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Hello and welcome to Behind the News.

My name is Doug Inwood.

Three guests and two segments today.

First, Maxine Dugan and Tara Burns will talk to us about how the surveillance state is oppressing sex workers and using them for practice and how to oppress the rest of us.

And then David Broder will talk about fascism, neo-fascism, and post-fascism in Italy.

First, surveillance.

A couple of weeks ago, the Erotic Service Provider Legal Education Research Project, the Esplor Project, published a report how the war on sex work is stripping your privacy rights.

It's an examination based largely on public records requests from California law enforcement agencies of how extensive snooping on sex workers is not only oppressing them, but offering cops practice and how to spy on the rest of us.

We're joined by two of the authors of the report, Tara Burns and Maxine Dugan.

Tara Burns is research director for a coyote road island and a sex worker for almost three decades.

Maxine Dugan is president of the Esplor Project and a sex worker of 30 plus years.

She says she plans to continue to work for another 30 plus more.

The first voice you'll hear other than mine is Maxine Dugan's.

Maxine, you've been doing this sort of work since 2005, right? Could you describe some of the techniques that you used to do this research?

Yeah, I've been doing public records research on what public agencies are doing around prostitution.

So in 2005, I started asking San Francisco district attorneys, San Francisco police departments for copies of all their MOUs, your memorandums, the vendor findings that they had with nonprofits.

Because we knew they had a nonprofit that was doing the shame based sex negative diversion program for people arrested for prostitution.

And we wanted to see, because it was a nonprofit providing those services through the district attorney's office, we wanted to see what that contract looked like.

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