Slashdot Mirror
UK Propose Registering Screen Names with Police
Oxygen99 writes "In a series of kneejerk suggestions following this online rape plot, the UK Home Secretary, Dr John Reid has suggested that offenders on the Sex Offenders Register should register their online identities with the police. According to a home office spokesman this means that offenders, 'online identities would be treated in exactly the same way as their real name'. So, just how misguided is this and who's going to be the first to tell him?"
Having kids, I don't think this is misguided...
Umm. Yay?
I'm not saying the intent is bad. But it's an enormous waste of money in my opinion.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
So who is going to be the first person to explain how free email web sites such as yahoo, hotmail, etc and new screen names can be gotten anonymously (for the most part) and can change daily, hourly or however fast you want to fill out the forms?
What kind of spam you will get after registering.
if it were feasible (which it isn't) this might be a good idea. Sure we should in general be free to do what we please online, but that freedom rests on an implied right to safety. Rapists forfeit their online freedom and in the currently unregulated system they undermine our online rights. Good for the Brits for trying to make the web safe for everyone.
my name is M0lester... not MOlester
The original generic sig.
To make sure sex offenders do not have computers, or access to computers?
When I first saw this story, I thought the intention was that *everyone* register their screen names -- an unpardonable invasion of privacy, and clearly unenforcable, yet something I could imagine an Internet-ignorant politician might just propose.
But it turns out that it only applies to people on the Sex Offenders Register, which isn't quite as bad. There's some precedent for "you break the law once, you sacrifice some of your rights".
So I no longer see it as such a terrible invasion of privacy. But it does seem about as unworkable as asking burglars, upon release from prison, to call the local police station with a time and address before attempting any further burglaries.
because I NEVER use an alternate handle, and being the LAW ABIDING citizen that I am, I ALWAYS tell the cops everything I'm doing!
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
John Reid is a bloody idiot, and he is subordinate to the tabloids. He pumps out hair-brained schemes like this, that are frankly embarassing.
We need to find a way to stop politicians (and tabloids) interfering with this country, because in general the UK functions very well without their accursed meddling!
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Why would this be a bad thing? I doubt that it is even possible, but the anonymity of the internet is basically the only thing that takes away its credibility. Internet security would be much easier, and internet commerce could become even more accepted and prevelant.
You cannot just say whatever you want in a newspaper or in a public forum without people knowing who you are. Why should you be able to do it on the internet?
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Is anyone else starting to confuse the UK and China? B/c there "legal" systems are starting to look awfully similar.
of the internet
we're all witnessing how the birth of a powerful new medium is changing human society
the first big impact of course is the absolute nullification of copyright laws: if you can point and click and disseminate millions of copies of books/ movies/ music with zero effort, copyright is for all practical purposes a dead concept
the second big impact is the new mercuriality of identity. you don't know who someone is, where they are from, their sex, how old they are, etc., and yet you can form lasting bonds with such people on line. of course this bs about registering online ids is bullshit: the person who proposes the idea is using pre-internet thinking about the solidity of someone's identity. on the internet, identity is as interchangeable as ties on a tie rack. much like some still cling to the newly antiquated notion of copyright law, some people still cling to the idea that people's identities are solid online
all sort of implications in human social contact, all revolving around the idea of trust, will be affected. from online banking, dating, online gaming, etc
i think it will eventually change human identity itself. i see in a few years the emergence of people who identify with their online identities more than their real life identities
all sorts of psychological and social consequences will result when personal identity itself is smudged by the internet
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
While every techno-illiterate parent may be jumping up and down saying, "oh yes! Keep the sex offenders off the internet!"
What is being suggested here isn't really possible or desirable.
If you ever delete your cookies files, If you ever blocked ads, If you ever used an internet kiosk, If you ever have had the desire to surf the web anonymously, If you ever used PGP or put a password on an archive file, then you are against this type of thinking and need to be very concerned about where internet legislation is going and what it means to your privacy.
That being said... how in the world would anyone stop someone from joining an IRC channel and typing "/nick FriendlyKoolKid16"? How is anyone going to stop someone from registering for webmail and IM accounts?
I'm no criminal, yet I certainly wouldn't be willing to register any nicks I might use on IRC with the police. Neither would I willingly provide or want any companies to provide any information about my IM accounts to the police.
As a matter of fact, if I found out that AIM, MSN, Google, Yahoo! would capitulate to authorities and turn over information on me based solely on some suspicion that they might need access to my IM logs, I'd re-register at all of them with completely bogus information and single use mail accounts.
I don't think that increased information gathering by the UK authorities is much of a problem, given that their actual will and ability to punish/discourage/reform criminals are pretty well zero anyway. What are they going to do to anyone they catch? 'Interview them under caution'? I don't see much point in prosecuting them for rape, given the conviction rate and sentences involved.
The thing is that UK police have so little power, compared to most countries, to prevent or punish crime that when it wants to look like it's taking crime seriously the government tends to do it by increasing their power to survey the populace in general.
Actual public order (I only know London, maybe the rest of the UK is like a Beatrix Potter book or something) is maintained primarily by ever-increasing use of gated communities, as near as I can tell. Of course, not everyone gets to live entirely in a gated community. This is how come regular as clockwork the local kids sweep by the cafe round the corner and take the chairs and knock stuff over and there isn't a thing you can do except find where they threw the chairs, and replace the broken stuff. It's a totally bizarre system (and it sucks if you are running a Korean cafe in what is now no longer a Korean area) but I hesitate to conclude that it doesn't work. As cities go, people rarely get shot, or beaten senseless in a police station, or seriously maimed provided they avoid obvious trouble.
So, sure, they have a lot of cameras and databases compared to the law enforcement of other nations. But the whole system is checked-and-balanced by a mix of denial and apathy to the point where I really don't see that it makes any difference.
Or to put it another way, I'd rather the UK police knew EVERYTHING about me than have the French police know ANYTHING about me
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
According to the article, Beavan and two others were discussing a plan to abuse two girls.
Beavan goes to the police, in person, and tells them about it.
The article says Beavan gets 11 years, while the other two get 8 years? WTF? How can the guy who actually went to the police get a longer term then the other two?
What really bugs me is that of the three men they arrested, one of them, David Beavan, was a vigilante trying to stop child abuse who told the police about the plot. This man was also sentanced to 8 years for conspiracy to commit rape. I have no problem with them arresting him for some other charge- what he was doing was questionable, and I'm sure violates laws about entrapment, child porn distribution, etc. I think it's pretty clear, though, that he wasn't going to rape little girls like the others were planning to.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Well, this is not that much of a bad idea.
Infact, Virginia will pass a legislation (or has passed already) that will do the same thing and the state SOR will need to be updated so that "Email / IM and other Communication Names" will need to be registered with law enforcement and specifically through SOR.
What this enables law enforcement to do is if they do come across a perp using another scree name, email whatever that is not registered with law enforcement, they have all the reason to charge him, for violation. And believe me, they wont have much of a leg to stand on, owing to how easy it will be to inform law enforcement on a change of IM/email ids.
I am ok with scum like these enjoying a subset of our rights as a result of this. And I am sure a lot of people are, as well.
Rapid Nirvana
(i.e., people who would want to hide their identities for the wrong reasons) then this would make sense. But they're not.
Detterance seems like the right approach here: there's no way to prevent people from misbehaving, but you can make it costly.
So let's say: go ahead and choose any screen name you want. If you use a fictitious screen name in a way related to a crime,
then some extra penalty gets added in, no questions asked, no appeal.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Oh... sorry... we were looking for 1HotLuv99874... We didn't realize you were 1HotLuv9874. Our bad...
Yeah.. uh... just contact city services to fix the door for you...
I think the House of Lords should be replaced by the editorial board of the Sun, and the House of Commons should be replaced by the editorial board of the Mirror.
All of these rules and bullshit laws would not be necessary were it not for things like this. A child molester got off and had to buy a bike for a 6 year old he molested! WTF?! The real problem is that you have mindless, liberal judges who go "poor child molester" or "poor murderer" and let them off with a slap on the wrist for a crime that has traumatized someone or left them broken/dead. Laws like this should be opposed on principle. We don't need them. You rape a little kid, you deserve life in prison. Texas, ironically, is the only sane part of the Western world on this. They are discussing giving 25 years mandatory for the first offense, life or execution for the second. No registered emails, no complicated slaps on the wrist. You rape a little kid, you're doing hard time where you can't get to another little kid. The reality is that the systems in both America and Britain are wildly detached from reality. Too often judges sympathize with violent criminals, and IMO, that makes them culpable for the victimization of the next person.
So we(or ie they, the UK) are giving up liberty for either reasons of:
1. Terrorism
2. Sex Offenders
So that's it, huh? One is getting to be annoying, the other is 100% laughable. Call me closed-minded, but we're paying waaay too much attention to "sex offenders", especially when being considered a sex offender is so broad, taking a leak at 3am in public when drunk would get you on the list.
We need that V guy sooner than later.
Way to go Britain. We all will follow you. You lead the way.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Of course this approach in unworkable as unverified online accounts are as easy to get as air, but suffering the lack of logic has never been a problem for a government...
Not to incite a flamewar, and I know the recidivism rate among sex offenders is high, but supposing a previously convicted offender has done his/her time and paid his/her dues, and is behaving appropriately, at what point do they deserve to NOT be treated like a criminal?
Following them around and requiring them to "register" everything, everywhere for the rest of their lives seems wrong. The mantra "Think of the Children" should have some limits...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I was told I need to register my username? It's spelled N-A-M-B-L-A. What? It's taken? Damn ....
Bark less. Wag more.
What's that Reid? No room in jails you say? If Reid didn't spend time engaging in this kind of stupidity, he might find more time to do his fucking job! The man has no place thinking of the children if rational thought eludes him.
When is someone sex offender going to register "Anonymous Coward" as a screen name? Hilarity ensues.
Thoroughly debunked (even shows why it's bad) at http://nsona.blogspot.com/ (No Sex Offenders Need Apply).
In unrelated news, can we get a summary slightly more neutral than "just how misguided is this"?
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
The real problems to be concerned about are:
This isn't really a YRO issue. Felons having reduced rights is a long-standing tradition, and I for one wouldn't care to give it up. There are some obivous attack avenues we need to watch (like making sure that laws don't get written that make everyone felons; this is not an exhaustive list), but the principle is sound.
In a US context, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the low bar of "sex offender", but all in all, this isn't much different than the other things sex offenders are already obligated to do, and it's already the offender's responsibility to do things like update their address, so even complaints that this isn't perfectly enforceable are pretty silly.
Besides, when did perfect enforceability become some sort of golden standard for the viability of a law? Can you draw a distinction between this unenforceable law, and the even-more unenforceable laws against murder?
(And how many people complaining about how this isn't perfectly enforceable would turn right around and bitch even louder if laws actually were perfectly enforceable? Nigh unto 100%, I'd guess.)
And from a related article here:
This guy sounds a lot like Stone Phillips (without the newscrew, of course). So . . . is this guy really a vigilante, or is he just a perv who got cold feet?
The point of the law (like most laws) is not to prevent the crime in the first place, but for establishing reason to punish after the crime has been comitted. Consider:
Joe Rapist is convicted, jailed and then released on parole.
As part of his release, he is required to register with the sex offender database, check in with his parole officer and register his online identities.
Now instead, Joe Rapist goes and rapes Mary Sue Victim.
With the laws in place, now Joe Rapist faces charges not only for the rape, but for failure to register with the database (twice) and failure to check in with his parole officer. All of a sudden, the prosecution can paint him as a severe danger to society has he clearly has no respect for any of the laws of the land, regardless of how small.
It's all ammunition to use against repeat offenders.
I don't suggest that the law is a good one or well thought out, but comments like yours miss the point entirely and actualy just fuel the false sense of security such a law would provide by framing the argument around security rather than punishment.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
An interesting perspective on it. One would also imagine that the good press such a law would generate for the politician proposing it would also be a factor.
This is an idea that's quite far-fetched, but someday might just work:
Force everyone to lie about their personal information on the Internet. It's certainly easier than the current model, in which children are told not to tell anything about themselves. Then the criminals wouldn't know who to target, since they're not the only ones lying their asses off.
Ok, this probably won't work, but if this would be what schools and parents would teach their children to do for decades to come, it could be feasible.
I think you're right. I was thinking about some of my online gaming friends. They are without real names, genders, or physical bodies-- to me-- but they /are/ a collection of ideas, opinions, emotions, and interactions.
Those aren't the only things that count, but we are rapidly seeing the changes that prove those characteristics are the only requirements for discourse. I don't need my online friend's visage to miss discourse with him when he's gone. Reminds me of online funerals for deceased-in-Real-Life gamers.
[Error 407: No signature found]
...they are still reading your comments on /.
The justice system is full of bureaucrats who mechanically enforce laws in such a way as to minimize their own personal liabilities and protect their jobs. If this means people get convicted of things they didn't do, so be it. So long as their actions are legal and procedurally correct they really don't care if what they do has any relationship to reality. Justice isn't even a part of the equation. Police care about laws not justice. I doubt if most cops could even define what the word justice means.
Another poster pointed out that erstwhile "maverick" McCain has sponsored a similar bill in the US Congress. My question is, do these bills have any regulations regarding the release of this information to the general public? Or will they tacitly authorize spammers, script-kiddies and soccer-moms to go whole-hog on this particular group of untouchables?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
...if they can't even keep track of where registered sex offenders live?
I keep hearing about all these hoops sex offenders go through, but what about other criminals? Yeah, sex offenders are bad people, but do murderers have to register? Are they put on a neighborhood watch list and have to go around announcing themselves to their neighbors? Why are sex offenders treated so harshly after prison? I'm not trying to troll or anything, I am really wondering why they are the targets so much. Are they the most likely group to repeat their crimes? What about drug dealers or carjackers? Bank robbers?
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
This is is a result of what "Yes Minister" (a BBC TV comedy and book) called the politicians' syllogism:
We must to something.
This is something.
Therefore we must to this.
Dream on, kid. The Real World will crush the Internet into submission and bind it to its laws. Let there be absolutely no doubt about this.
Think about all of the mistaken identities. Especially when many people on different services can share the same nicknames. I can't even count how many times I've tried to register one of my less geeky nicknames on a service and been told it's already taken.
One day some perv will go missing from his parole program and you'll have police on your doorstep asking you to prove your identity because suddenly by virtue of this name registration there is reasonable doubt that you are who you claim to be.
Papers please!
However, if the offense did take place with a strong link to the internet, or was otherwise significantly computer-based, then preventing access to computers and the internet - as is often the punishment for people convicted of things covered by the Computer Misuse Act, etc. - would be justifiable for a period of time.
Man, I can't wait to get every fucking Final Fantasy name associated with pedos. ...actually, just getting every damn name from anime series in general banned would do wonders to the Internet.
No more CloudxSephiroph, bishiInuyashakun, or EmoSasuke....
Several posters have fundamentally rather missed the point. The Sex Offenders Register creates an ongoing supervisory framework for convicted sex offenders for a number of years. No-one is suggesting this because they naively believe that registered sex offenders could not create alternative online ID's. The point is firstly that it will create an obligation on them which is testable by pulling ISP / IRC / Messenger / Whatever records to see if they have used ID's other than those declared *for any purpose whatsoever*. If they have and they are on notice of the stipulations, there is a justifiable presumption and a case in fact that they have broken the conditions of their parole and can be returned to jail.
This isn't supposed to be a magic lantern that will suddenly turn up sex offenders using declared ID's to do things they shouldn't (and which they are already prohibited from) - that would be incredibly stupid although it may happen occasionally. There is an element of uncontrollable compulsion in many sex offenders and this would give them another mental prompt everytime they log in with an ID that is registered that they are being watched, but more so that if they are thinking about creating an ID which is not declared, that they better think hard about doing so because the penalties are there. It is probably easier for some to be mentally warned off at this earlier point than to freely allow convicted sex offenders to keep on creating new ID's and possibly give in to compulsion that "they'll never find out this was me" when they've got into a conversation with someone which has progressed to a dangerous stage. Combine it with a keystroke logger and perhaps you'll be heading off *some* trouble.
This is about behavioural control more than anything and talking about aliaising and all that is really rather irrelevant. It's an incremental improvement, not a panacea, but it does have some value.
I'm sorry, but I disagree with standard slashthink in this regard. I think the anonymity of the internet is its greatest weakness, not strength. I'm a huge believer in freedom of speech - that is, you have the right to say what you want, and no government should take that from you. However, that doesn't mean you have the right to hide. They are different concepts altogether.
I think the internet would be a far better place if people who spoke up did so under their real identity.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
I know! Inform them by email and REQUIRE a receipt! So that they know that we know that they know...
OK, what if direct enforcement isn't the idea? Maybe the idea is that if they find a registered person using a false identity (easier to detect), then it's clear that they're up to no good?
At the rate you keep stealing our freedoms, we'll be as bad as the British in five years!
the authorities do not spend much time online.
What I would like to know is how registering their names would help prevent a crime from occurring? I read the article, and it just seems like there would be a million loopholes around this. Not every teen spends time on Myspace. Check out deviantart.com, for example. And how about online gaming? This just seems more like a way for law enforcement to cover their asses.
Best "String" Ever!
Message to Home Secretary: you do not have to emulate China's civil rights policy to achieve their economic success.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
We could make sure sex offenders do not have genitalia, or access to genitalia.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Really, I have friends in the UK who are on the register for sex offenses, primarily for downloading indecent images of children. Okay, it's stupid to download such images because of the legal penalties, but does that make you a child molester? No, of course it doesn't, especially when you consider that downloading simple naturist photographs, which I avoid for legal reasons only, can be considered "child pornography" in many Western jurisdictions.
For the record, I would be happy to watch a torture of the people who attempted to plot the rape of those young girls, but I would be extremely angry if my friends who dowloaded illegal images were forced to register their internet IDs as if they were child molesters. They wanted a way to relieve their urges without harming children, but simply weren't sensible enough to consider the consequences. That makes them naive, but not evil.
Then you should consider people who have taken a piss at the side of the road. They could be on the sex offenders' register and they'd be forced to register their name on this "Internet registry". What are they going to do, take a piss in MySpace?
Anyone who is unable to see the difference between paedophilia, sex offenses and child molestation needs to buy a dictionary.
John Reid is trying to look stronger because he has been exposed as a weak, spineless politician.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
[tinfoilhat]Yes, it's unenforceable. Yes, they know it's unenforceable.Yes, they will use it's enforceability to justify new draconian controls on the internet (like DRM, but more evil and less greedy). Think of the children!![/tinfoilhat]
More laws and restrictions are proposed being placed upon sex offenders? How shocking.
Are the the US and UK only capable of passing laws that pile more restrictions and harsher punishments on sex offenders?
It's become such an easy gimmick for politicians and legislators. In the US at least, politicians can sit on their hands and do nothing for years on end as long as they push forward a few new anti-sex-offender laws right before election, and the public applauds. The laws don't even have to be effective, or even enforceable. If the public hears about any single sex-crime in a nation of 300 million people, then there is a cry for harsher punishments, more restrictions, more databases, more cops posing as 14 year old girls online, more internet surveillance, more ex post facto laws, and less freedom for us all.
Many of the laws are shamefully overbroad. Keeping some guy who got caught peeing in the bushes or leering after a 16 year old girl from living within city limits does nothing to protect the community. Effectively ending some college students life because he downloaded some naked picture of a child off of Kazaa isn't helping.
There are millions of children in the US who are without healthcare or living in severe poverty. Yet everyone is much more concerned about those scary child predators lurking on Myspace. The 24/7 attention each sexual-related case receives in the media make sex-offenses seem like a huge problem, but is it really worth all of the panic and expenditure of law enforcement resources?
Sex-offenses have turned out to be the perfect tool to distract the public from any other issues. It's just so easy to beat up on a group that no one is willing to defend.
If I were a sex offender and this law got passed, I know exactly what I'd be tempted to do... sign-up for ~50 new screen names a day. Basically, (Number of sex offenders in the UK) X (Average number of new screen names per person) = A LOT of paperwork for the police. So much, in fact, I doubt they'd have the ability to do anything else. Which would lead to either this law getting changed/removed or an automated system. If it's the latter then there should be enough white noise & overlap (ilikekids in chatroom A & ilikekids in chatroom B) that it would render the list nearly useless.
.. you realize that people are put on the register for being caught peeing in public (and someone might have seen a sex organ, hence sexual offender). They've polluted the database with trivial shit. Way to go.
i got no time to rtfct, but perhaps you can asnewr this simple question: were ANY of these men "sex offenders" before this? Would ANY of them have been on this "list of sex offender email addresses" BEFORE this conspiracy? Could this new registration law in any way have prevented this conspiracy of rape from fomenting?
[rapeman69] /nick iLikeBoys23
* rapeman69 is now known as iLikeBoys23
I'm sorry, but i don't see the point, maybe the British government should spend some time on IRC.
Hi, CTS, mcgrew here. remember me from K5, always telling you to take your meds? ;)
/. and besides, I don't want to appear to be spamming).
Well, I'm not going to today. You made some intelligent points but I think there are some details you may be missing.
I, too, have had online friends I never met in real life. You're (almost) one of them. But you're you no matter what name you use. I've spent very little time online since I left K5, spending most of my free time trying to interact with the warm bodies of females (or at least social interaction with them;). If you (and other K5ers from the area) are interested, there is a last chapter to the "Paxil Diaries". Google for "Chris At Christmas" with "Paxil" and you should find it (not enough bandwidth for a link from
But at K5 and even moreso before when I was heavily into playing Quake, I was immersed in the internet. However, after making online friends, I invariably find out their real names, ages, and where they live.
In the Quake days I met "Tikki God" and "Nacho", and became friends. I found out that they were teenagers at the time who lived in Tennessee. I've forgotten Tikki's real name; he droped out of the Quake scene after Eric (Nacho) moved to Arizona with his parents.
There was "Yello"; in his twenties. Now, I'm not too sure about Yello's sex. I'm convinced he was really a woman masquerading as a man. His name was Niel ("Kneel") Harriot and he lived in England, but an email from him once came as "Janet Harriot." Niel's site was "Yello There" (no trace on the wayback machine), a parody of Blue's News and IMO one of the funniest things on the internet. Sadly, Niel succumbed to muscular dystrophe; he was in a wheelchair the last I heard from him, and I'm pretty sure he's no longer on the planet. I miss my friend Niel.
There was "Dopey Smurf" whose real name I remember but am not going to mention here, as he is now a physician in Canada. He submitted a lot of hilarious stuff to my "Springfield Fragfest" site, the funniest of which IMO was the guide to E3 Booth Babes.
There was "Sgt Hulka". I've embarrassingly forgotten his real name, too, but he was a family man in his thirties with a house and a mortgage and kids. Most likely his name will pop into my head as soon as I hit "submit", I seem to have CRS.
Remember "Q"? I met him; he gave me a ride to Cahokia. His name I also know.
The only online friend I had whose name I didn't know was Flamethrower, and as he was in the middle of a controversy involving blowing the whistle on a game company and had a game company CEO trying to find him to serve a court summons to for letting out trade secrets (the "secret" being that this CEO who had been seen as a programming god was actually a talentless jerk) it was a good thing. However, in one of our last correspondences he let me knoow that there wasn't just one Flamethrower; four or five people shared the name and email address.
But my point is you are going to know your friends' real names, or they're not really friends. Make no mistake, these were real friends; I could count on them when I needed them, and they knew they could count on me, even though the only one whose hand I shook was Q's.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
What's next? I'll have to register at the laundromat when I go to get the blood out of my clown suit?
Reduce, reuse, cycle
It's real value is to use as an additional charge once a violator has been caught. It keep the real habitual offenders in jail longer
And that, I submit, is a flaw in the legal system. If you want violators to spend more time for a second or Nth offense, craft the punishment for the specific laws they commit in that fashion. Don't invent new excuses to keep them in jail longer. Creating a NEW law solely for the purposes of entrapping people who violate other laws is unjust by nature, even if it generates a socially useful result.
I am against the concept of laws which can only be broken during the act of breaking a different law, or are only enforced after the fact. Charge the violator with aggravating circumstances for the more serious crime.
Isn't that exactly what this is doing?
Nope. As the GP said, they're creating a crime they intend to enforce when they have a bias against the perpetrator. Otherwise, "it's too much trouble to enforce".
And just for drill... how do you prove that you have NOT got a hidden hotmail account somewhere?
I fear this is the end of my "SexualPredator1973" screen name...
Recently, BBC News reported that someone on the Sex Offenders Registra had gone missing because he first listed his address as "a tent" and later changed it to "woods".
Another report mentioned that a women who asked for information from the police on a man she was in a relationship with was not told of his prior serious sex offences because he changed his name (by deed poll) to "Jay Powers".
People often try to make out that Americans are dumb, but if you are looking for institutional stupidity then the UK is the place to do it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
May not be the best solution, but it is a step in the right direction maybe.
Sex offenders here in the States are required to register where they live.
Some states require that they inform their employer.
If they do require this registry it may stop one rape.
The issue I have with it...
there are multiple people out there in the www that have the same screen name.
The only way I think this would work is the have the Government assign a screen name and
not allow anybody to select one.
Ok you can slap me for that comment, it was a BAD idea.
Another thing is each government body declares what a sex offender is.
Some states require registration for having sex in any position other than missionary.
Some only when violence or a child is involved.
First thing they need to do is standardize what an offense is.
There is a registered offender here in my town. His offense, sex with a minor.
His actual crime, He married a 17 year old girl, he was 17, he turned 18, she was still 17, her dad had him arrested for it. He is now branded for life as a sex offender for screwing his wife.
The need to fix what they have before they load it with more broken data
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
i have no interest whatsoever
some guy in nyc wanted to meet up, he pressed me on the issue a number of times. i totally blew him off
just this november of 2006, rusty was in nyc and wanted to meet, i blew him off too
i genuinely have no interest in knowing anything about the real lives of people i meet on the internet, and i have a good reason for this: i change my behavior on the internet, i let another side of personality exist here. i get to be someone else. it is freeing, liberating, exiciting to express new things in new ways that i can't offline, i get to experiment with aspects of my personality safely online without any worry for blowback
i don't ever want to suffer the consequences of my action on the net. what i do here, stays here, good or bad. it's a simple discipline, a compartmentalization of my life
there is a firewall between my life here, and my life offline. i'm different people, and i want it to stay that way. in fact, if someone came up to me offline and said "hey circletimessquare!" i'd probably freak out
now who's to say your attitude is better, socially or psychologically, than mine, or even more common?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This can totally work even without unique id's. Why... 1. Non-Compliance: Goes to intent... For law enforcement, allows additional investigation of an individual if they are found to be using a non-registered id. Perhaps help in getting a warrent or charges to stick. In a case, this could make the difference between identifying a trolling predator or someone that made a bad in the moment decision. 2. Compliance: Goes to affirmation of community standards. A predator in a weak momement might be reminded by myspace that they can not use that id on myspace etc... They could also potentially enjoy restricted service, such as they can't make friends under 18. Remember, a "don't walk on the greass" sign doesn' keep you off the grass, it reminds you of the standards. 3. An unique arguement against this in the nsona is that this would create private marketing lists for pedophiles. Great. Law enforcement can put in dummy addresses and monitor spam putting those other fucks in jail too. Of course, who would want to share an ID with a known predator? but this isn't much of an arguement as many people already have the same NAMES as predators.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Maybe everyone in the World should locate every paedophile who hasn't committed an offense, that disgusting and perverted 18 year old who had sex with his 17 year old girlfriend, that dangerous predator who took a piss near a public place, then imprison them for life. If people are still angry, they could imprison these perverts' families too!
Don't worry, I'm sure that society can find something else to worry about!
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
What noone seems to have pointed out yet is that if they are caught breaking this proposed law by the police, they can be punished - without having to prove intent to molest etc.
Except, how are they going to catch them breaking it? This is nothing but an invitation to let the police construct some sort of invasive monitoring scheme, once they find out that it's unenforceable given the infrastructure presently in use.
Once unenforceable laws get passed, it's rare for the politicians to just give up and admit they did something dumb; inevitably, they attempt to patch things up with more laws, and try to bring reality around to the point where the original law is enforceable.
In this case, it'll probably go something like, after it's clear that sex offenders are getting away with registering for free email addresses, requiring that free email services collect the real names of users, so that they can be checked against the sex offender database. And when it becomes apparent that sex offenders are just using false names, then require the email providers to collect some sort of secret unique identifier (whatever the UK equivalent of an SSN is). And when that fails, it'll be requiring them to send a postcard via mail to your address of record, that you have to sign and return, etc.
Creating unenforceable laws, just to make law enforcement's job easier, is an inherently bad idea. If you don't create laws that are enforceable in reality, then the alternative is to create a reality that's easily enforceable by the laws that have been created -- and personally, I would rather make the police do some extra work, than starting to put society over the authorities' collective knee, in order to make their job easier.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Don't know about easier, but maybe it'd be better to make sure they don't have access to children?
If the end is not practically achievable, it doesn't matter whether it's "better" or not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Two things:
1. Someone investigating pedophiles will pick up a lot of child porn. Certainly police investigating a child porn ring will have to trade and download files to get in. That doesn't make his story less credible.
2. Even if he was a pedophile who chickened out and talked to the police, that means that he was unwilling to go through with his plan- i.e. he's less dangerous than the rest of them. Furthermore, by co-operating with the police he should get a reduced sentence.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I think the idea of making some kind of "national sex offender chatroom registry" is pretty silly. But it seems to me that a registered sex offender who, upon getting out of jail, signs up for an online chat service with the same online ID as the one he was using when he committed his original offenses should probably be seen as being in violation of the terms of his probation. Police might want to have a record of what those original IDs were, in that case. For that matter, maybe it's appropriate for someone who uses chatrooms to groom children for abuse to be barred from using any chat service again for (at minimum) a long, long time? These would be decisions for judges to make.
Breakfast served all day!
1) We know it'll be completely unenforcible for the purposes of actually being useful. On the other hand, it'll be easy to prove for the purposes of throwing the book at someone that an individual prosecutor takes a dislike to. This is not what we have laws for.
2) Sadly, the actual text from the radio report this morning isn't on the website, but it was something along the lines of "Politicians, parents and teachers are increasing worried". Notice, it doesn't say "teenagers" or "children", i.e. the people actually affected. This is for one reason - these people are not technologically illiterate and KNOW that the internet itself is not a risk and aren't worrying about it. The problme is with kids who don't know enough about the real world not to meet, in real life, people who they meet on the internet.
3) If they're worried about kids giving out their personal information and allowing themselves to be tracked down with it, a far better approach would be to have a quiet word with Myspace & Facebook and the like and ask them what on earth they were thinking when they included address and telephone number fields on their profile pages in the first place. If you don't give someone a box labelled "mobile phone number" they probably won't put one in.
FGD 135
On the other side of the pond, ex-felons can't buy guns & have to do some paperwork to get their voting rights re-established... That's pretty much it. Everything else is social stigma.
It's a lot more than that. They are effectively barred from any 'positions of trust' for the remainder of their lives, unless their record is expunged, which is unusual. This pretty much takes them out of any government or civil-service position (including the military), out of jury duty, and out of most teaching positions in public schools. This is just the stuff that they're barred from by law.
By that "social stigma," they're basically unemployable in all but the most menial jobs, and even in those they're basically un-advanceable. I don't think you can even get a fast-food job with a felony on your record, because they're suspicious that you'll start stealing from the till.
Effectively, they're the modern version of "untouchables"; they become members of a permanent underclass unfit for legitimate occupations. I don't have a whole lot of pity for them, frankly, but it's not hard to see why the recidivism rate is so high. But that creates a feedback cycle; the public expects ex-cons to fall back into crime, thus they're not trusted, thus they can't find legitimate occupations, and thus they do exactly what's expected of them.
Short of 'rebooting' the system by summarily executing anyone with a felony conviction, or other similarly drastic methods, I don't think there's any easy way to break that cycle.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What about the poor pedo who goes for HotLuv1949 when he meant to go for HotLuv1994... Sorry I think I may be slightly twisted...
By the way - here's the link to a story on Chris Morris's BrassEye special on PEDOGEDDON. The show was released during a UK-wide paedophile media-witchhunt, shortly after a Paediatrician in Newport had her house vandalised by idiots. Dirty Paedo.
What puzzles me, is that this proposed law is supposed to be a reaction to the rape plot.
But this rape plot was not interupted by feasless defender, but obviously one of the protagonist actually found that the initial fantasy got out of hand and called the police.
The three plotter also swapped photos, it would certainly be interesting to understand exactly how they got them.
As there is a difference between forcing, coercing or luring a minor to submit to any kind of pornographic action, and retransmitting photos.
Even if both are illegal and wrong.
Actually it would be very interesting to follow up on this case, there is a distinct possibility that the "ringleader" is actually "rather" inocent,
it could be that he started with a perverted fantasy, and suddenly found out that "real bad guy" are out there, and maybe he really actually helped the
police to put away one or two "real baddies".
In wich case the proposed legislation would actually be a case of making sure that sex offenders do not use the internet to communicate, and stay under the radar for years.
That is scary.
In a separate case we could also suggest that all farmers should register as "potential sex offender" and need a special "on line identity" and have restricted travel rights (remember the Canadian Serial Killer they got recently with 30+ bodies on his hands ?, it MUST have something to do with the internet!)
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
-- Stephen.
Like so many of the fascist neoliberals that rule this world.
They have learned valuable lessons from Stalin, it's important that people think they are free.
He was also best pals with both Karadzic and Mladic. Great guy, all round.
It's called a Sting Operation, as opposed to entrapment, which your idea is. Basically, if a police officer sends me child porn I didn't ask for, the cop is the criminal. If I ask an undercover cop for child porn, and he sends me child porn and I get busted, I'm the criminal, not the police officer. Undercover police officers are authorized to commit crimes to bring criminals to justice.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Here in Michigan, adulterers are considered "sex offenders".
1 6495155.htm
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/nation/
but trust me, if I catch you....you won't have to worry about a trial or registering as a sex offender.
While I am serious about the above, I also know that my daughter is smart and aware enough not to let anyone touch her without her permission, and not to give strangers her personal info.
I try to be aware of my daughter's on-line habits and be a responsible parent. It's not easy, but I make sure that my daughter can talk to me if she needs to.
That said, I believe that 'sex crimes' punishment is way out of line with the crime. You can kill someone, serve your time, and get on with your life. Rape someone, or god forbid, have consensual sex with a minor and you will be punished till the day you die.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Okay, after reading most of the posts I think almost everyone is missing the obvious.
If you are a registered sex offender here is a logical flow that would work
1. Welcome to MySexOffender, please log-in
2. Thank you for logging in child molester, you are currently registered on the following sites and services with the following names (Slashdot, MySpace, Yahoo, MSN, etc etc etc with some multiple entries and different userids at all of them)
3. You have selected to add a new entry, please enter the URL or information on the site or service and your user name
4. (enters www.somesite.com and RegisteredPredator1234 userid)
5. Thank you for updating your information. You are now cleared to use this service. Remember, any time you register for a new online site or service you must immediately register with MySexOffender and failure to do so is a violation of (blah blah legalese)
Now, yes they can just get a userid and not register it, but if they don't and later that userid is correctly associated with the individual then they can be arrested and charged under the law this falls under. Same type of thing for parole violations, failing to update addresses, etc. Scott free until caught, but once caught no excuse will get you out of it.
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3672591.stm
From the same Govt who argued that most people weren't necessarily entitled to passports and that we should just trust they won't use their totalitarian laws for totalitarian means.
http://www.waronfreedom.net/
Convicts are already proven guilty. Why should convicted murderers be given a license to buy a gun?
The whole problem is, if they did it once, if they crossed that boundery once, what stops them from doing it twice? If they lacked self control the first time, why do you believe they'd suddenly have self control?
All of their activities around children should forever be monitored.
actually your post does not in any way answer what I asked. I didn't say "what value does this have in regards to registered offenders" (which is all you answered) but what value does it have when a good many - if not MOST - cases like this involve people who are NOT already in the system. "Megan" (of Megan's law) for example, was killed by a man who was NOT in the system and, therefore, the law named for her really would not have, in any way, helped prevent her meeeting exactly the same fate.
Were any of these men registered sex offenders? ANY of them? If not, then this law would have absolutely no value in preventing it - nor from preventing exactly the same thing from happening again.
Given that this is supposededly a site frequented by people who have an understanding of the Internet beyond "click the big 'E' to see the intarwebs", can we please lose this silly term?
I haven't had 'screen names' since the Amiga days, when it referred to, well, screens, due to the possibility of having multiple overlapping screen or virtual displays at different resolutions, colour depths etc that you could slide up and down behind each other. (Copper tricks like that were cool. I miss the Amiga.)
I have no idea why AOL originally pulled this term out of their collective arses - where exactly is this screen I'm supposed to be naming? What's displayed on it? - but let's not keep propagating it...