Private information can be used to publicly ruin anyone at any given time. What age do you think we live in? The Stone Age? Given the correct motivation someone could at any time find out something about your life even if you didn't want them to. That's the problem with the internet, it provides the ability to make the world smaller in a sense that you can easily communicate and pass on information but that is also one of it's problems of being connected. Don't try to tie partisan information to this, no one thrust this guy into the spotlight, he went up and talked to Barack Obama.