dcphonelist: Legalizing Prostitution One Step At A Time July 23
In an entertaining turn of events four Brandeis alums have pitched in and created a searchable interface to Madam Palfrey‘s phone records. If you want to try a number for yourself head on over to dcphonelist.com and once you are bored of that the story in the Hill about the the project is worth a read. Apparently one lobbyist has already been outed through the site but given the difficulty. In case you aren’t familiar with the DC madam case so far I give a brief summary after the break.
Now some people seem to think that reporting on or distributing this information is immoral as the sex lives of politicians should remain private and others find this an unpalatable invasion of privacy. Presumably this is the reason that ABC refused to identify any of Palfrey’s non-politician clients. But this is mind bogglingly hypocritical. I mean jesus christ the men on this list are faced with potentially losing their job or being divorced. Ms. Palfrey is facing prison time. It’s insane to think that prostitution is bad enough to throw Palfrey in jail for it but not bad enough to cause some guys to be embarrassed. Unless the guys calling are on the record as supporting the legalization of prostitution I have no sympathy for their plight.
Every day the government takes away people’s freedom for no other reason than prudish moral disapproval1. It is the people who don’t really believe prostitution (or drug use) is that bad (such as the johns) but stay silent out of ambition or fear of censure who are really guilty here not Madam Palfrey. None of us would defend the person who let an innocent man go to jail rather than reveal he was having an affair and tacitly supporting the criminalization of prostitution is even worse. You don’t even need to admit you have been to a prostitute to argue for it’s legalization. Just like homosexuals working for gay bashing senators these clients deserve to be punished for their hypocrisy if anyone does and more importantly we ought to discourage this sort of hypocritical behavior.
If we really knew the names of everyone who used drugs or visited prostitutes they would become legal within the week. I’m hopeful the loss of obscurity (aka privacy) that everyone complains about will bring us to a point where this sort of hypocritical moralizing is no longer possible.
In case you aren’t familiar with the situation so far Ms. Palfrey ran Pamela Martin and Associates, an exclusive escort business in the Washington DC area for the last 13 years and is now being charged with running a prostitution ring. Of course she contends that her escort service only provided legal services and any sex her escorts might have had with clients wasn’t part of the service her business provided. Since many of her clients were in government, some highly placed like Senator David Vitter and Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias (who has resigned as a result), Ms. Palfrey had the brilliant idea of releasing all of her phone records with the potential benefits of creating pressure to make the case go away or availing herself of a list of high profile individuals who would testify that no sex was involved. Unfortunately for Ms. Palfrey the strategy seems to have been backfiring as the exposed individuals seem to be fessing up or resigning.
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This isn’t to deny there are harms from prostitution or drug use but only that on net there are more harms in banning them then in regulating them. Thus the choice to ban rather than regulate is a choice to hurt people just so you can feel morally righteous. ↩
Hey, Yoni here from dcphonelist.com. Good post; while I don’t necessarily have a strong opinion about legalization/regulation of prostitution I think you make a point most of the media and commentators haven’t even looked at.
While I can’t speak for the other three “Brandeis Boys,” I personally feel that Ms. Palfrey is being held up to a very silly double standard. On the one hand, the government says what she’s doing is illegal and should have no protection morally or legally. On the other hand, everyone seems to expect her to go above and beyond any other business in keeping her phone records away from the public, and many others seem to think she has some sort of moral obligation to protect her alleged madam-client relationship — the same relationship they say should be illegal in the first place. Unless the government is willing to give that relationship the same legal protections they give priests, psychologists, and lawyers, it’s a little silly to expect her to act as if she had the corresponding obligation.
Either you think what Ms. Palfrey did is so bad that she should go to jail for it, in which case you ought to support the outing of her equally criminal clients, or you think what she did doesn’t deserve prison time, in which case you should be protesting for the dismissal of the charges against her, not wasting time complaining about the release of her phone records. You can’t have it both ways.
What’s even worse is that many people seem to think that what dcphonelist.com itself is doing is wrong — even beyond the rightness or wrongness of Ms. Palfrey’s own release of the records. That we’re not doing anything different than what Google Book Search does seems to be lost on people — we’re making public but inaccessible information accessible to all, not making private information public.
Hey, thanks for stopping by to comment.
Anyway I didn’t really say much about this point here but I definitely agree that once the records were public it’s a very good thing to make them easily accessible. Given that OCR and other computer scanning technologies exist the fact that a nice simple interface doesn’t exist on the web wouldn’t really protect anyone’s ‘privacy.’ Rather it would just reserve the power to search and identify Ms. Palfrey’s callers to those with the resources and motivation to do the OCRing and search on their own. But that would be the truly dangerous situation, where the general public doesn’t have the knowledge but potential blackmailers or other insiders can get it and threaten exposure.
While it’s not directly relevant to this case this is my biggest fear regarding much of the privacy legislation that people are proposing. For millennia most humans lived in small communities where everyone knew each other’s misdeeds so it will hardly be the end of the world if everyone loses their obscurity and we all know about each other’s peccadilloes. What does worry me, however, is the possibility that the law will create an unequal system that in effect only protects the privacy of certain social classes or prevents the general public from using this information while still leaving it available to individuals who could nefariously profit from knowledge of others embarrassing incidents.