With the recent release of reams of phone records from a woman accused of running a Washington prostitution ring, bloggers and others online have taken up the cause of hunting for links to elected officials and other prominent people.
Titillated by the prospect of uncovering another name like that of Senator David Vitter, the Louisiana Republican who admitted his number was on Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s escort-service phone list, bloggers, many of them liberal, are scouring the records and publishing what they find.
”Some top-level Republicans are making statements about lifestyles and family values,” said Lori Price, editor of the liberal Citizens for Legitimate Government website, explaining her motivation. ”We want to see if they are, in fact, living their lives based on what they are preaching and forcing us to comply with. We see some hypocrisy.”
So far, no names matching the caliber of Vitter’s have been uncovered, although blogger David Corn, the Washington editor of the liberal weekly the Nation, found a phone number with a Senate prefix from 1999. And the Chicago Tribune reported on one of its blogs earlier this week that the records show a call from the escort service to the newspaper’s national desk in Chicago in 2001.
Other websites are casting a wider net than just public officials.
The blog Hot Potato Mash is collecting and publishing a list of names and numbers, including the results of calls made to the phone numbers in Palfrey’s files. So far the search has uncovered numbers for hotels, businesses and homes. Several numbers were out of service or appeared to have been reassigned over the years to new phone customers.
Alan Breslauer, a Los Angeles man who runs Hot Potato Mash, said most people he has contacted by phone have been friendly, and some are appreciative when he tells them their phone numbers are linked to the scandal.
”It is public record. It is unfortunate. I think these people are going to have to change their numbers, no matter what,” he said. ”I think the information is important enough that we have to go through it and find out.”
Records
Palfrey published the records dating between 1994 and 2006 on her own website after a federal judge on July 5 lifted a restraining order that prevented her from releasing the files. Palfrey, who faces criminal racketeering charges, wants to identify former clients to get them to support her claim that her escort service, Pamela Martin and Associates, did not involve prostitution but was a legitimate business offering sexual fantasies.
The records contain the numbers called by Palfrey’s service, usually to confirm escort arrangements with a client.
She initially gave some of the records to ABC News, which linked her escort service to Randall Tobias, a top State Department official who subsequently resigned. After the restraining order was lifted, Palfrey’s lawyer distributed about 50 CD-ROMs with scanned images of the files to bloggers and news organisations.
Vitter released a statement on Monday saying he had committed a ”very serious sin” in the past, but did not acknowledge using the escort service. The phone records show five calls were made by Palfrey’s service to Vitter while he was in the House of Representatives, including two while votes were under way.
Palfrey’s lawyer, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said on Thursday that he already has been contacted by people who have identified names connected to the phone numbers, including one woman who said her ex-boyfriend was among them. He plans to have an investigator contact those who were named.
”I am five or six witnesses up from where I was a week ago,” Sibley said.
Search for number
For those trying to determine if a particular number is on Palfrey’s list, one website called DCphonelist.com claims to allow a user to enter a phone number in a search field to see if it is on the list. In an email to The Associated Press, the site’s organisers would not identify themselves but said they were three tech guys from Boston and were ”just some citizen journalists providing a public service”.
The site has some self-acknowledged shortcomings, however, such as its reliance on optical character-recognition technology to pull numbers from the phone files, which are scanned copies of printed phone records. The site urges users to double-check the accuracy of the numbers. However, it is one of the few ways to search the data rather than sifting through hundreds of pages of records.
Price, who edits the Citizens for Legitimate Government website from her home in Bristol, Connecticut, said she has several people, including other bloggers, assisting her in searching the files.
They are conducting their probe through Google and reverse phone-directory searches. She said they will check any information they find, and will also publish the names of Democrats if they find any. — Sapa-AP