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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."
... but do regular people actually sign up with their real name / information, and even if they do, is it likely that sex offenders do too?
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.
"state attorney generals" => "state attorneys general"
General is an adjective, not the noun. You pluralize the noun not the adjective.
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
This case has me ambivalent. On the one hand, what about having a Myspace account is worthy of automatic surveillance? On the other, the recidivism rates for many sex offenders are incredibly high. Also, there are often many other embarrassing restrictions already placed on their lives much closer to home where people know them. I know, it's a touchy issue, but the more you think about it, the less clean-cut it seems.
u-bend
... do remember that it's never been easier to commit a sex crime that requires that you're place in a registry. Even people who get busted for 'indecent exposure' while urinating in an unwise place can end up on a sex offender registry.
n decent.html
http://www.criminal-law-lawyer-source.com/terms/i
Theoretically, you have to be trying to 'assualt' someone by exposing yourself. Of course any DA with an agenda can make certain charges stick with a plea-bargain deal, even when they might not otherwise be applicable.
How many people can afford to hire lawyers necessary to try to defend themselves in such a case? If you do try to fight it, I hope you've got a damn good Public Defender.
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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?
Up until the last couple of years, consensual homosexual acts have been able to put you on the sex offenders register in many states. Sex with a consenting partner, in a park, after midnight, when all children should long since be in bed - you're a sex offender. Oral sex in Utah? Mississippi's ludicrous "sex with a minor unless you can prove she was not of previously virtuous character.."? They all merit a place on the list.
I don't dispute that identifying those who prey on children may have its merits. Given the sex offender registry is a great way of stitching red letters on the chests of anyone that offends good conservative taste, that is hardly its sole effect.
Given how open to abuse the system is, how long before the MPAA figures, "Hey, there's hardcore porn on them there torrents. I wonder if we could get anyone that uses them labeled a sex offender, destroy their lives, and kill off torrents that way, without worrying about trying to prove actual piracy."?
I've never got caught having sex in public nor getting a blowjob in Utah. I also happen to be straight. Still, even if I had been caught for any of those acts, it's absolutely none of their business whether I use MySpace.
Mind you, I also grew up in England where, after the Daily Mail posted a list of 1,000 sex offenders, including some errors, a paediatrician got their house burned down. Dirty paediatricians! I hate the way they look at and touch children!
I enjoy reading the repeated calls for age verification on social networking sites. Never does anyone making this demand suggest a feasible solution, they just pound their shoes on the table and say, "make it happen!" Even better are the calls for requiring parental permission for minors. Think for about 30 seconds about how one might accomplish that feat. Yeah.
...I've read about where people have ended up living under bridges because there's nowhere that's not too close to something, they should probably be happy they didn't get collectively banned for hanging out at the same place many young people do. While I do understand the need for protection, the US looks like the kind of place where you're so utterly, completely head-to-toe screwed that you can't possibly redeem yourself and live a honest and normal life. And I'm not talking about the babyraping kind, the kind that was drunk, horny and didn't catch the jailbait signs.
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Hilarity will soon follow, I'm sure.
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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.
How does Myspace get those informations?
Well the first response above is one of my own reactions. How hard is it to just use fake information? How exactly are they narrowing down sex offenders on MySpace? Then I realized that most sex offenders are morons and this probably would nab them. Then again what happens to people in the same general area that have the same or a similar name? I am a little confused as to what this will prove. How do you know the MySpace account wasn't setup as someone pretending to be the sex offender trying to get them in trouble? There seems to be a lot of murky areas here.
From the Bureau of Justice:
To me, these statistics do not indicate an "incredibly high" recidivism rate. Sure, sex offenders are more likely than non-sex offenders to commit a sex offense, but if 2.5% recidivism is high enough to justify lifetime tracking, then 1.2% (for murder!) is as well.
I read this and I'm wondering what this will be used for first, catching the pedos or target marketing to them.
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The summary has both "attorney generals" and "attorneys general." Does anyone care to hazard a guess as to which one is correct? The word "general" describes the attorneys--it's "general" the adjective, not the noun.
That and "son of a bitches." Bah. It's SONS OF A BITCH or SONS OF BITCHES (depending on the number of dogs involved). Our science isn't advanced enough to generate one son from more than one female dog, damn it!
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
"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.
...that it covers half the MySpace population. Don't the majority of people use MySpace for getting sex? Being a /.er, I wouldn't know. Also, being married, I don't know much about sex these days.
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And since Georgia is one of the states mentioned in this article, let's observe that Genarlow Wilson is still in prison, http://www.wilsonappeal.com/index.php , and will be on one of these lists in about 8 years when he gets out. Not bad, for getting a blow job from a 15 year old when you're 17.
Crap...mispost. The interesting part would be testing for login and/or message patterns, by offender type and profile (as generated from the offender pool).
Read what I wrote. You're responding to a strawman here.
The vast majority of sex offenders will not reoffend. Out of thos ewho will reoofend, the vast majority are not going to put anyone at risk by using MySpace. In fact, most sex offenders commit offence against people they already know. Many people who are on the list committed very minor crimes, or had sex with someone a couple of months younger than them when they were teens, or even are simply considered to be at risk of committing a sexual offence.
On the other hand, any sex offender who has never been caught or convicted will be able to use MySpace with impunity.
Most child molesters / sex offenders are actually quite intelligent. They setup and exploit national as well as international rings to share photos etc. They commit their crimes dozens, sometimes hundreds of times under the radar without being caught. Never ever dismiss them as morons. They are often the hardest criminals to catch and furthermore convict. The worst ones are also the best at the manipulation, not just of children, but of the justice system.
Case in point, the Catholic churches issues with sex offenders. They masterfully manipulated an entire international religious organization and continue to do so to this day. It takes a lot of resources to deal with these people and it takes a huge emotional toll on the people who do it for a living.
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.
Why are most people assuming that the sex offenders are being identified by their user profile information? The FBI/Attorney Generals are probably already monitoring their behaviors and provided their IPs or other identifying information to MySpace, making it easy to track and report on their myspace habits.
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.
Which is why the aggrieved shouldn't be allowed to dictate policy for the rest of us. That's how we get laws like we have, how we got into the Iraq war... I know this will be flamebait and start a whole new thread of wangst, but that's why there's a mod for it.
Are you serious?? They'd have to let pot smokers out of jail to make room for the mother stabbers and father rapers.
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Saudi Arabia does have a handle on crime. The reason for this is they have a massively well funded secret police force with the right to do pretty much what ever they want, courts that sentence people to death at the drop of a hat and absolutely no civil liberties. I wouldn't like to speculate how many people are wrongly convicted there every year, but it works because people are shit scared of the authorities.
You can't have it both ways. You can either live in a (relatively) free society and put up with the effects of those who will abuse that freedom. Or you can live in a Nazi style state where nobody (except the authorities) has any freedom to abuse.
I would suggest the violence inflicted on the Saudi population by their govt. under this system is probably at least an order of magnitude more severe than any violence prevented by the fear of these repressive laws. I would also argue that this applies generally, more repressive legislation can reduce criminality outside the govt. but will increase the criminality and oppressiveness of govt. itself.
Going back to the middle ages will not solve our social problems, as much as you would clearly like it to.
How about: There was a case featured in the November 1996 issue of "Marie Claire" involving an Atlanta wife who tried to have her soon-to-be ex-husband charged with rape. She had persuaded her then hubby to tie her up and later used the bondage as a means of proving that the sex had not been consensual. Her sister came forward and informed the court of the plot against the man, but there was another twist in the story.
Although the man was acquitted on the rape charge, the man was sentenced to five years in jail for having performed oral sex on the woman. He had admitted to that during the course of the case and so he was charged and sentenced under Georgia law. Source
From the same article:
I guess his browser doesn't support sarcasm tags. Alternatively, he might have had his speakers turned off, so he couldn't hear the Colbert impersonation.
And how does the FBI no which public wireless hotspot a sex offender is accessing the internet through?
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?
er....well...I guess that would be a problem in this case.
well then...."won't someone please not think of the children?"
Pandering to the lowest common denominator would be less frequent if more people were prime numbers.
Naah, I'm just overthinking this
States AGs are looking at this purely as a political issue. One would have to conclude if one watched local news and listened to their State's AG that approximately 1 billion percent of everyone on the internet over the age of 17 is a child raping communist homosexual terrorist sex offender. A hundred crimes? That's what they point to? A hundred crimes.
If only getting guns off the street for a hundred murders were this easy. If only the regulation of dangerous dog breeds for a hundred maulings were this easy. But hey! The internet will turn your virgin daughters into Islamofascists with a crackpipe in one hand and a grown man's cock in the other.
Being a Virginia resident, I have to confess that I have broken that law many, many times. But remind me never to move to Willowdale, I'd really miss that...does it count if you're not actually married? ;-)
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If the younger person is under 18 take half the age of the older person and add seven. Here are the the results.
- It is acceptable for a 20 year old to have a sexual relationship with a 17 year old.
- It is not acceptable for a 20 year old to have a sexual relationship with a 15 year old. But it is acceptable for a 16 year old to have a relationship with a 15 year old.
- If two 14 year olds want to play doctor that's fine.
- It is unacceptable for anyone of any age to have sex with a 13 year old.
Sure, there's still a dividing line, but it beats the current system in some states where overzealous prosecutors will arrest a boy on his 18th birthday for having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend. And at least this way once a relationship is legal, it's always legal."The formula" works for adults as well, but we can't and shouldn't regulate the sexual behviour of consenting adults. However, if you're 40 and dating a 20 year old, it's going to raise eyebrows. Dating a 27 year old, not so much.
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In a local case, an fireman and a young woman had consensual sex in a private yet kinky location, with him taking digital pictures of her. The initial contact was over the Internet, where she claimed to be eighteen.
When her boyfriend found out about this, he reported the fireman for having sex with a minor. The police investigated, found the camera, and deleted the images so that he wouldn't be on trial for possessing child porn. Their reasoning was that they didn't want to risk the pictures ending up on the Internet. I also get the feeling that they had evidence that the young woman had lied about her age, which turned marginally legal pictures into illegal child porn.
That created a major public outburst with a lot of people wanting the heads of the police and the fireman.
The fireman lost his job because of inappropriate use of government facilities. (He used firehouse computers to access porn sites while on duty, among other things.) But there is little if any mention of the fact that the young woman lied about her age.
This is one of those situations where the label 'sex offender' should either be avoided competely or applied to both participants. And various laws need to be written to handle situations where a lie by a consenting party toggles an activity from 'misbehaving' to 'major felony.'