It seems there doesn't need to be any additional laws. There's a claim in the article that if there was a law, it might have prevented the harassment, but there was no further argument nor supporting facts. The perpetrators are eligible to be pursued under existing criminal and civil laws. The real issue is enforcement against numerous perpetrators, which the new law wouldn't help with anyways.
i can imagine vaguely how doxing and swatting could be related, for example discovering dox that support claims made against a person when swatting them, but ive always thought they were two distinct practices.
with that being said i think the full practice of doxing is an amalgam of two or more offences [i.e. stalking; slander; libel; defamation]
Were phone books voluntary back in the day? I can't remember, I was 10 years old.
Real estate records is a big problem. Back in the day they intended the use case to be "who lives at {address}" not "where does {person} live?".
But now thanks to #computers, all of the mappings have been brute forced and stored publicly online and are easily searchable in reverse. Why should it be that way? Keep in mind that in some jurisdictions I can't even defend myself legally against criminals.
Phone books were included by default, but with an opt out choice (might have cost extra for an unlisted number). They usually had address in there too, so you could search by name and get address.
"Why should it be that way?"
I'm not sure. You could probably set up authorized use databases for people that use this, like process servers, PIs, repo, etc. Of course there are companies that would likely qualify and open the records via those public record searches. One could also set up an anonymous WY LLC and register everything that way. You could even defeat license plate readers that way.
One use case for the general public would be serving/filing private criminal complaints.
