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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."
"...as good a place as any to start", she said.
because registering a new email address and IM account is so hard. Better still, get an .i2p email address.
There is such a large difficulty in getting new email addresses, nobody could concieve of a situation where not all would be registered! All this does is create yet another charge to lay on someone you want to imprison. The problem with this is that if they are grooming children/formenting terrah on yr kids/whatever, you already have appropriate charges. If they are not, it isn't an issue.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
...more than half the slashdot-population can find themself in the name "Virgina" (even when it's mentioned twice in the post), but I sincerely request the editors lay down their powdery-pipes and at least provide the decency to call the region "Virginia".
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
In Capitalism West sex offenders must register emails. In Soviet Union use of email registers you!
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Our lawmakers are idiots.
Either the sex offender has served his time, or he hasn't. If you're worried about their recidivism rate, UP THE TIME SPENT OUT OF SOCIETY, DO NOT SEND THEM BACK OUT THERE IF WE'RE SO SURE THEY'RE JUST GOING TO REPEAT OFFEND.
Seems simple, so why do these guys make it so complex?
This sounds like some grand standing of a politician passing useless law to "protect kids". Anyone with a passing knowledge of the internet knows this is useless.
Not only anyone can get any screen name and email address anyway they want it. Next thing you know, people will be setting up the "virtual neighborhood" off shore.
This is one of those feel good law with some truthiness in mix!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
officials would turn them over to MySpace. The company, using new software, would then block anyone using that e-mail address from entering the site ...
They mean new software like:
if (user == sex-offender)
then (drop)
else (proceed)
Won't they just, er, get another account? It's like CAN-SPAM deja vu. Must be election time.
As a reminder, there are plenty of jurisdictions in which urinating in a back alley when no public toilet is available constitutes a "sex offense", and sufficies to have one placed on "sex offender" lists.
Furthermore, making out in a car in a quasi-public place can likewise be considered a "sex offense", if I'm not mistaken, though in practice, the cops tend to crack down only on gay couples doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Sex offenders just ain't what they used to be.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
sex_offender937123@hotmail.com
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
This is basically as I've said elsewhere...
I'm not a sex offender and don't want to support those in particular, but juridically, I think these questions still need to be asked:
- Why only sex offenders? Are other criminals not as dangerous? Do these not use e-mail?
- What happened to jail penalties clearing them of their crime after it's over? Or do I misunderstand part of their intent?
- How is this legislation going to be enforced? Will a sex offender willing to abuse kids be willing to register the mail address used for this?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The furore over internet child abuse is great for headline writers, the combination of two topics which catch peoples attention and of course legislators do love their headlines. I'm surprised we don't see more of this kind of cross-topic headline grabbing. Legislation to outlaw the use of
- iPods to smuggle polonium
- Segways by terrorists
..
Oh maybe the headline writers didn't take best advantage of the oppertunity presented by the recent "No luxury goods for short fat dictators" legislation"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
...cannot protect your children because they're too far away from them plus I think you don't want an agent in your home watching what your kids do. Protecting children is parents' responsability. they should teach them properly so the chances of getting offended or getting into unadequate web sites will be drastically reduced. No cop and no lawyer can make the parent's job.
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.
Statistically, sex offenders have a very high commit-it-again rate.
Complete BS. http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060516_predat or_panic.html
For what we know, sex offenders are like other offenders ; many are just your once-in-a-lifetime (because they had oppotunity or whatever) type, a few are true maniacs in the medical meaning of the word. While the first type desserve a sentence, and don't need more attention than anybody else afterward, and probably less than a DIU convict, the latter type are mentaly ill persons, and they need constant medical attention instead of jail ; and they should be held in hospital until proven safe for release. Jail only prevent them from accessing adequate cure for their condition. The social pressure for a trial is in fact at the root of their early release (because neither a judge nor a jury is a qualified MD). This is medieval justice at its near best, if you don't count capital punishment.
If I was a viagra spammer, I'd love to get a copy of that list.
I hope you are being sarcastic. If our society deemed that serving prison time paid for crimes, then nobody would ever be asked "Have you ever committed a crime?" on job applications and no ex-con would have to register for previous crimes.
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.
Look, it is a difficult word to spell. That's why I just say "cunt" instead.
This is an ill-thought-through measure designed only to court acceptance from the public. Now that it's no longer politically acceptable to go after witches, blacks, jews or gypsies, sexual offenders are the current untermenschen -- somebody to whom everybody else can feel superior; and against whom no measure is unjustifiable, irrespective of whether or not it would ever be workable in practice and/or the extent of collateral damage it would create.
Have you ever received junk mail addressed to a former occupant of your home?
Have you ever been refused credit because of a bad debt run up by a former occupant of your home?
I can answer yes to both questions. I've even received late-night faxes from abroad on my voice line, because my phone number used to be a fax number (the telco had run out of never-before-used numbers and so had to give me a recycled one; it had been out of service for over a year, but that didn't help against some overseas scumsucker with an out-of-date phone book).
Now think of the way that information tends to hang around on the internet: somebody sees an interesting story, makes a copy of it on their website, the original goes away but the copy persists. Also, "sexual offences" cover a broad gamut. Legally there is no distinction between someone who has non-penetrative sex with a 15 year, 364 day old girl who managed to get into an over-18s bar; and someone who participated in gang-rape of a pre-school child. Being caught taking a leak in the street (in times when councils are closing public toilets, and bars and restaurants are erecting bogus "toilets are for customers' use only" signs [they're bogus because entering the premises for the purpose of using the toilet makes you automatically a customer]) is also deemed a sexual offence.
Still think all this tracking of sexual offenders is a good idea? I know exactly why this man did what he did.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Yes, and so was whatever crime they commited that made them a sex offender. Those that will try to do it again are the ones least likely to comply with the law in full. All this will do is help ostracize the ones trying to do things right from now on.
Ars Technica had an article about this also, here's a quote from it:
That brings up two of the major problems with all this. 1. Many states have gone nuts with what they consider a sex offender, pretty minor things can land you on one, so the lists aren't useful any longer. Do you really worry that the guy living down the street was a year too old to have sex with his girlfriend and got hit with a statutory rape charge? 2. People who feel completely rejected by society often end up feeling they have nothing to lose. People who feel they have nothing to lose are more likely to commit a crime.
We need some sanity in all this, this proposal simply isn't going to work, it's way too easy to get new E-mail accounts and IM accounts. We also should be worried about the unintended consequences the law may cause. Iowa passed a law not too long ago (I can't find the exact date, but the news articles are from March 2006, article at FindArticles, same article at the NYT) that restricted sex offenders who had committed crimes with children from living within 2000 feet of a school or day-care center. This sounds somewhat reasonable at first doesn't it, they even restricted the class of sex offenders it applied to. Well it backfired, let me just quote this bit from the article:
So now they've lost track of many sex offenders they had track of prior to the law going into affect. Even if you think the sex offender registries actually help prevent sex crimes this is bad news.
You have to ask yourself, what unforeseen side-effects will this Virgina law have? Might it make registered sex offenders purposely use multiple accounts and only report one? Might it make them more cautious about what they do and say online, making it harder to catch them before they commit another crime? We don't know, but I don't see how there's any benefits to this law, at best only the ones who are trying to not commit another crime will fully comply.
The reason this law will be useful is it can't be effectively enforced. Are you going to require that convicted sexual predators are monitored 24/7?
No, of course not.
If thats the case why have this silly rule? It would take me, as others have said, 30 seconds to create a new anonymous email account.
You're still missing it. There's nothing that will guarantee that you catch all pedophiles. It's a way of lowering the standard of evidence against a known pedophile. Let's say you get a transcript of a guy in a chat room talking to a kid, and he's careful enough not to say anything blatantly incriminating. But let's say it's a chat room the FBI does happen to be monitoring. If it's enough to raise their suspicion, but not enough to actually bring a case, they can trace the IP and see who the owner of the account is. If it's a pedophile using an unregistered email account, they can now press charges where they couldn't before.
This also does nothing to protect against those who have not yet been convicted of sexual abuse. If the illusion of security is all you want, enjoy your dream world, but that will just make you less safe.
Using that tired logic, we shouldn't have police either, because they won't catch every crime. Wouldn't want you to live in a dream world, right? This isn't meant to completely solve the problem. I'd say no law has completely solved any problem. It's really just another tool for law enforement to be able to more easily bring charges against recidivist but clever pedophiles. Just like tax evasion did with Capone.
Wait, so in this carefully-constructed example of yours, what the guy actually do wrong?
Probably easier than proving intent of kidfuckery.
Good thing everyone on the sex offender list participates in kidfuckery, and not getting drunk and pissing in a bush or mooning your principal, or various other "sexual" offenses.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
About as useful as the No-Fly list.
... it's exactly as useful as the No-Fly List. Which does its job admirably.
Yep
It's just that its job isn't what you think it is. The No-Fly List doesn't really have anything to do with keeping terrorists off of planes, because as you pointed out, even the most retarded Al Qaeda operative is probably going to think of using a false name. What it does do, is create a (arguably false) sense of security in the general populace, and make them think that their government is "doing something." This is its function, its raison d'être, just like most of the other post-9/11 government "security" measures.
This registry is exactly the same thing. Nobody in their right mind can possibly believe that it's actually going to do anything to save children; it's a trivial requirement, one that if you're already OK with doing something illegal (like propositioning children), you're not going to have any trouble avoiding. But it's going to make a nice talking point for a few politicos, and help to create that 'warm, fuzzy feeling' in the hearts of the voters who are too stupid to see through it -- which is basically most of them, I've come to believe.
When you see a government program that's failing horribly but yet still allowed to continue year after year, chances are it's not really failing; it's doing exactly what somebody wants it to do.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."