A guy by the name of Jason Fortuny put up a provocative woman's picture on Cragslist's risque personals section and pretended to want to play slave to someone else's master to see what kind of response he could get. Within 24 hours he got "178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress." Fortuny then took the emails, which included real names, phone numbers, and email addresses (with employer's names) and put them on another side (that doesn't appear to be working at the moment).

This brought an emphatic condemnation from Wired's Ryan Singel:

These aren't prominent people, there weren't breaking the law and there's no news value in posting their identifying information. There'd hardly be any value in posting the stuff even with the information removed and faces blurred on the photos, but there might be some -- if only as a warning to naive people.

And I hope Fortuny does get sued.

At first I thought of this "prank" as frat boy boorishness, but its worse than that.

It's sociopathic.

My sympathies to the guys who responded and take note -- any of you out there -- anything you divulge over email can come back to haunt you, even when divulging that information is illegal.

Then, in response to various comments supportive of Fortuny's actions, he wrote:

As Fortuny shows, it may be practically so, but that lack of knowledge does not obviate these persons' legal rights.

While I'm not a big fan of guys into dominating women (it's rather retrograde for my taste), the only truly pathetic individuals involved in this whole debacle are Fortuny and his supporters who get off on their own righteousness.

This was not like a legal sting.

None of these people are violating any law.

No journalist would ever pull a stunt like this, because exposing the private lives of private persons, in absence of any justifiable public interest, is both unethical and a clear violation of the law.

If Fortuny wanted to show the world that there's a lot of guys willing to, not so smartly, email pictures of their members to a woman who wants to be dominated, Fortuny could have easily obfuscated phone numbers, email addresses and identifying pictures.

That wasn't his point.

The point of the whole 'prank' was to shame and humiliate other people and to let Fortuny and his LiveJournal hangers-on feel intellectually and morally superior -- e.g. the victims are 'perverts' who aren't smart enough to know how use the internet anonymously.

I won't speak to Fortuny's motives, which appear to be as banal and narcissistic as Singel suggests. Nor will I speak on the legality of Fortuny's actions, as I will let the state of Washington figure that out. And, to be honest, I'm not that concerned with the behavior of those targetted except to the extent that they are married. Abstractly, what interests me in this is Singel's repetition that what's important here is that the emailers were not breaking any laws and his suggestion that one type of legal behavior is just as valid as another.

One of the tenets of libertarianism and social liberalism in general is that liberty is not license. It is not right to pass laws against certain behavior simply because you don't find them acceptable. And just because somebody can do something doesn't mean that they should or should.

The problem with this idea, as attractive as it is, is that it quickly breaks down when things do become decriminialized. When facing social consequences for one's actions, "I wasn't breaking any laws" becomes an oft-used defense. Largely, the same people that want to de-criminalize various activity are the quickest to denounce judgmentalism from a purely moralistic standpoint.

Which is exactly the opposite of the way it should be. Social libertarianism requires more, not less, judgmentalism. For libertarianism to sustain, it requires not only that man regulate his own behavior, but also regulate the behavior of others by whatever the law permits.

In some ways the most disappointing aspect of this (aside from the possible illegality of it) whole this is that it was thought up by a self-proclaimed provocateur. This is the sort of thing that social conservatives ought to be doing. The quickest way to shut down a new porn store is with a camera, access to DMV records, and smart press. Once people start hearing about their actions being relaid to their spouses or even parents, few would risk their comfort by frequenting it.

I believe firmly that it is the government's responsibility to protect our privacy from the government, but protecting our privacy, in public places, is nowhere in the contract. People that frequent the merchants of immorality depend not only on freedom from the law, but freedom from consequence. It's not society's job to preserve immoral behavior through the lies and deceptions of the actors.