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The makers of the watch claim it gives peace of mind to parents

Yeah, because that's the most important thing in bringing up children, right?

It's called trust, parents. One evil detail about trust is that knowing is the opposite of trust. By replacing trust with knowledge, you're removing it. So if you don't trust your kids, you have to check on their every move. If you don't trust the people, you have to have surveilance everywhere. It really is the same mindset that's driving both of these developments of society.

And yes, this includes the kidnapping scenario. What, exactly, do you gain by a real-time alert that your kid has been kidnapped? It's not like it would prevent it.

Now the numbers. Yes, you read stuff like this:

Every 40 seconds in the United States, a child is reported missing or abducted.

(source)

Note the words "is reported missing". If you dig into the numbers a little deeper, you find that:

152,265 [of 876,213] of the persons reported missing in 2000 were categorized as either endangered or involuntary.

(source)

That's 17% of the reported cases where something serious is actually going on. But that's just the surface. Actual crime statistics show a better picture:

In 1999, only 115 children were abducted by strangers with the intent to keep, kill or hold them for ransom.

(source)

Now that's a very different figure (almost the same year, though). It does exclude sexual abuse, which accounts for a fair share and is certainly almost as frightening to a parent than a murder. However:

"Family kidnapping" accounts for nearly 50% of all child kidnappings.

(same source)

Now we're getting somewhere. Look, in the "reported missing" as well as in the "involuntary" cases above, one very common case is fully included, as if it were equal to a kidnap-rape-and-kill case: That of one parent in a divorce taking the child without the other parent's knowledge or consent. Yepp, legally that's a kidnapping.

So if you throw enough stuff together under the same label, you can get big enough numbers to frighten parents senseless with. Which you can then use to sell them stuff, pass new laws or whatever it is that was your original intend.

Look at a map and discover that they live near parks, schools, bus stops, etc., and just look at how many are around Disneyland .

You can bet that these guys just didn't take a leak in public to get their "jacket".

Got it now?

Oh, one might look and see how many other states are doing what CA is doing and save himself some effort.

That is why sensible states (like Nevada) have a tier system base on risk.

Our system is that low risk offender's info is shared with the authorities only, medium risk is shared with youth orgs, schools, etc (places where children are, basically) and high risk is shared with the community.

http://www.klaaskids.org/st-nev.htm

Course you'd need to make sure the signal's undetectable by the enemy, otherwise they could just sit there with a RFID sensor and know exactly where you are at all times.

This would be great for journalist as well. Remember that journalist for the Wall Street Journal that was kidnapped and killed?

I think all these people with the tinfoil hats are paranoid. If the gov't wants to find you it can and will, remember the movie Enemy of the State with Will Smith? The gov't already has satelites that can see a dime from space, but the real question is do the really want to find you? Like these Amber Alerts, they could publish your description, license plate and car model on every electronic billboard & radio station in the country and find you within hours, the point is why do you believe you're so freakin' special that they really want to bother finding you?

I think every criminal should be able to do their time and then get on with life, under the fair assumption that the due has been paid. This is pretty much the whole point of a legal system with prisons, right?

While most of the time I tend to agree with the liberal pro-privacy posts we see on Slashdot, I think this is one case where there's justification for privacy invasion. It's restricted only to those who have committed the crime (a common complaint here is that most recent privacy invasions happen to everyone, including the by-and-large innocent public, and thus violate presumption of innocence), and it's got a built-in expiry for the truly reformed.

I'm not sure what the requisites are for the program, but you should check out the Abmer Plan. It's a national alert system using highway signs, media announcements, and I believe even AOL is issueing alerts for opted in members. It's designed for rapid announcements in the first hours and days of a kidnapping, but it might be helpful, especially if you get information on where she might be.

Elizabeth Smart's family is getting more coverage for two reasons:
1) The State of Utah activated their "Amber Alert" system (here's some information about that: Amber Alert). This is a system that involves the news media and requires them to interrupt all broadcasts with information about the missing child. The national media picked up on it.
2) The Smart family hired a PR firm to get the word out.

That is why there is so much coverage of the event.

One should be concerned whenever ANY child goes missing, anywhere in the country of any ethnicity or social background. Alert systems like the "Amber Alert" should be mandatory.