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January 30, 2007 5:43 AM PST
Proposal requires sex offenders to list e-mail, IM
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The proposal says that such Web sites may--but are not required to--send a formal statement to the U.S. Department of Justice to request a list of sex offenders' e-mail addresses and screen names used for instant messaging.
A press conference is planned on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to announce the sex-offender legislation (PDF), a draft version of which was seen in advance by CNET News.com. Scheduled speakers include Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio, and MySpace.com Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam.
"This bill provides social-networking sites, which are an increasingly popular way for kids to connect with their friends, with one more tool to help keep our children safe from dangerous predators on the Internet," Pomeroy said in response to an inquiry Monday.
The legislation may also help allay the public relations problems that News Corp.-owned MySpace has encountered after a series of incidents involving adults using the popular service to seek sex with youths. Earlier this month, for instance, MySpace said it had developed software to let parents know what their children were doing online.
Current federal law requires that sex offenders provide information to the federal registry including their name, Social Security number, home address, work address, license plate number, DNA sample, fingerprints, and palm prints.
Pomeroy's so-called "Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act," or KIDS Act, would add the requirement of providing an e-mail address, instant message name and any other "similar Internet identifier."
The offender's e-mail address and other Internet information would be generally exempt from disclosure to the public. Social-networking sites, however, would be permitted to request it in confidence from the attorney general.
Social-networking sites are defined as any commercial Web site that permits people to create their own Web pages and offers a "mechanism for communication with other users," which would include sites like Slashdot.org, Amazon.com, CNET's Gamespot.com and CNET Reviews.
A similar version of the KIDS Act has been drafted by aides to Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican. One difference is that the draft Senate bill includes a revocation of supervised release for failure to register.
McCain has not introduced in the new Congress a related proposal from last year, which would force Web sites to report illegal images posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000 and delete Web pages posted by sex offenders.
Virginia's attorney general has also proposed an e-mail registration requirement for sex offenders.
See more CNET content tagged:
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On top of that, if this becomes a law, all the other companies would have to comply, reducing any loss of competitive advantage to MySpace, which to a major company, is a primary goal.
And what if an e-mail on the list get closed and then later on - another person registers it?
I'd hate to be labeled a sex offender just because I picked the wrong e-mail address at Yahoo or something.
Case in point: Some idiot gets on a plane with explosives stowed in his shoes. The government's response: Make everyone take off their shoes before boarding a plane. This solution fails to address the real problem that people bent on breaking the law will try to do so in new and horrible ways. Simply requiring a sex offender to register email addresses and screen names will do nothing because it is built on the assumption that these people THAT ALREADY BROKE THE LAW will now play by the rules. C'mon! If they want to, they'll just get another email address or another screen name and do it anonymously.
We need to come up with solutions to this problem that at least embrace the reality that bad people will break the law as many times as is necessary to keep doing what they are doing.
The department of homeland insecurity should take a lesson from this fiasco and start really doing something to protect us. Instead, we seem as a society to keep reacting to one specific situation instead of trying to address the general problem.
It should also be pointed out not all sex offenders are child molesters and/or predators, so there is a lot of unnecessary searching.
Currently, every organization on the Internet, be it MySpace, or Google, or Yahoo, or MSN, or CNET, or whoever, maintains their own independent database of who is who, making it very difficult to demonstrate who has committed what violations. Further, anyone can blur their activity trail even more by simply re-registering at different sites using different names -- since they all rely solely on user-provided information.
That being said, this proposal is probably a good start -- I'm sure there's a certain percentage of cases that will probably be prevented by something like this. However, many of the more savvy (I feel so tainted using that word to describe them) offenders will continue to find ways to blur their identities...
Free email and IM accounts are LESS THAN a dime a dozen. What the heck do these people think is going to make a sexual predator give them the one they may be using to continue the offenses that landed them in trouble to begin with?
Now get rid of the anonymous access to email and IMs and everything else and THEN you MIGHT be able to do it. If they can do that, I certainly don't have a problem with it.
Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com
And they SERIOUSLY expect the plan to work?
(* ROFLOL *) (* ROFLOL *) (* ROFLOL *)
Just an additional waist of taxpayers money and more bureautic red tape but it won't help to solve the problem in the least...
But hey... that's what the government is good at... mucking things up!!!
Walt