How Data Brokers Can Fuel Violence Against Public Servants

A new report released Tuesday reveals that while violent threats against public officials across the United States have increased, “comprehensive” state-level consumer privacy laws fail to provide adequate protections for these officials, creating a “data pipeline to violence.”

The report was published by researcher Justin Sherman of the Public Service Alliance’s Security Project, a platform that provides free and discounted security services to current and former public officials. While Trump officials have characterized federal immigration agents’ behavior on the job as “violence” and “doxing,” Sherman says the report focuses on the more traditional and widely accepted definition: the publication of a person’s personal and private information, such as their home address, with the specific intent to harm them.

Sherman analyzed 19 different consumer privacy laws and found that while they all give consumers the right to prevent data brokers from selling personal information obtained from private sources, none give “public officials the right to legally compel state agencies to remove their personal data from public records,” and none prevent data brokers from selling data, including people’s home addresses, when obtained through public sources such as state records. property or court records. Additionally, none include what is known as a “private right of action,” which would allow individuals to sue for violations of their respective states’ privacy laws.

Taken together, this means that information about civil servants is only available and they have few means to prevent its release.

Violent threats against public officials have increased, according to a separate analysis by PSA and Impact Project of more than 1,600 individual threats made against public officials between 2015 and 2025. That analysis found that violent threats against local officials, including school board members and election workers, accounted for nearly a third of the reports reviewed. The study also found that threatening statements were almost nine times more common than physical attacks, and that one form of threat could escalate into another.

A 2024 report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that a greater share of women and Democrats reported an increase in the severity of abuse since first taking office, compared to men and Republicans.

Last year, a 57-year-old man was charged with murdering Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state representative, and her husband at their Minnesota home. According to court records, the suspected shooter possessed handwritten lists of dozens of federal and state officials in Minnesota, including Hortman’s name and home address, as well as 11 “people search engines” that allow anyone to find personal information about a person, including their home addresses, phone numbers and the names of their loved ones, often for a small fee.

The report calls for legislation that would specifically address the privacy concerns of all public officials, including public school educators and local elected officials, who are not necessarily covered by existing federal or state privacy laws. This suggests that lawmakers could try to balance First Amendment and privacy concerns by regulating the digitization of public records and the ease of accessing them remotely, instead of limiting them altogether.

Sherman, the author of the new report, said that while many public records can be useful to journalists and accountability watchdogs, repackaged public records sold by data brokers may make it too easy for abusive individuals to stalk and harass their victims, even when they move to another state. In the past, people searching for public records already had to have an idea of ​​where those public records were located and physically go to that location.