You are asked to serve on the jury in the first criminal prosecution of a United States president. What could go wrong? The answer is of course everything.
A juror in the ongoing criminal trial of former president Donald Trump in New York was dismissed Thursday after expressing concerns that she could be identified based on biographical details which she testified in court. The dismissal of Juror 2 highlights the potential dangers of participating in one of the most politicized trials in American history, especially in an age of social media frenzy where voters can High partisanship and the amount of personal information available online.
Unlike juries in federal cases, who can remain completely anonymous, New York law Allow personal information of jurors and potential jurors will be disclosed in court. Juan Mercan, the judge overseeing Trump's prosecution in Manhattan, last month command that the names and addresses of the jury will be kept confidential. But he could not prevent potential jurors from providing detailed information about their biographies during jury selection, and many did. Those details were then widely reported in the press, potentially subjecting jurors and potential jurors to harassment, intimidation, and threats—Maybe it's because of Trump himself. Mercan has since blocked reporters publish details of potential jurors' employment.
The doxing dangers facing potential jurors became clear on Monday, the first day of the proceedings. An update in one Washington Post A liveblog of Trump's trial revealed the Manhattan neighborhood where a potential juror lives, how long he has lived there, how many children he has and the name of his employer. Screenshots of the live blog update quickly went viral on social media, as people warned that the man could have been tricked or had his identity publicly revealed against his will. , based solely on that information.
“What is alarming is the amount of information someone with OSINT skills can glean,” said Bob Diachenko, director of cyber intelligence at data breach research organization Security Discovery and an open source expert. based only on few publicly available details about the jurors or potential jurors.” intelligence research.
Armed with basic personal details about the jury as well as certain tools and databases, “an OSINT researcher is capable of uncovering a significant amount of personal information using how to cross-reference all this information together,” Diachenko said. “That is why it is so important to consider the impact of publicly releasing jurors' personal information and take steps to protect their privacy during criminal trials. ”
Even without special OSINT training, uncovering the details of a juror's life can still be trivial. To check the sensitivity of information parcel was published, WIRED used a popular reporting tool to look up the man's employer. From there, we were able to determine his name, home address, phone number, email address, spouse's identity, voter registration information, etc. The entire process took about two minutes. The parcel added an explanation to its live blog, explaining that it currently excludes the man's personal information.
The availability of those details highlights the challenges of informing the public, said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics and Director of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication. about a highly newsworthy criminal case without interfering with the judicial process. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
