Kash Patel, Bryon Noem: Political doxxing surges as digital lives leave powerful exposed
Whether the string of leaks and hacks embarrasses those at their center is hard to say, but it reveals just how little of modern life remains truly private in a permanently networked world, Northeastern experts say.
An Iran-linked hacktivist group recently claimed to have hacked into the private emails of Kash Patel, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posting photos and documents online.
Images of Bryon Noem, the husband of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, circulated online last week and purported to show him engaging in a secret online life of cross-dressing and consorting with fetish models.
And last year, leaks from private Telegram chats among members of Young Republicans groups around the country reportedly revealed some of its members racist and antisemetic rhetoric.
Whether the string of leaks and hacks embarrasses those at their center is hard to say, but it reveals just how little of modern life remains truly private in a permanently networked world, Northeastern experts say.
Personal material can be leveraged by bad actors in ways that enable blackmail, coercion and targeted disinformation campaigns, all of which represent a rapidly evolving form of digital-age warfare, said Ryan Ellis, an associate professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on communication law and policy, infrastructure politics and cybersecurity.
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Apart from emphasizing that the rich and the powerful are just like us, “Things that used to be ephemeral — conversations, locations, fleeting interactions — simply don’t disappear anymore,” he said, of the disappearance of true privacy. “There are records of past behaviors, associations and conversations, both important and trivial, and in some cases they can be discovered and used for leverage.”
So-called “hack-and-leak” campaigns are not new: Foreign adversaries have long sought intelligence on political leaders, Ellis said. But the tactic has evolved to include the public release of that information. The release of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign — including internal communications from her campaign chair John Podesta — demonstrated how stolen information can be strategically deployed to shape political narratives.
Some media companies have also begun piling on. For example, TMZ urged its own readers to submit photos of politicians vacationing during the ongoing partial government shutdown, effectively crowdsourcing potentially embarrassing material for public exposure.
Experts say the shift from quiet intelligence gathering to public exposure also marks a more aggressive phase of digital conflict, one that blurs the line between espionage and political disruption and it could increasingly shape both governance and public trust, Ellis explained.
“The fact that [Patel’s] personal Gmail was hacked, raises a different kind of issue, namely, how we think about public officials who have grown up as digital natives and have long digital histories,” he said. “What responsibility exists for protecting information from their past lives, before they entered positions of power?”
They’re difficult questions, Ellis added, because “it’s a broader social and political challenge.”
At the same time, such regular instances of political doxxing and potentially damaging revelations about public figures no longer seem to elicit the same shock because of just how normalized they’ve become, experts say.
Add the preponderance of deepfakes and misinformation to the mix, and exposure takes on a new dimension: authentic leaks and fabricated content circulate side by side with equal plausibility, said Don Fallis, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion and Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University.
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“The real concern now is that we’re in this world where you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not,” Fallis said.
Around the same time of the Patel hack, a video surfaced of a man who looked like the FBI director, dancing to a Bollywood song.
At first, the video was widely thought to be linked to the email hack, according to media reports. But France 24, a Paris-based international news network, determined that it had been circulating since 2020. Multiple outlets have since confirmed that the dancing man is not Patel.
The video is an example of what experts call a “shallow fake,” or “cheapfake,” which is information that isn’t manipulated with artificial intelligence, but instead consists of authentic material that has been lightly edited or recontextualized to mislead audiences.
“You’re either in the position of seeing a convincing fake and believing it’s real, or you’re in the position of thinking, ‘We know what the technology can do now — so even if this video is genuine, I don’t trust it because it could have been created using machine learning or artificial intelligence,’” Fallis said.
The Patel shallow fake may seem innocent enough, but at the highest levels of government, digital overexposure creates a growing opportunity for personal data to be harvested and weaponized at scale, experts say, setting up for many dilemmas.
“As new generations of leaders emerge, many of whom have lived most of their lives online, we’re going to have to continually grapple with how to handle this reality,” Ellis said.
