When Judges Became Easy to Find
Judges are increasingly targeted at home as personal data becomes easy to find online. How digital exposure has reshaped risk for public officials.
By C.K. Redlinger
When I was a cop in the 1990s, protecting your identity was remarkably simple. If you were a judge, a public official, or someone who didn’t want to be found, you unlisted your home phone number. You kept your address out of the phone book. That was often enough. It wasn’t foolproof, but it created a buffer.
Later in that same decade, when I was working homicide, finding someone required real effort. If we needed to locate a person, we didn’t open a browser. We worked systems – NCIC, jail records, court filings, DMV data, old phone books. We relied on interagency cooperation and institutional access. Even then, it took intent, authority, and patience.
The barrier mattered.
That barrier has mostly disappeared today.
The recent shooting of the Indiana judge and his wife, who both survived, appears more understandable when viewed from that perspective. This was an intentional act with a clear objective. The escalating number of direct threats against judges at their homes has been a growing concern for a considerable time.
That detail matters.
The attack wasn’t in a courthouse or a public place. It happened at a private residence – chosen deliberately. A place assumed to be removed from public exposure. A place that once would have been difficult to identify without access, time, and resources.
That kind of targeting rarely begins with physical surveillance.
Over the past several years, violence directed at judges and public officials has followed a familiar arc. In Minnesota, reporting showed how publicly available information was used to identify and locate political figures before attacks occurred. Years earlier, in New Jersey, a federal judge’s home was located by an attacker who went on to kill her teenage son and critically injure her husband.
Different individuals. Different motivations. The same vulnerability.
We still tend to imagine surveillance as something physical – someone watching a house, following a routine, casing a location. That’s how it worked when I wore a badge. But modern targeting has shifted upstream. Today, the most consequential surveillance often happens quietly, remotely, and long before anyone is seen.
Public records. Archived addresses. Old phone numbers. Family associations. Information scattered across systems that were never designed to be connected – yet now are. Individually, these fragments feel harmless. Taken together, they form a targeting package.
For judges and others in high-risk public service, this has fundamentally changed what exposure looks like. Risk no longer begins at the courthouse steps or in a parking lot. It often starts months earlier, behind a screen, assembled piece by piece from data that was never intended to be dangerous.
Legislation like Daniel’s Law exists because this shift is now impossible to ignore. Limiting the public disclosure of judges’ personal information is meaningful. It reflects an understanding that visibility itself can create risk.
But it also exposes a hard truth.
These protections largely operate inside official systems. They don’t reach information that has already been copied, resold, or replicated across the data broker ecosystem. They don’t erase legacy records that persist long after policies change. And they don’t slow the speed at which personal information spreads once it escapes into the wider data environment.
That gap has been understood for some time, but addressing it would require changes well beyond any single law or agency.
When protections cover only part of where our information lives, it’s easy to feel safer than we actually are. The Indiana case shouldn’t provoke panic. It should provoke clarity. The world familiar to many judges, and to many of us, from the 1990s has vanished. The buffers that once shielded people in public roles has been engineered out of the system.
Violence targeting judges today is seldom random or unpredictable. The cause is more often digital reconnaissance, a discreet and systematic effort, made possible by the widespread availability and ongoing trade of personal information.
When that reconnaissance occurs largely outside official systems, protections designed to safeguard judges inevitably stop short of where risk is actually formed.
Sources:
1. Latest reporting on the Indiana judge shooting
Associated Press — ongoing investigation and condition of victims
https://apnews.com/article/a3b1d7eaaf7c47590b2cb63ea7b3fb69
2. Wider context in news reporting (Washington Post coverage)
Washington Post — Indiana judge and his wife shot at home, broader concerns raised
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/01/20/judge-steve-meyer-indiana/
3. Reporting on threats and trends involving judges (Salas and others)
The Guardian — U.S. judge Esther Salas discusses rising threats against jurists
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/01/us-judge-esther-salas-threats
4. Overview of Daniel’s Law and its context
Electronic Privacy Information Center summary of Daniel’s Law and data brokers
https://epic.org/judge-upholds-new-jersey-law-protecting-public-officials-privacy-and-security/
5. Background on data broker risks and public safety
EPIC — Data Broker Harms to Public Officials (PDF overview of how data brokers build dossiers that can create safety risks)
https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Data-Broker-Harms-to-Public-Officials-One-Pager.pdf
6. Minnesota case demonstrating how public data was used in targeting officials
Politico — alleged shooter used online sources to find lawmakers’ addresses
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/16/alleged-shooter-found-minnesota-lawmakers-addresses-online-court-docs-say-00409260
C.K. Redlinger is a Senior Privacy and Intelligence Advisor at 360 Privacy. He partners with executives and organizations to identify how personal data is exposed, exploited, and operationalized in today’s evolving threat landscape. With four decades of experience across the U.S. Marine Corps, law enforcement, overseas government programs, and executive-level corporate security, he brings a unique, multidisciplinary perspective to privacy challenges.
