Expanding Municipal Services

On Wednesday, the City of Frederick [Maryland] ended a long-running lawsuit by releasing evidence from a seven-month police investigation into [a] once-thriving prostitution business, including photographs, financial ledgers, police surveillance tapes and 8,500 pages of documents, mainly e-mail messages from the lovelorn and lusty.

The city is now selling copies of the client list to the public for $20 apiece. Another 20 bucks gets you a "smutty homemade video" seized by the police (which the city is also showing in private screenings).

Read all about it here and here.

Comments

[Warren]

"Not all these electrons are intercepted by the screen -- in fact, only a few are."

Uhmmm no. That's just wrong. If that were so, then CRTs would be a strong beta ray source and sitting in front of one would cause all sorts of radiation poisoning (including genetic damage).

Undoubtedly what's being intercepted are the radio waves that radiate from all electronic devices. CRTs draw a fair amount of power so it isn't surprising that their EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference, usually considered pollution to the spectrum) can be picked up from the next room or even across the street.

[Jason Ligon]

Everybody knows that gamma rays are the only ones that give you super powers, anyway. If photons are safer, too, who are we to complain ?

[Whacky]

Pretty soon City Hall will have to start hiring jizz moppers.

[Douglas Fletcher]

"How come shit like this can't happen in Rockville?"

Strange you should mention that, but I once met a guy who grew up in Lincoln Park, the old black community along Stonestreet, who wrote a screenplay about a little tradition they had back when he was a kid. Apparently it wasn't unusual that when a boy there was of age, his uncle or grandpa or whoever would take him up to Frederick to a whorehouse, to initiate him into the game, so to speak. Why they had to go all the way to Frederick I don't understand, except that Rockville was a pretty small town until about 40 years ago, and Frederick is about as close as DC is from there.

It's pretty hard to imagine much whorehouse action going on in Montgomery County, though I do remember a couple of busts they had in Gaithersburg a few years back.

[Jeff Smith]

Happy Thursday to all.

A couple of remarks:

1) Prostitution (of the outcall variety) is
legal in Canada, and seems to cause little
in the way of ill effects. Why Americans
are so hung up about it is beyond me. Of
course, I don't get the tempest about Janet
Jackson's boob either. Where is Mencken
when we need him?

2) Montgomery County (home to NIH) shows what
happens when you concentrate too many public
health busybodies and would-be stalinists
in one place.

Jeff

[JimInNoVA]

See? This is why you go downtown for your hookers. The ones on the Hill know how to avoid getting caught.

You really havn't lived until you've seen a hooker with an anti-tempest filter on her beeper screen.

[Mo]

Pardon my ignorance, but what's an "anti-tempest filter on her beeper screen"?

[Fur Better or Worse]

I'll never look at a furby the same way again.

How come shit like this can't happen in Rockville?

[JimInNoVA]

A tempest device can read a computer monitor through a wall. Rumors abound that there is a better model that can do it from across the street. Anti-tempest filtering prevents it from working, and has been built into most intelligence agency computers for the last 5-6 years. All it does is layer some harmless white noise electormagnetic radiation over the stuff already being put out by the monitor.

I'm not sure if LCD's and plasmas can be read by a tempest, or if it's just CRT's. I think it was a side effect of CRT's.

[isildur]

It's just CRTs. CRTs operate by firing electrons from a 'gun' at the back of the vacuum tube at the interior surface of the screen. Not all these electrons are intercepted by the screen -- in fact, only a few are. The rest of them fire out into you, the room, the next room, and so forth. Tempest technology can intercept those stray electrons and reconstruct what image they were attempting to display when they broke free of their vacuum-tube shackles.

[MALAK]

So the Maryland government is now in the porn biz? Will they ship internationally? In a plain brown wrapper? Will the state web site have links to Hustler, Swank, et. al? Just asking.