Transcripts are already public information. The accused obviously already knows where she lives. How does this affect her security?

Even if we could keep the identity of witnesses secret, we don’t want to. We have the right to confront our accusers, and we don’t want secret trials.

It's a harder problem that. Secrecy in courts is a tool often used by totalitarian dictatorships, a blanket objection to that sort of thing may actually do more good than harm. In a practical sense I totally agree with omitting addresses specifically but I also understand the skepticism of any reduction of transparency in the courts.

It's not secrecy, you can be totally transparent about who is involved without revealing their residential address.

Courts don't post SSNs and bank account numbers in their transcripts, and residential addresses should be treated with the same level of privacy.

According to [1], you can request a transcript be redacted if it contains "the home address of an individual (applicable to criminal cases only)".

It also looks like the onus is on you (or your attorney) to request the redaction. I think its highly likely that she didn't care in this case - people don't really care about privacy as much as HN does. Her abuser went to jail. Worrying that some rando will start harassing her because of this court proceeding (and not from her Facebook, or a phone book, etc etc) is bordering on paranoia.

[1] https://www.ned.uscourts.gov/internetDocs/pom/tran_redaction...

Your thought process is wild. I honestly cannot see where you're coming from.

Did you see where a GitHub project was forked, and the maintainer of the fork had people at his place of residence threatening physical violence? This shit sounds made up, but craycray is rampant on the internet.

I’m baffled, myself. Everyone lives somewhere. I don’t see how knowing someone’s address creates a hazard from random people. If a lunatic wants to assault someone he can kick in a random door. In the case of someone, say, testifying against the mob or against a violent person who doesn’t already know where she lives, sure.

You underestimate the amount of crazy living on the internet.

There are a lot of misogynistic incels that think most women claiming to be abused are lying. I could easily see one of them being crazy enough to SWAT her in retaliation.

Is it likely? Probably not. But considering we've had mass shooters who have cited their inceldom as their motive, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

Your scenario had occurred to me, and it’s not wildly improbable. But I don’t think we should form public policy, especially if our adjustments might be disharmonious with the Constitution, on the basis of any scenarios that we can dream up. In this case the accused already knows where she lives, and any imagined affect on her security by publishing her address depends on supposition.

We should form public policy on the basis of evidence – that is to say, models that have high explanatory power and confidently predict reality correctly.

We have policy around nuclear attacks that aren't based on actual nuclear attacks. There are policies around preventing certain people from being assassinated even if nobody's assassinated them yet. If “swatting” is something that we know happens in this sort of case, we should review our procedures around preventing it if circumstances change in a way that we could reasonably expect would increase swatting.

The accused isn't always the only threat to the victim; even if they are put behind bars, they may often have associations to other perpetrators yet to be found.

In any case, this logic is tantamount to:

"We don't see any immediate threat to posting the first 3 digits of victim's SSN in the transcript, and they don't have any ID theft criminals yet, so let's just post the first 3 digits for the hell of it."

Residential address is equally unnecessary. No need to post their address for the hell of it.

That just means that you're lucky to not have been at the receiving end of this.

"Lunatics" don't usually kick down random doors, in the vast majority of cases. They usually have a targeted person in mind, and they stalk that target. They may even be associated with a former perpetrator that is already behind bars. Courts posting the victim's residential address on the internet is not helpful to their safety, yet the law's biggest responsibility should be to keep innocent people safe.

you're just ignorant. this is something all famous people and public figures understand. once you hit a certain threshold for volume of people, some of them are guaranteed to be aberrant, violent, and/or unstable. it doesnt have anything to do with who you are or what you've done (although you can certainly attract more if you try) - at least 1 person has a serious problem with you.

the specifics here matter too. court cases are adversarial and high-stakes. the court-going population isnt as stable as the general population.

I am not sure if you are that sheltered. It is within the realm of possibility, it would be possible to believe that humankind are collected and knowing their boundaries. Until recently (last year or pre-pandemic) it become transparent that we are, in fact, stupid. The thought process is valid because it is possible for that to happen. This thought process will be very outlandish 10 years ago which I can agree with you. But now... it is not impossible to think it can happens.

I do not know if you know this, but back in the day, we used to publish entire doxxing books, listing everyone's address and home phone number. It was opt-out, and almost nobody did.

Why are people today suddenly so worried about that?

Those things were printed at most once per year. Lots of information can change in a year. Online data can be as close to realtime as it gets. There's a large chasm of difference in MaBell's book and the internet. MaBell also would charge you to be unlisted, but you could provided fake names/info that would be printed in the book instead.

Addresses are still quasi-public information - they are published in all sorts of places, property transactions are published and available online. Someone's address is usually are easily found if you go looking.

Technology has made it far more dangerous. Swatting. Identity theft.

It wasn’t terribly practical for, say, a random person in Spain to harass, steal from, or cause the death of someone in the U.S. 20-30 years ago. Everything is global now.

Just because it happened in the past doesn't make it right.

Lots of very grave things were done in history that we now know to be mistakes.

Also, I always opted out in those days. I should still be able to do that today.

Yes, phone books are murder.

The other solution seems to be endangering the general public by opening the courts in a pandemic or to start having secret courts. Neither are particularly compelling. Far less people were assaulted in the US than died of coronavirus, and even fewer were assaulted for witness intimidation. And a secret court is obviously bad for a rules based democracy.

You can censor live events for nuisances like strong language or nudity, but you can't protect the privacy of victims? You would be absolutely astonished, how many women are intimidated/assaulted each year. The infection rates of covid pale against that.

Roughly 300,000 people were assaulted in 2019 (last year of uniform crime stats from the FBI). The annualized amount of COVID-19 death is about 400,000.

Correction: 300,000 reported assaulted, not 300,000 assaulted.

Specifying that for only one side isn't exactly balanced. There were only 400,000 reported covid deaths as well.

I'm not sure why is it that you only mention "women" here, are you implying men are never assaulted?

It needn't be one or the other.

You can have remote trials but just don't put personal information in records, and prohibit unauthorized recording. Have one official recording that redacts personal addresses and contact information.

No parr of the justice system should be hidden from view. If its too dangerous to be made public, its not important enough to be used.

I disagree. I strongly think the justice system should be first and foremost protecting victims and not exposing them to more harm.

That would encourage victims to not bring wrongdoings to trial in fear of their personal info being exposed.

If someone is convicted, then yeah, go ahead and put them on a sex offender registry with their address. Loss of privacy is a consequence of their actions. That's justice.

But goddamn no don't put the victim's address in public view.

Everyone should be treated equally in the court. A court that prioritizes the victim is barely batter than having a system based on vigilante justice.

Well yes, so you start out by not publishing either party's address. If and when someone is convicted as a sex offender, it's reasonable to publish their address at that point, and continue to protect the victim's identity.

This was an ok amount of anonymity under Old School journalism with paper phonebooks but not after the internet. Seems they need to update their standards.

There's always a price when you censor something. There's also always a price when you regulate something, too. In this particular case, the likely attacker was literally in the same house, so there's not a lot of argument to be made that the extra burden of censoring would add a similar or greater gain.