Someone with an IP address corresponding to the House of Representatives doxxed Senators Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee on Thursday evening.
At about 5:13 p.m., someone with a House IP address added Graham’s personal home addresses (in DC and their home state), home phone number, cell phone number, and personal email address to their public Wikipedia pages. Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee also got doxxed.
The Senators themselves were in the middle of questioning Judge Brett Kavanaugh as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the multiple allegations of sexual assault leveled toward Kavanaugh, the Trump Administration’s current nominee for Supreme Court.
The doxxing was immediately picked up by @congressedits, the automated Twitter bot that monitors every Wikipedia edit from an IP address connected to the Capitol building.
Graham was first to go, some time after his fully-unhinged rant in supposed defense of Kavanaugh.
About 12 minutes later, at around 5:25, Hatch’s information also went up.
Then it was Lee’s turn, about 29 minutes after that.
All the edits were almost immediately suppressed and taken down from the site, but are immortalized by the @congressedits screenshots.
The doxxing apparently ruffled some feathers, as the main U.S. Congress Wiki got hit shortly after, by someone writing “Wikipedia should block all congressional IPs if some little rich-boy socialist interns can’t be responsible online,” which would certainly be one response to the problem! So far, it doesn’t look like any of the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have been doxxed in retaliation.
The next edit was to the @congressedits Wikipedia page itself: “@congressedits was a mistake.”
Anyway, it’s always a good time to engage with your elected officials!
Update, 7:10 PM ET, 9/27/2018
Gizmodo reports that Capitol Police were notified of the changes.
From their post:
“Senator Hatch and a number of other Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were targeted after they questioned Judge Kavanaugh,” Hatch spokesperson Matt Whitlock told Gizmodo. “It’s alarming that anyone would want to put Judiciary Committee Republicans and their families in danger.”
A spokesperson for Graham told Gizmodo that he was aware of the doxxing, but declined to comment on what steps the office was taking in response.