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?"
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.
my name is M0lester... not MOlester
The original generic sig.
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.
Having kids, I don't think this is misguided...
If you don't see anything wrong with it, then I think that your having kids was misguided....
The real litigious bastards...
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!!!!!
Then you haven't considered the practical questions of how it could be implemented. Screen names are self-chosen, and typically numerous. There is no universal respository of screen names that is shared by the whole of the internet. HappyMonkeyPooFace on slashdot may be a totally different person than HappyMonkeyPooFace on MySpace.
Am I supposed to check some registry somewhere before I pick my screen name, just in case some rapist has already used it somewhere else? How will the authorities know who they are monitoring?
A screen name simply can't be used for identification purposes of this sort -- it is nothing more than a self-chosen highly context sensitive nickname.
Please, explain to me how you would implement such a proposal.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
Having kids, I don't think this is misguided...
That's because you're assuming you're not ever going to be in that database or one like it.
I am an attorney and I work in the law enforcement area. The value of a law like this is not actually to track the offenders. 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 makes plea bargaining result in longer terms. I'm not saying it's a good plan - just that the fact that offenders won't register is not really a flaw in the plan.
"Yes, officer, my screen name is 'Optix.'"
*goes home*
www.yahoo.com
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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.
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.
To make sure sex offenders do not have computers, or access to computers? But even easier to just put them in jail together and then leave them there.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The real problems to be concerned about are:
That still doesn't get you anything. Because HappyMonkeyPooFace on slashdot could have a hundred other logins on slashdot as well. Bottom line is that there is no one-to-one relationship between people and screen names. No matter how many screen names you register as belonging to John Q. Sexoffender, he can always get another one that isn't registered, and how are you gonna know?
In other words, this plan boils down to, "Hey everybody on the internet, if you are a predator, please let us know before you rape our children, K?"
The whole suggestion depends on the voluntary self-identification of sex offenders, and if we could count on that, we wouldn't NEED any system at all. The only thing such a policy could possibly do is provide additionaly criminal penalties that can be tacked on once an offender is caught, which is ridiculous because the penalties for their actual crime should be enough to keep them locked up forever.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
So how do you stop people just instantly registering a new e-mail address with hotmail, GMail, Yahoo mail, 10-Minute Mail, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc?
See the problem yet?
And for usernames, how many times have you tried to sign up to a site to be met with: "Username 'm0le5ter69' already in use, please choose another"? So what chance is there of having a register with "their" username on it? Even if the paedophile plays along and reports every online account he sets up, they could well wind up with hundreds of usernames associated with each person. That's a lot of overhead when searching or cross-referencing and a lot of false positives when looking for those usernames on the net.
The only way this could work even in theory would be for there to be some kind of mandatory, permanent, unchangeable net-identity infrastructure which could be tagged to forum postings, e-mails and social networking sites. But there isn't. And if there were, how are you going to possibly enforce it and what makes you think that it's worth losing the anonymity of the net for something so infrequent and unlikely as a kid getting abducted?
And with all due respect to your children, I'm not (and I suspect everyone else isn't) giving up my cherished net anonymity on the merest off-chance that it might reduce the chance of a child being groomed for abuse on-line because their parents haven't done a good enough job of teaching them proper, safe online behaviour.
I don't think anyone's against the idea of making paedophiles easier to track or bar from sites frequented by minors, and everyone wants kids to be able to play safely. But if the only way to do it is to make every human being on the net trackable in the same way, you can fuck right off.
Not aimed at you personally, but in general:
Your "right" to leave your kids unsupervised and have nothing bad happen to them does not trump my right to privacy.
Or, more generally:
Don't infringe my rights because you can't be bothered to perform your duties.
End of argument.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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.
Might be, but unless the original crimes were perpetrated online, I don't think it's at all fair. Criminals they may be, and of a particularly nefarious sort, but they still have rights, and restricting those rights as a safety measure is reasonable, but should be applied in moderation
If this sounds like too much protection of a sex offender's rights, think banning a murderer from buying knives because they are a popular murder weapon. Computers today are WAY too much of a general-purpose tool to go banning people from using them without good reason.
So, we're talking about a law that, applied to ordinary citizens, would be considered unjust. And we even admit that it will have no value if applied only to sex-offenders. But that's okay, because it's really just a way to punish them, and they deserve to be punished more. Always more. They can never be punished enough. This is how we justify it?
If the punishment for their actual crime is not sufficient, why do we not just increase the punishment? Why create all sorts of imaginary pseudo-crimes to heap onto them? How is this justice?
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!
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
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.
[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.
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
I fear this is the end of my "SexualPredator1973" screen name...
As little as 200 years ago, sex between young teenagers was perfectly normal. Sex between 18+ year old men and girls as young as 13 and 14 was perfectly acceptable. The age of 16/18 that is used for statutory rape is completely arbitrary, contradicts normal human developmental behavior, and could change at any time. Non-consensual sex should be the only legal definition of rape. Statutory rape is a contradiction in terms and a legal fiction used to punish people for being human.
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...
This oubviously came to police attention prior to the act. Could they not have simply then set a trap and caught them in the act (of course, before anyone actually got raped)? That would give them even more justifiable reason to lock them up for longer, less wriggle room for legal defense, and would result in a better overall benefit to society IMHO.
This is simple...you just haven't heard the new govt. sponsored part of all this yet.
First, you will have to register with the Govnernment, all of us, not just the convicted....this will make it easier to track all potential criminals too.
YOu will not be allowed to log onto an internet connected computer without this govt. issued/registered logon identity.
This way, you can't get away with anything...and a wonderful side benefit...ALL your interactions, transactions will be monitored, and safely stored in a govt. data repository. In case there is need for future you against you.
Heck, I'm sure with wonderful data mining....and even a little creative associations, we can safely predict not only your future predilection to sexual crimes, but, also to potential terrorist activities.
Of course...I'm being a little sarcastic here, but, not totally. This would be about the only way to track and enforce this...I just hope this method isn't seriously put forth by our leaders.
It seems pretty clear already they don't like the thought of anonymity online....even for the innocent citizen out there doing nothing wrong...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Sign up? Way I read it, any name you use in a chatroom. So set up an IRC server on your own machine, connect, and use an IRC script to
- sequentially generate all legitimate IRC names, starting with a, then b, then eventually zzzzzzzzzz
- use
- send an email to the police informing them of your new online identity
Then start on the email addresses you have under the domain you own.
a@example.com
b@example.com
By the time you reach 999999999999999990000000zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.aaa@exa
Now start printing the email addresses in 4 point font on double-sided A4. Rent a transit van to drop off the first load at the local police station. Demand individual acknowledgement of each email address so that you know it's safe to use.
As soon as anybody tells you to stop, apply for a court order to make them follow the law, or give you immunity to prosecution.
(I suspect a court would slap an ASBO on you preventing you from using more than one email address, or some such silliness. I guess at that point firebombing the court building is about the best bet, because quite frankly, if you're getting fucked senseless by the law then you may as well fuck 'em back)
Oh, and don't forget to register jreid@parliament.gov.uk - you never know when you might use that to register with facebook...
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
Perhaps this is intended, as so many laws are, as a way to pile further punishment on criminals who have already been caught. "Not only were you caught trying to solicit sex from a minor, you were also using an unregistered screen name, Mr. Pedophile." Kind of like charging someone caught with cannabis with possession of "paraphernalia" because he also had rolling papers (not to mention intent to distribute because he had plastic bags in his kitchen.) On second thought, it's probably just more pointless, unenforceable legislation intended to evoke an emotional response from the voting public.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
The example of pedophilia was used, not because of any supposed criminality, but for the very reason that it is a condition and not itself a crime (activity). The point being that pedophile sex offenders are likely to repeat their crime, this because they are pedophiles, not because they are sex offenders. Thus my use of the term.
Your arguments are all anecdotal and cannot be proven.