continue his spree. In fact he had stopped by four homes in total, but by chance the occupants were gone from one and the police were already checking in on another and he left without acting there. This was a tragedy that could only have happened in the way it did because of home addresses being so freely available, and it was pure luck that the tragedy was not even worse than it happened to be.
> These things simply don't happen enough to warrant further limiting government officials' accountability to the public.
What accountability to the public is meaningfully gained by letting people attack your home? "Random people going to legislators' doorsteps" is not a legitimate part of the democratic process of any country I'm familiar with.