Sex Offenders to Register Emails in Virginia

Isaac Bowman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Virgina has a proposed law that would require sex offenders to register their email and IM screen names in an attempt to monitor and control their presence on social networking sites like MySpace."

Re:Right

[AuMatar]

ANd the odds of that occuring? 100K:1?

Re:God damnit.

[somersault]

You can't send spam to inmates

Seems to me if they want to do something like this seriously, that everyone should be assigned an email address at birth *shrug*

What this will produce

[Opportunist]

First of all, there will be two kinds of former criminals: Those that really try to reintegrate into society and those that don't give a rat's ass and work harder to avoid getting caught.

The latter will simply register some waste-spam addy, get a new freemail addy and go hunting again.

The former will register their mail addresses. Now, let me predict the next step. The next step would be to make those mail addresses public so "you can see if your kids are mailing to a bad man", maybe including a tool for the really dumb parents who can't figure even that out.

First of all, those registered addresses will drown in spam, because a legit mail address is gold for a spammer. Second, they will drown in hate mail from overzealous self appointed protectors of innocence and other bullcrap. I bet my rear that there will, no week after that list goes public, be a mailing list, so you can reach all of them at once. The net effect of this is either that they get a new mail address they can use (and don't register it), or they turn towards a "society hates me so I hate it too, to hell with it!" stance.

In either case, all you get is that those people go further underground and get more careful, and are thus harder to track and catch.

Great job. Really, I feel a damn lot safer now.

Re:Comments

[Fred_A]

How is a sex offender defined?

Someone who buys (or is it uses ?) a sex toy in Texas ?
Someone who has extra marital sex ?
Someone who has "sex not for the sole purpose of reproduction" ?

You can define that in a lot of ways...

You miss the point

[Mr. Underbridge]

because registering a new email address and IM account is so hard. Better still, get an .i2p email address.

But like Capone with tax evasion, catching a pedophile using an unregistered email address would then be a chargeable offense. Probably easier than proving intent of kidfuckery.

Re:define: sex offender

[the_humeister]

Apparently in Utah [denverpost.com] you can be both a sex offender and a victim at age 13 for the same thing.

Re:God damnit.

[sasdrtx]

Not so, young padawan. You evidently suffer from the naive belief that "lawmakers" spend any time at all reading or thinking about the laws they pass. They do not in any substantive way. The only "law" they think about is revenues and spending, so they can use your money to bribe themselves another election. The rest of the stuff is interesting to them only as to its value as marketing.

Re:You miss the point

[Qzukk]

Ahh google comes through with the goods. A nice PDF of all of the registrable offenses in the various states [nicic.org].

In general, it looks like you're right. As long as students resist the urge to moon their principal on school grounds, most states wait until the second time they catch you pissing in public to register you for public indecency.

Fortunately it's in alphabetical order, making it easy to find such wonderful things like "obscene bumper stickers" as grounds for registration in Alabama.