RICHARDSON, Texas – Blogging is often referred to as an empowering practice in a democratic society, an outlet for “citizen journalists” to speak about news that often gets passed over by mainstream media.

I’m all for people talking about stories outside the mainstream. I think it’s impossible for any major media organization to effectively cover everything for all people.

But sometimes, too much information falls into the laps of some irresponsible people and the result isn’t journalism, but simple harassment posing as investigative reporting.

On July 5, 2007, a federal judge ruled it was okay for the so-called D.C. Madam, Deborah Palfrey of Pamela Martin & Associates, to release her business phone records. Palfrey released the records to ABC News, who pored over the records and matched some of the numbers to their owners who had assumedly and allegedly been soliciting prostitutes through Palfrey. The result? One U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Randall L. Tobias, submitted his resignation following the revelation.

But then things got interesting.

On or about July 7, Palfrey released her phone records on her website.

Palfrey’s reasoning, according to her website, for releasing the full, unedited phone list was that she believed the disk that contained 13 years’ worth of telephone records had been hacked and she did not want the data falsified. She goes on to state that she and her attorney fear that if the data were falsified “considerable damage can and will be done to the reputations of individual [sic] and entities with no connection to the business.”

The ironic thing is, thanks to a few overzealous bloggers, that’s exactly what happened anyway.

Sharks would faint if they saw the feeding frenzy that followed Palfrey’s release of the Pamela Martin phone records. On the website Fark.com, a news aggregator and forum famous for its funny and often offensive headlines and unusual regular visitors, the locals went crazy.

The phone records were downloaded from Palfrey’s website, file sharing servers were set up almost immediately and people began converting the files into database-readable formats. Phone numbers were called, and names were posted to the Fark forums, which log thousands of unique hits a day.

Citizens for Legitimate Government, a left-leaning blog, also downloaded the files and began posting numbers to the web.

And here’s where it gets ugly.

These phone records go back as far 1994, prior to the days when your cell number was portable. People also change residences, thus changing their landline numbers.

That didn’t stop folks from calling those numbers and posting the results to the Internet.

So what happened? A lot of folks who might never have called an escort service in their lives received anonymous phone calls from folks who were very curious about their sexual proclivities.

On the Citizens for Legitimate Government site, there is a full list of phone records from December 2004 to August 2006, with the names of the person or business appended to the numbers called by the bloggers.

That’s just irresponsible and I hardly think cold-calling private phone numbers qualifies as journalism. I know I wouldn’t be happy if a Google search on my name turned up a hit for a story about the D.C. Madam, but that’s exactly what could happen to these people.

This scenario illustrates the darker side of “citizen journalism.” ABC didn’t post every name they found in the list they were given, they only posted those for public figures, people ABC felt the public had a right to know about.

Random bloggers do not show that kind of restraint. They don’t have to, because they are not part of any actual media organization. They basically have free reign to be irresponsible because they have no one to answer to.

For all the digging and harassment that went on in relation to this story, nothing concrete or even valuable has been learned that we wouldn’t have learned anyway. Senator David Vitter (R-La.) apologized for his connection to the scandal. Vitter publicly admitted his number was on the list before any accusations arose. No other elected officials have been found on the list.

But a lot of private individuals were harassed because a bunch of bloggers wanted to play Woodward and Bernstein. This should be a cautionary tale for those who want blogging to be taken seriously. If you want respect, practice restraint.