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Slashback: Summer, Sail, Sex Offenders
A new definition for optimism. Rei writes "According to a weblog entry from the Planetary Society, it appears that Cosmos 1 - the world's first controlled solar-sail spacecraft - has been found. The data is still tentative, but they have detected evidence of the spacecraft's signal in multiple tracking stations. There is a chance that it is in the wrong orbit, but it appears to be up there. This is after it was reported that the Volna rocket that launched it lost an engine after 83 seconds, and many had assumed that the craft was lost."
The power of the tag can only grow with time. An Anonymous reader writes "Saw your coverage of YubNub - I've been playing with a similar tool for a while that might interest your readers. It's called Ambedo and works in a way that you can tag search engines or bookmarks with a bookmarklet (you can also enter them manually if you want to). These are then added to you own tag directory. You then access these tags by typing them in a search box -- but all the matching is done client-side in javascript. It also has nice features like matching IP addresses, domain names, FedEx packages, calculator in the search box and so on."
If you like it so much, why don'tcha marry it? Mad Merlin writes "Groklaw has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google with regards to their Summer of Code program (as previously covered here). When asked why Google is doing the SoC program, Chris responds, 'It is simple: We love open source. A great number of Googlers have and are donating their 20% time to the open source efforts that we're doing.'"
Just kidding! scotty777 writes "Japan plans to give up its bid to have the world's first nuclear fusion reactor built in Aomori Prefecture. Japan Today reports the government decision, which means that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) site decision can be made. Japan Times reports that the government announced the decision by saying 'it plans to back down [from the Aomori site proposal] if the European Union stands firm on bringing the project to Cadarache, in southern France.'"
Surely this won't cause any controversy. davenaffis writes "Here's a little site I developed that uses Google Maps to map sex offenders. Only Washington, D.C. data is available right now, but I'll be adding more states soon."
Being able to plot the home locations of sex offenders on a map, as if they were tire-fitting chains or restaurants, is one step too far for me. I can see the logical extension from the things the Chicago Crime maps were achieving, but its really data that shouldn't be made accessible in such a contextless and simple manner. There could be people on the list for any number of reasons (not just the most serious offences..) who suffer greatly due to a 'Find your local sex offender' site.
I wouldn't be surprised if google maps chose to pull their data from being used by this site in such a way, it certainly wouldn't look good if anything unsavoury occurred. I'm all for cool and nifty uses of google maps, but this just doesn't seem tasteful.
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The culture wars may turn literal.
Imagine this:
People from conservative websites search liberal websites for anyone admitting that they have smoked pot. They compile a database of who said they smoked pot, linking the person's name, the person's address, and the comment(s) where the person admitted to smoking pot.
Now liberals respond. To take revenge, they categorize the different types of beliefs held by conservatives, and begin compiling a database of people, evidence, addresses.
Hostilities rise. If you live in a tower, a grid of condos, anywhere where there are a lot of people- stories start to spread, and people take sides.
The "sex offender" b.s. is a very, very bad thing.
I remember reading last year sometime about a guy in Aurora, CO (It was in westword) was having sex with a woman that told her she was over 18. A while later, he was busted because the woman was 16 or so. The guy got nailed by the courts and his life is now ruined.
The general "Sex Offender" term is just wrong. I can see why it's a bad thing to have your normal raper out on the loose, but to have your life ruined because of some stupid chick? Come' on people.
Where are all the female sex offenders???
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Excellent, Mr. Vigilante, maybe I should burn a fucking cross on your front lawn, eh?
Such lists are a great resource for vigilantes looking for targets. And now you know exactly why the laws exist -- its not "protecting the public", its explicitly encouraging vigilantism.
If you really wanted to protect the public you'd make the address of career violent criminals (like those who commit multiple armed robberies, assault, etc.) public.
I don't know where you get your "sex offender" data from, but are there really no sex offenders with white skin?
Or are they just not recorded?
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What happens when a teenage boy gets convicted of Statutory rape because his girlfriends's dad walked in on them making hanky panky? Is he just another blip on the map- presumably a target for vigilantes or a scapegoat for community demagogues?
What happens when two consenting homosexual adults get railroaded by some backwater anti-sodomy laws? Now the ignorant have a map to the house for vandalism and hate crime intimidation?
Without context these maps have huge potential to inflict harm upon innocent people. These are just two of the examples that come off the top of my head.
Aside from the two hypothetical cases I talked about elsewhere in this thread, I've heard horror stories of people being put on sex offender lists for mild offenses like public urination or public nudity.
Considering that the definition of "sex offender" can be so broad, compiling a map from every state and local database (each with its own criteria for listing people) seems like a really really bad idea.
Oh, looky, the plural of "anecdote" has suddenly become "data"!
Look, genius. It's not okay if even one person gets hurt because of this. Not. Okay.
And that's true no matter what he or she has done. Because there is an appropriate penalty for what they have done, and that is to be administered according to law, by a court.
Not by some yahoo like you who thinks that he is qualified to unilaterally judge what other people deserve.
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So you don't believe that the rehabilitation system works then. Certainly you lose your rights for the duration of the applied sentence, but once you are released and your parole period is up you are once more deemed to be an up-standing, reputable member of society.
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God, there's a shining example of the law of fives if I ever saw one.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
so it's okay to ruin lives, as long as its only REAL sex offenders' lives?
Hey, once upon a time we had this system where you do the crime, get caught, do the time. Then they let you out and back into society.
If we don't want these pedophiles walking around on our streets, the correct answer is to change sentencing so they stay away for a lot longer (or for good).
Don't let them out and then track them like livestock. Unless you want the same system to eventually be used on your schoolkids, local delinquents doing public service, all released cons or just everybody.
Believe it or not, some people don't watch TV and don't feel intellectually superior about it, nor are we locked in our parents' basement. Personally, I don't make a conscious decision NOT to watch TV, I'd just rather do other things. I don't go to baseball games either. Does that make me anti-baseball? It's possible to decide not participate in a pastime without actively being against it. In fact, I think that's probably normal.
Obviously the guy was joking, the humor of which is that nobody would legitimately ask what TV is, but he was modded as flamebait and criticized as a zealot. Get a grip people. It's okay to laugh.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I glanced through the mapped offenders in D.C. -- what surprised me was the seeming smallness of some of the crimes.
Some of them definitely fit in with what I'd think of dangerously disturbed... rape of child under 12, etc. etc... but there are also crimes like "enticing a child under 16 years of age". I'm not even sure what that means -- does it really put this guy in the same category? We don't even know that he knew the girl he was "enticing" was underage... and perhaps he would have found out for sure before committing statutory rape.
Personally, I think listing someone in a database like this is a pretty severe punishment (because it will likely continue to cost them jobs, make it impossible to make friends with neighbors, etc. etc.). If they're going to list such a broad range of crimes, they'd at least make damn sure that someone checking the list will know -- WITHOUT clicking on the name and reading through the details -- what kind of crime it was.
Their set of rights is smaller than yours or mine. Why?
The concept of redemption is fundamental to christianity, so it is part of the legislature of societies based on the judeo-christian ethic. The concept of vengeance is fundamental to most human beings, so a key goal of victims and potential victims is punishment. We are now seeing a renegotiation of the boundaries between these two conflicting ethical systems.
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Pay CLEAR attention to the wording here:
Which I read as:
Others read this as:
The other problem is that rearrest does not equate to reconviction. True recidivism rates should only be calculated based on conviction rates. Plenty of arrests take place in the U.S. without convictions and so we should only note that someone has been recidivated when they are actually convicted of the crime - not merely arrested for it.
We could speculate that the recidivism rate is much higher due to the fact that many victims of crime never step forward. Unfortunately it would also apply to regular crimes outside of the sexual arena (e.g. assault, theft, fraud, etc). It would still also be speculation.
What the study suggests to me isn't that sexual offenders have a higher recidivism rate compared to the general encarcerated populace. Instead, to my interpretation, it says that sexual offendors are more likely to commit a sex crime on reoffense versus say a convicted burgler would be to commit a sex crime on reoffense.
For instance if you look at this report, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/rpr94.htm, for the same time frame you can see that motor vehicle theives had a 78.8% recidivism rate for the same crime versus the rapists who had a 2.5% recidivism rate for the same crime.
I've been thinking about the ethics since I first thought about doing it - until a minute or two before I made the post, that option would only show up when a special URL was used.
I had been gradually giving access to people I knew, and asking what they thought of it.
When I saw this story coming up on Slashdot, I figured it was as good of a time as any to expose it to a larger group of people, and see what people's opinions were.
I think that the main component which is least ethical is the initial collection and release of the dataset by the state of Michigan. Once the data has been released, I don't really see a problem with presenting it in another form.
As for correcting the misspelled sreeet names - I've generated lists of street names and number ranges for every zip code in the US. When trying to correct the spelling, my script only accepts a correction if the changes are minimal (missing street type, and words run together are the two main things it trys to fix) and the number falls within the range for the new street.
As for the clusters of dots - I am not sure; part of the reason I started mapping the addresses at which sex offenders were registered was to see if pressure from people not wanting them living near them would result in clusters of offenders living in clusters in areas which were less hostile to them.
If you or anyone else have any concerns or comments - the email address I have here is real; I'm trying to decide if I should leave this option up, make it only available on request, or just take it down entirely.
But what even if all the guesses are correct there's still some ethical issues. Granted most of the issues involve even publishing the list of names to begin with. I mean wouldn't it be easy for someone to get the list and go around all vigilante style on the people on the list? Certainly it might be satisfying to attack a creep (even a reformed creep) but that's not justice. That's vengence.
Which brings me back around to the real point. Sex offenders are apparantly still dangerous to society following their release from prison. Shouldn't the solution to continue to segregate them from society rather than to just let 'em go and tell people, "Sorry, there's a dangerous new person in your neighborhood, watch your kids/wife/backside." We could put them in a concrete building with bars over the windows and locks on the doors.. a lot like.. more prison! If it's been shown that these people are a danger to society following their terms and that they are incapable of reform*, then it is obvious, at least to me, that the terms are not long enough to protect society from them and them from society.
*statistical incapability** is indistinguishable from real incapability if you cannot say for certain if they've been reformed until they die having not regressed.
**within a socially acceptable error margin. (is 3 standard deviations enough (~99.7% confidence)? 30 (100-(.98e-195) percent confidence)? I don't claim to have the answer)
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Who is the bigger fool, one who trusts a somewhat inaccurate list to decide for them whether a person is safe to let thier children be around.
Or one who goes by thier own sensibilities, intuition and comminications with the person in general.
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By some Bizarre twist of fate I have actually worked with two people who have run afoul with this sex offender list thing. One was convicted of Internet child porn swapping (In the worst miscarriage justice I have ever witnessed). With the other it involved his ex-wife and his kid. From my perspective the first guy I listed became pawn in various people's games to stay in elected office and consolidate power while the second one really had something fishy going on (he signed up to be youth councilor at a local church). So how does this sort of thing distinguish between some poor sod who wants just live his life and someone truly out to continue the activities that got him on the list to begin with.
Also don't you think you're on the borderline of encouraging vigilante behavior? This is where I really question the rationality behind the creation of these lists. If you've done something against society and you go to jail for it, doesn't your debt to society end when you are released? Why then the list? If you say it's because of the high incidence of repeat offenders, then you also must admit that just sending these people to jail doesn't really work (with the exception of protecting society while they are in jail). So shouldn't then the emphasis be placed on understanding the causes of the repeat offense and real solutions to socialize these people rather than just some high-tech branding?
I really agree with Richard Feynman with this and say that the justice system has everything to do with retribution and nearly nothing to do rehabilitation and as such has no emphasis on efficacy. And honestly I'd rather live in a society which really changed the behavior of these anti-social types rather than perpetuating some weird catch-release cycle.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
We have no system of justice, and the law is whatever you can pay for.
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I'm not sure we should be letting them out of prison in the first place.
Yep, let's not hope they are rehabilitated and contribute to society. I, for one, would hope they continue to leech on the rest of us their entire lives!