Daniel Anderl had turned 20 the week before. On a Sunday evening in July, the doorbell rang at his family's home in New Jersey, and Daniel went to answer it.
The man standing there was dressed as a delivery driver. He was not one. He had come for Daniel's mother, a federal judge, and he had found their home address on the internet and watched the house for days before he rang that bell.
Daniel took the first bullet in the chest, shielding his parents. His father was shot three times and survived. His mother, Judge Esther Salas, was in the basement and came upstairs to find her only child dying in the doorway.
I am going to say the next part carefully, because it is the reason I am writing this instead of somebody else.
I know what the rest of Judge Salas's life looks like. Not because I have read about it. Because I am living the same one. My son Alex was 14 when he was murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She said something after Daniel's death that I have never been able to shake: I am moving forward, I am not moving on. That is the sentence. That is exactly it.
Here is what I need every officer reading this to understand. That address was not obtained through some sophisticated breach. It was compiled, packaged, and made available the way data brokers make everything available.
These companies build dossiers on Americans and sell them. Home address. Phone numbers. The names of your relatives. Property records. Location data. They do it legally, continuously, and at a price anyone with a grudge can afford. As the Electronic Privacy Information Center puts it, selling this information hands violent people a tool to locate and track public officials.
And you are on that list. Not as a hypothetical. New Jersey's response to Daniel's murder, the law they named after him, covers judges and prosecutors and law enforcement officers, because everyone involved understood immediately that the same file exists on the deputy who testifies in the same courthouse.
Last week in this newsletter I argued that the audit log is your friend, that a system tracking your queries is what lets your agency keep the tool. I still believe that. But there is a mirror image to that argument, and it is this: there is an enormous amount of data being collected and sold about you, and none of it is audited, none of it is governed, and nobody in your chain of command is accountable for it. The data you touch at work is watched closely. The data being sold about you at home is watched by no one.
Earlier this year, Colorado recorded what is believed to be the first conviction under its anti-doxxing law. A woman livestreamed outside a Denver police facility, asked her viewers to find a police commander's home address, and then repeated that address publicly once someone did. The result was extra patrols around that officer's house and additional security for his family.
Notice what actually happened there. The crime was the broadcast. But the vulnerability existed long before she went live. She did not have to break anything. She only had to ask, because the information was already sitting there waiting to be found.
That is the distinction I want to draw, and I think it is the one the profession keeps missing. The risk does not begin when your address is posted. The risk begins when your address is available to be posted.
Agencies are in a workforce crisis, and everyone in this field is tired of hearing about recruiting. But the retention half of that crisis has a piece almost nobody is naming out loud.
An officer who believes their family is exposed makes different decisions. They think about the job differently at 2 a.m. They think about it differently when their spouse asks whether the car in the street has been there before. Analysts working on this issue now describe digital exposure as a parallel category of risk, one that follows officers home, reaches their families, and shows up later as a resignation letter.
Departments spend enormous money on vests and training and none on the thing that led a man to a specific front door in New Jersey. Your vest is rated for a threat you can see coming, on a shift, in uniform. It does nothing at 8 p.m. on a Sunday when the bell rings and someone you have never met already knows your address, your spouse's name, and which bedroom is your daughter's. If a chief will buy body armor to protect an officer at work, that chief should be able to explain what the agency does to keep that officer's home address off a broker site. Right now most cannot, because nobody has ever asked them the question.
The encouraging part is that this is a solvable problem, and 2026 has given you more tools than you had a year ago.
The law is moving. 17 states now have standalone anti-doxxing statutes. Several states have Daniel's Law style protections that let officers and their families demand removal of home addresses and phone numbers. More bills are moving through legislatures right now, including in Indiana.
California opened a real door this month. Under the state's Delete Act, a single verified request through the state's deletion platform now reaches every registered data broker, and as of August 1 those brokers are required to process it. One request instead of fifty. If you live or lived in California, that is the highest value hour you will spend all year.
Removal is administrative, not adversarial. This is the part officers get wrong most often. Opting out of broker sites is a paperwork process supported by privacy law. You do not need a lawyer and you are not picking a fight. You do have to repeat it, because the pipelines refill you every six to twelve months.
None of this is a guarantee. Anyone who promises you a clean sweep is selling something. But every listing you remove is one less path to your front door, and the entire point of proactive work is that you do it before you need it, not after.
Search your own name the way a stranger would. Not a vanity search. Open a browser you are not signed into and look for yourself the way someone with a grudge would look for you. Note every site showing your address, your relatives, or your phone number. That list is your actual exposure, and most officers have never once looked at it. Then start the opt-outs, check whether your state has a Daniel's Law style protection you are eligible for, and ask your agency one question at the next briefing: what do we do, as a department, about officers' personal data being sold online? If the answer is nothing, you have just identified the cheapest officer safety upgrade available to your agency.
Judge Salas has spent every day since July 2020 making sure her son's death meant something. I have spent every day since February 2018 doing the same for mine. Neither of us got a choice about joining this club. You do get a choice about the front door. Please go look.
For Alex. And for all of them.
Max Schachter
Per our No Notoriety commitment, the man who killed Daniel Anderl is not named. Daniel is. Learn more about school safety at schoolsafetydashboard.org.