Before someone shows up at an election worker’s home, before a school board member gets doxxed or swatted in the middle of the night, before a public health official’s family gets harassed at home, someone finds their address. It often starts with a quick Google search that then takes them to a data broker site, where that broker sells sensitive personal information to anyone willing to pay for it, sometimes for as little as $1. However, data brokers are only part of the problem. Public servants’ home addresses also often appear on campaign websites and public records, giving bad actors multiple (and unnecessarily easy) paths to the same destination.
One year ago this month, Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered in their home by a politically motivated gunman. What investigators found in the suspect’s car should alarm everyone: a notebook with the handwritten names and home addresses of more than 45 state and federal officials, as well as a list of 11 data broker websites he used to research his targets for free or little cost. Court documents show that Hortman’s address was listed on her campaign website — a choice lawmakers sometimes make to signal that they’re accessible to their constituents. What this shows is that far too many public servants face risky exposure from multiple directions at once: data brokers, public records, and official websites. The system creates so many paths to their front door that closing one rarely closes the others. As a result, preventable tragic things happen.
Let’s start with data brokers because they often act with impunity and are a primary part of the backbone of infrastructure that’s fueling America’s public servant security crisis today. These brokers — which constitute a multi-billion-dollar industry — aggregate home addresses, phone numbers, family members’ names, and personal financial information, and they sell it very efficiently at scale, with virtually no accountability and negligible legal or regulatory restrictions. There is no real societal benefit to what they do. They just use people’s personal data to make money, regardless of the consequences.
Because of all of the anger, extremism, and dysfunction in our politics today, public servants are disproportionately exposed and at risk, especially women and people of color. Their names are often public by definition. Their roles make them identifiable. And the laws designed to protect consumers from data broker abuse largely weren’t written with public servants in mind. Congress did pass the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act in 2022, which protects federal judges’ and certain other limited categories of public servants’ personal information from data broker resale, but similar protections for state lawmakers and other public servants have not followed in the ways they should. That’s a significant policy failure stemming from appalling legislative inaction on both sides.
The exposure gap is by design, it’s massive, and it doesn’t get enough attention. That’s why we analyzed the existing 19 state comprehensive consumer privacy laws and found them overwhelmingly weak in protecting public servants from data-related harms, as featured by Wired.
The gaps are not minor. They are structural. This is why data privacy tools that help people remove their personal information from a large volume of data broker sites on a recurring basis make up such a significant (and growing) portion of what PSA offers in our marketplace. It’s not a product category we stumbled into — it’s a deliberate response to what the evidence tells us about how public servants actually get targeted, reducing their risk of being doxxed, swatted, scammed, and more.
We want our users to increase friction between themselves and bad actors who might seek to target them and their families in the future. That’s why we scrutinize our marketplace partners to minimize the likelihood that our users are paying for services that don’t actually do what they say they do and we negotiate meaningful discounts so that these services are more affordable and accessible. We don’t take kickbacks or referral fees. We cut through the noise, saving our users time and money and empowering them to proactively elevate their privacy and security baselines.
The research backs up our approach. Rachel Kleinfeld’s landmark June 2026 Carnegie Endowment report on political violence in the United States, for example, specifically names doxxing protections as one of the most well-documented, evidence-based interventions for reducing threats against public servants. Not a nice-to-have. A documented reducer of violence.
That same report shows that nearly 90% of state legislators experienced threats or attacks between 2021 and 2024, and more than half of locally elected officials, including school board members, experienced threats or attacks from mid-2023 to 2024. And yet, most public servants today have no meaningful access to doxxing protections because the tools are fragmented, the laws are weak, and no one has built the infrastructure to close the gap at scale. That’s unacceptable. It puts the people who serve us at risk and makes the idea of serving in government unappealing to so many others who want to do good. That’s why PSA exists – to help close the gap.
To be clear: data privacy services — no matter how effective they are — are not a silver bullet. The underlying problem — a near-total absence of meaningful federal data privacy legislation and the serious structural gaps in state laws currently on the books — means that even the best data removal services are fighting a system that’s actively working against them, including because data brokers can re-aggregate and resell people’s information faster than it can be removed.
That’s why PSA is also raising national awareness of the nonpartisan policy reforms needed to fix this problem at the root. Our aforementioned report — “The Data-to-Violence Pipeline” — analyzes existing state-level comprehensive consumer privacy laws and recommends four key changes to state privacy regimes to make them stronger: (1) broadening coverage to all public servants; (2) requiring personal data takedowns within 10 days of a request to a data broker or government agency; (3) including private data sources and public records in the scope of protection; and (4) incorporating a broad private right of action to ensure accountability. This approach is essential to better protect the millions of Americans who have chosen to serve their communities and their country. And make no mistake: First Amendment principles and common-sense data privacy protections are not mutually exclusive.
At PSA, we don’t confuse awareness with action. Nor do we admire problems without building actual solutions. The data is out there. The solutions to reduce violence are too. That’s why we’re putting concrete tools in our users’ hands today, while elevating policy reforms to make public service in America safer at scale, including by working to make stronger data protections the new normal nationwide.
If you’re a current or former public servant -– at any level of government and across party lines -– PSA has your back. If you haven’t yet explored the data privacy and range of other tools in the PSA marketplace, we encourage you to do so. And if you’ve never served but know a current or former public servant — a colleague, neighbor, or family member -– share this free Substack post with them so they know they’re eligible for our support.
Check us out at PublicServiceAlliance.com and reach out with questions or feedback at Hello@ThePublicServiceAlliance.com. We’d love to hear from you.
Take good care,
Isa
About PSA:
The Public Service Alliance (PSA) is the first nonpartisan platform built to empower America’s estimated 40 million current and former public servants — across all levels of government and political lines — to better and more affordably protect themselves and their families.
PSA operates three programs: (1) The PSA Marketplace, which provides streamlined access to free, discounted, and subsidized services that increase privacy, security, and professional and personal well-being; (2) The PSA Security Project, which produces original research and amplifies common-sense policy solutions to make public service safer; and (3) PSA Advisory Services, which pair former U.S. Secret Service, FBI, and other security experts with individuals and organizations to help them make better risk-mitigation decisions.
PSA’s work has been featured in the Associated Press, The Washington Post, Wired, and CBS Evening News, among other national media outlets. Learn more at PublicServiceAlliance.com.