David Calvert / Nevada Independent via AP
Assemblywoman Rochelle Nguyen on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020, during the fifth day of the 32nd special session of the Legislature in Carson City. Nguyen is a sponsor of an anti-doxxing bill.
Tuesday, April 13, 2021 | 2 a.m.
CARSON CITY — Heather Korbulic was driven out of her job as the head of Nevada’s unemployment agency last June because of threats to her personal safety.
Korbulic had been doxxed, a term for an organized campaign of harassment and intimidation in which personal information is shared and reshared online, circulating without the victim’s permission.
Assembly Bill 296, sponsored by Assemblywoman Rochelle Nguyen, D-Las Vegas, would ban this practice and allow for victims to pursue civil penalties against the perpetrators.
“People were personally attacking those individuals on social media, sending people to their house, coming outside their house,” Nguyen said. “They were not public officials, they were not doing anything. They were just trying to live their lives and do their jobs.”
Korbulic, then the interim director of the state Department of Unemployment, Training and Rehabilitation, received online threats to her physical safety and saw her personal information shared online in the wake of delays in jobless benefits at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. It was the product of a historic 25.3% unemployment rate from business closures.
Assemblyman Jim Wheeler, R-Minden, said in a hearing that he previously had his address published online by extremist groups, though ultimately there was no incident.
“Thank God for the Douglas County Sheriff and our Legislative Police here that nothing happened with my grandkids in the house that weekend. I get it, let’s put it that way,” Wheeler said.
The bill passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee unanimously on Friday. It has not received any significant opposition.
The bill originally would have allowed for criminal charges to be brought against doxxers, though Nguyen amended that provision out of the bill out of concerns over the language. She said in the bill’s first hearing that it walked a fine line with “First Amendment concerns.”
“Getting the language (right) is a priority for, I think, everyone, to make sure that it isn’t manipulated or abused or used in a way that it was never intended to be,” she said.
Legislators from Oregon and West Virginia have also discussed anti-doxxing legislation this year.
There is no set federal law explicitly for doxxing, though many of the ramifications of doxxing, such as stalking and harassment, are covered by federal law.
Under the Nevada bill, a doxxing victim can bring a civil action forward if a person shares their personal information online with the intent to aid criminal offenses ranging from death to harassment.
Nguyen said the language is “narrowly tailored to those people that are inciting violence or mental anguish.”
Jolie Brislin, the Nevada regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a hearing on the bill earlier this month that the prevalence of online harassment is high.
“We know that hate and extremism are on the rise, and digital spaces are not immune,” she said.
According to an ADL study released this year, 27% of respondents had experienced online harassment. When broken down to minority groups, the numbers increase: 64% of LGBTQ respondents and 36% of Jewish respondents said they had experienced harassment.
Asian-Americans, a group which has seen a rise in racist incidents over the past year, reported that 17% had experienced online harassment, a rise from 11% the year before.
