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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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Wait, so in this carefully-constructed example of yours, what the guy actually do wrong?
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."