Slashdot Mirror
MySpace Agrees to Share Sex Offender Data
mikesd81 writes "The Seattle Times is reporting that MySpace will be providing a number of state attorney generals with data on registered sex offenders who use their site. Attorney generals from eight states demanded last week that the company provide data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live. MySpace obtained the data from Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., which the company partnered with in December to build a database with information on sex offenders. Attorneys general in North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked for the Sentinel data last week."
While I can see the ACLU taking this to court for invasion on personal privacy I personally applaud this. Those who break these type of laws and are still at risk for doing it again should have restricted privacy for the safety of others. More so when it involves innocent defenseless children.
Joe Slashdot: >www.myspace.com
,.^$.!G*...
"You are not permited to access myspace. Your IP is on the Sentinel watchlist"
JS: WTF??? What is 'Sentinel'??? Ok, >google 'Sentinel'
"We at Google regret to inform you that you cannot access Google at this time. Your name has been flagged by the Arkansas State Outstanding Warrants Project"
JS: I've never been to Arkansas in my whole fucking life!!!! >Yahoo search
"Yahoo does not do business with people who have overdue library books"
JS: Ok, I'll ask slashdot! People there know everything. >slashdot.org
---Message from Southwestern Cable Services: Your account has been terminated. &%.,78(*...NO CARRIER
Problem: People (children included) seek viable mates via MySpace. Prospective mates turn out to be rapists or sexual deviants.
Solution A: Don't seek mates on MySpace & teach your children common sense about acceptable human mating practices. Show your children how to safely use the internet, how to meet real people and make friends in reality instead of through a virtual layer.
Solution B: Police MySpace at the expense of everyone's (180 million) privacy.
Now, which solution is the correct one? The one that involves you being a responsible person/parent or the one that involves you infringing on a person's basic rights? If you are going to argue for the latter, first answer how they will acquire information about sex offenders without first examining everyone's behavior.
If they are at risk of re-offending, don't release them.
It is really fucking lame to let these guys out as if they had 'paid their debt' like any murderer, rapist or thief and then treat them as second-class citizens. The murderers don't have people telling them where to live! Thieves don't have to sign up for a 'watch list' and tell people when they move, because they might steal again!
What's worse? The death of a human or the sexual abuse of a human? Since I don't believe in that nonsense about an 'afterlife', I must say killing is worse than sexual abuse. Way worse. Way WAY worse.
I've had enough of my rights infringed upon in the name of the 'innocent defenseless children' so that dog won't hunt. Try another angle, brotha!
Blar.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that not all inter-generational relationships are abusive, it's easy to prove adulthood, by demanding a credit-card check. However, how is it possible online to robustly age-verify a person as under 18?
Does anyone know if any provider has made any progress on this?
I know plenty of MySpace Morons in real life and have seen more than a few of their garishly decorated user profiles. I can assure you that plenty of "regular people" sign up with their real names and "information". MySpace shifted the IQ bell curve of Internet users like no other website before it.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
My favorite one is turning 18 before your girlfriend/boyfriend does.
While /. usually is all for privacy in cases such as this I believe the sex offender made a choice to give up their privacy as soon as they performed the criminal act.
/. or somewhere else but I do remember reading a very heated discussion about sex offenders recently.
Unfortunately there are numerous cases that have caused a person to be labeled as a "sex offender" that should have never occurred. In some cases children (People under 18) have been convicted of child molestation. Or parents who take pictures of their children in the tub have been arrested for child pornography. Right now the major issue is that laws designed to protect children can be used against children.
I don't remember if it was on
Then why are they out of prison? These registries are populated entirely by people who should be in prison for life or worse, and by people who should never have been punished. Nobody actually belongs on these lists.
"Actually, death is too good for them."
Do you beleave in forgiveness? Do you beleave harm to one person should lead to the destruction of another?
Hate by any other name is still hate.
Morally you don't appear to be too well off.
I am a doctor who has some "sex offenders" among my patients. They range from rapists and paedophiles to people who harmed nobody but those with a narrow religiously based world view (eg people having sex in a public place without intent of being discovered, like in a bush after dark in a park).
I define sex offenders as people who cause grief to others through non-consensual acts.
However, U.S. legislation has a much broader view on this, depending on state - in some states the term includes virtually everybody who doesn't fit into a very narrow minded strongly religiously biased cultural view.
My first observation would be that very different people are lumped together under the same tag, a tag which will cause suffering way beyond whatever suffering they may or may not have caused to others.
We all remember the case of a female teacher having had consensual sex with a physically fully developed but legally under age boy. She was convicted as a sex offender, put to jail, and after she was released, the boy married her. Who has suffered here? The boy? Obviously not. He said so, and he demonstrated it by marrying her after she was released from prison. Only he woman suffered grievously under the assault by the legal system, and will probably suffer from the consequences of the conviction and the label of "sex offender" the rest of her life. To what avail? Just to have satisfied the puritan narrow minded views of a few judges and religious zealots.
Plenty of legal cases, mostly from the US, going along similar lines.
The point is that a number of people are deprived of their constitutional and basic human rights. While I agree that in some extreme cases this might be necessary in order to defend others, in the majority of people who are tagged with the label of "sex offender"this is definitely not the case.
The US judicial system is increasingly mutating from a system designed to protect people into a system to enforce the narrow world view of a few zealots; a system that cannot even be reconciled with the constitution.
There was a recent story of a teenage boy who had sex with a teenage girl a year younger than him and became a "convicted sex offender". He'll be in such a registry and it gives me the creeps to think he's going to be watched the rest of his life. Let's face it, if at age 17 you weren't having sex with teenage girls, you wanted to (or if you're female, vice versa).
It also kind of creeps me out that "sex offenders" have become a completely separate class of criminal. Why shouldn't burglars, drunk drivers, embezzlers or other white collar criminals be kept on a registry and be exposed to any community into which they move? Why not shoplifters or people who've been convicted of any drug offense?
Considering the percentage of elected officials who've been convicted of crimes, we'd have to create special island communities in which they could live.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You can get their point of view, but you can't really get the opinion of a murder victim since, well, they are dead and never coming back. A rape victim may well say that rape is the worst possible thing in the world because it is the worst thing that's ever happened to them. That doesn't mean that a dead person would agree, if they were capable of doing so. You also could ask the family how they feel, would they rather their child/spouse/parent was traumatized, or dead and gone forever.
No one is saying that rape isn't extremely traumatic, but death is, well, final. You can overcome being raped, you can't overcome being murdered.
Here in Florida, most communities are enacting completely unconstitutional laws barring exactly where "sex offenders" can live. In one community in the Tampa Bay area, they set the distance limit to something like 2,500 feet from *any* bus stop, church, school, library, etc. There were a few small areas in the town left over, which the city promptly added school bus stops despite there being no demand for them, effectively chasing out every sex offender, regardless of actual offense.
So, what happens to the really dangerous offenders? If they stay in the city, they end up homeless and wandering, probably eventually losing access to any medication or counseling they might have been receiving, and end up cold, hungry, and very angry. And all of that is supposed to make them LESS likely to offend? If they leave the city, and more and more communities pass laws like this, it will just shunt the problem out into the rural areas (where there are still children and lots of densely wooded areas and isolated buildings and no one nearby to hear the victims' cries). No, laws like this don't solve the problem, and the people who favor them are less interested in "solving" the problem than in merely making it "go away."
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Why do you say "sex offender"? Are you suggesting that a sexual offense is not a crime? I personally think sexual offenses should be some of the most punished crimes.
:-)
However, with that said, I do think the laws need to be tweaked a little. For example, there shouldn't be some silly age limit like say, I am 18 and my GF is 16. Her daddy finds out we "did it" and gets me nailed-to-the-cross. That is just sick IMO. On the other hand, If I am 34 (which I am) and my GF is 14, then maybe there should be a law against that. What if I were 27 and I had sex with a 12 y/o boy? Should that be cool? Not IMO. Oh, and I am not saying that gay sex should be outlawed or anything. I just think there should be a minimum age for consent (heterosexual and homosexual) with a maximum age of partner, unless you are at least 16, IMO. For example, a 12 y/o girl and 13 y/o boy do some experimenting. So be it. Been there, done that. It was fun. Now, if it is a 12 y/o girl and a 20 y/o guy, well that is just freaking sick IMO. There is a huge maturity difference both physically and emotionally between 12 and 20.
I don't want to see sex offenders to only be rapist (my wife was raped as an adult, it was very nasty). I feel this way because I know a guy who was molested as a boy. Totally screwed him up.
This is a very tricky subject. For example. A good friend of mine from HS has an older brother that was about 4 years older than us. I remember being in 8th grade and my buddy's brother was in 12th. He broke up with is demented GF. The night he broke up with her, she called the cops and said he raped her. It was a devastating blow to this guy and his family. He was a very good guy. He had a nasty court fight and eventually was cleared of all charges. However, if you have never gone through something like that, well I can tell you it really hurt him. I haven't seen him or heard from him in years now (I am 34). Last I remember, he didn't go to college. I hope he recovered and got the education he wanted.
Oh, this topic touches so many hard points. For example. Say I am 18 and my GF is 15. To me that is not a significant age difference. However that could be enough for the parents to get you marked as a "sex offender" (the only time I think it is OK to put that term in quotes). What I have a problem with in a situation like this is that at 16 I KNEW I wanted sex! I wasn't "forced" into it. However, it seems that only the guy is the one that gets rap. Why does the chick get off? Because she didn't reach that magical age of 18? I can tell you as an older dude, that at 16 I wanted sex, and at 18, I just wanted MORE sex
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
That's exactly the issue here, however. In your hypothetical, a 34 year old male should certainly be punished for having sexual relations with a 14 year old girl. Very few people would question that. However, should that singular offense lead to life on a list that will keep you from holding a job, living in a growing number of municipalities, and otherwise making your life simply unliveable?
I don't think that crime warrants what is effectively a life sentence, and certainly not on your first strike. Justice, after all, is not about revenge..
There are lots of other issues like this. For example, in Texas a stripper who is convicted of giving an overly suggestive lap dance can be charged with public lewdness... a 'crime' that can land you on the sex offender registry. So can selling 'obscene' materials at a porn store. That's the problem with these lists, they are meant to protect society from the most dangerous of offenders, but the hysterical of society expand them to include virtually any crime with any kind of sexual connotation.
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So maybe, and I'm just throwing this out as a thought here, maybe it's just a crazy idea, but maybe instead of trying to keep the sex offenders out of MySpace.com, perhaps we might spend a little time attempting to keep them out of the fucking police force? I mean really, it's a pretty sad day when a "social networking" web site is expected to do a better job of doing background checks on its users than the police can do on their job applicants.
Jeesh.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Or they'll just move to a different town that doesn't have similar restrictions. This is a classic example of CYA (cover your arse) security; it doesn't make a iota of a difference with regard to any future crimes that may be committed, but when something *does* happen, it allows the politicians involved to say "it's not our fault - we did something about it!". In fact, if it happens in another town, they can even pat themselves on the back and point to the fact that it didn't happen in theirs as evidence for how well their laws and regulations are working.
So, yeah - it's all about covering your own arse and being able to come across as a hardliner so you'll get more votes from the "won't somebody please think of the children" hardliner moos and BNPs. What it is NOT about - and what it actually does not achieve - is actually reducing crime or making anyone genuinely safer.
butter the donkey