In June 2025, Vance Boelter drove to the homes of elected Minnesota officials and killed two of them.
FBI investigators found a notebook in his car. It listed 11 data broker sites, annotated by hand, noting which services were free and how much personal data each one returned. Next to Rep. Melissa Hortman's name was her home address, drawn from publicly available records. His notes included one observation, "most property records in America are public."
Reported by The Record from Recorded Future News.
He was right. They are.
The mechanism Boelter used to locate those politicians draws from the same infrastructure that documents every small business owner, sole proprietor, and home-based operator in the country. Business filings, property records, people-search aggregators, domain registration histories, state licensing databases. Each feeds the same system.
These politicians had institutional resources and security details. None of it changed the fact that their residential addresses were accessible to anyone with a browser and 10 minutes.
A small business owner has none of those buffers.
Removing that address from those systems is not a single opt-out request. The exposure runs across dozens of overlapping data layers, and pulling one thread without a sequenced architecture often surfaces additional records rather than suppressing them.
What does that map resolve to when someone searches your name?
RuleDraft