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Sex Offenders to Register Emails in Virginia
Isaac Bowman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Virgina has a proposed law that would require sex offenders to register their email and IM screen names in an attempt to monitor and control their presence on social networking sites like MySpace."
First of all, there will be two kinds of former criminals: Those that really try to reintegrate into society and those that don't give a rat's ass and work harder to avoid getting caught.
The latter will simply register some waste-spam addy, get a new freemail addy and go hunting again.
The former will register their mail addresses. Now, let me predict the next step. The next step would be to make those mail addresses public so "you can see if your kids are mailing to a bad man", maybe including a tool for the really dumb parents who can't figure even that out.
First of all, those registered addresses will drown in spam, because a legit mail address is gold for a spammer. Second, they will drown in hate mail from overzealous self appointed protectors of innocence and other bullcrap. I bet my rear that there will, no week after that list goes public, be a mailing list, so you can reach all of them at once. The net effect of this is either that they get a new mail address they can use (and don't register it), or they turn towards a "society hates me so I hate it too, to hell with it!" stance.
In either case, all you get is that those people go further underground and get more careful, and are thus harder to track and catch.
Great job. Really, I feel a damn lot safer now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Someone who has extra marital sex ?
Someone who has "sex not for the sole purpose of reproduction" ?
You can define that in a lot of ways...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Apparently in Utah you can be both a sex offender and a victim at age 13 for the same thing.