Encouraging Harassment?

Encouraging Harassment?

Professor Volokh points to this site that provides a way to plot the location and names of people that contributed money to California Proposition 8, which defined marriage as "one man, one woman." Professor Volokh well understands the danger of taking publicly available election contribution information, and combining it with available mapping software:

I suspect this sort of technology may well make people much more reluctant to donate money to (or against) controversial propositions -- and may lead people to rethink whether the government should indeed mandate disclosure of such contributions, especially small contributions. In any case, I thought I'd note this.

I agree with Professor Volokh that there shouldn't be any laws against it--but it is pretty clear that the purpose of such efforts is to encourage at least economic retaliation against campaign contributors. There is a very real risk that some homosexual activists are going to use this information to engage in acts of vandalism, harassment, and violent crimes against Proposition 8 supporters. Anyone who puts together such a website and claims that this did not occur to them is obviously a liar.

I am really, really troubled by sites like this. We could lower ourselves to the level of homosexual activists, I suppose, by putting together a similar mash-up of those who contributed to the No on 8 campaign--and risk that some unhinged sorts might decide to use such a site to identify and attack homosexuals. That would not be right--but then again, it might be the only way to get the message across of how dangerous it is to do this sort of data extraction and mapping.