Balancing the Public Interest versus Personal Safety
“Ten, 15 years ago I would have been adamantly against that. Look, y’all, the world is getting kind of crazy. We just have to make sure we’re not putting people at risk of being seriously hurt.”
– State Ethics Commission Executive Director David Emadi speaking at the Biennial Institute for Georgia Legislators regarding candidate addresses on campaign disclosures.
We have a policy here at Peach Pundit not to post personal contact information for those we write about, even if that information can be gathered from other publicly available sources. For those of us in the public eye, safety is always a concern and today, with the growing popularity of “doxxing” and “swatting” those in public eye, especially elected officials, making it just a little more difficult to obtain home addresses is probably the right move, even in light of the public’s right to know how to reach candidates for elected office.
Swatting is dangerous in several ways. Swatting first and foremost puts the target and their family in danger of being injured or killed by the responding law enforcement officials who may, in that heightened and stressful situation, wrongly perceive a threat by the target who is also as confused about the situation. In that sense, swatting can become a tool of political assassination, with the swatter using the police to do their dirty work. Swatting also takes law enforcement resources away from responding to actual emergencies and threats resulting in delayed response times. Finally, there is always the potential for others to be injured or killed as law enforcement rush to the false emergency, as we recently saw in Rome, Georgia.
After a wave of swatting incidents last year involving several members of the Georgia General Assembly, the legislature made the decision to make swatting a felony rather than a misdemeanor.
The law, SB 421, which went into effect July 1, 2024, was sponsored by Sen. Clint Dixon after he as well as GOP Senators John Albers, Kay Kirkpatrick, Democratic Senator Kim Jackson, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, and Cong. Marjorie Taylor Greene faced swatting incidents around Christmas in 2023. Greene has been swatted numerous times at her Rome home, including as recently as December 9 when someone falsely reported a pipe bomb had been placed in the mailbox at Greene’s home. One of the bomb squad officers responding to the false report hit and killed another motorist. According to a report in the Georgia Recorder, “On the way to the headquarters in their personal vehicle, a Rome Police sergeant and bomb squad member collided with another vehicle driven by 66-year-old Tammie Pickelsimer.”
Greene posted a statement on X offering her condolences to Pickelsimer’s family and the officer involved in the accident.
Catching swatters has been an issue when there are so many ways for those who want to commit these crimes to hide their identity. The false bomb threat against Greene was traced to an IP address out of Russia. So called “burner phones” and VOIP can also help cover identities, but most swatting calls are made over computer systems where IP addresses can be masked, manipulated, or patched through multiple IPs. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can also be utilized to hide the source. Swatters also usually hit multiple targets at once to make them more difficult to track, which is why, as was the case in December of 2023, multiple elected officials in Georgia were victims of swatting at the same time. Despite this, however, there have been swatters have been apprehended, including one California teen who was charged by the State of Florida with over 400 false calls.
While Emadi’s proposal for legislators seems to make common sense, attempts to block such information have been met with resistance by First Amendment advocates.
According to The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Richard T. Griffiths, media ethicist at the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, responded to Emadi telling the AJC, now is the time “to be strengthening government transparency, not restricting the public’s right to know.” But, he added, that it’s “always fair to think about the safety of those who serve the public.”
Griffiths continued saying, “There may be some smart ways of doing that. I hope the Legislature in its wisdom will take great care as they do that and not make such redactions blanket across vast numbers of other documents.”
In a March 2023 op-ed, Griffiths discusses some of the legitimate reasons for transparency, notably the public’s right to know if an elected official is using their influence for personal reasons, “But if a county employee wants to conceal the sweetheart deal he got on his property tax valuations, he would now be able to use his invisibility cloak to do it.”
While the op-ed centered around legislation that would have amended Georgia’s Open Records Act removing a line that restricts redactions of records that “do not specifically identify public employees or their jobs, titles or offices.”
Griffiths admitted that the law, SB 215, had good intentions,” because it is aimed at providing a little sense of security to public officials like judges and prosecutors who may have made some enemies along the way,” just that it went too far and the final version of the legislation only applied to law enforcement officers.
Surely there is a way to craft legislation that will not only protect public officials and their families from undue harassments and criminal acts while ensuring that bad public officials don’t have a legal cloak of invisibility to hide their misdeeds behind, but until then, Emadi’s proposal is a step in the right direction.
