Honest question: What's the difference between that and telling someone they shouldn't use 123456 as their password because it increases the chances that their account might get hacked?
It all exists on a spectrum: saying "Politicians shouldn't support $SOMETHING because it increases the chances they might be assassinated" or "Maybe gay people should just stop having so much gay sex if they want to stop being victimized by society" is on the other end, but the same logic seems to apply. It displaces the focus from the perpetrator to the victim.
Asking people to choose a complicated password [1] is a pain, but it's nowhere near as much an encroachment on meaningful freedom than asking them to not have political opinions, or to modify their sexual practices.
[1] I'd argue that our password situation is terribly broken right now, actually, and the fact that so much crime revolves around stolen passwords is as much an indictment of the technical systems we have as the criminals who exploit it.
> "Powerful and/or controversial politicians always have lots of security for this reason."
Yes, and I'd argue that goes with my point. As a society, we never say "well, they sort of had it coming when they were a hack for the socialists/capitalists/whites/blacks/misogynists/feminists/whatever"; we condemn the assassin, and on top of that provide extra security to the politician. In the same way, if a woman goes out in public and gets raped (which is surely more risky than staying indoors all day), we don't condemn her for doing something that statistically increases her chances of becoming a victim of sexual violence, but condemn the rapist and, on top of that, try to build government policies and social practices that decrease the chance of her becoming that victim.
