Sex offenders to register their e-mail and instant messaging addresses with law enforcement authorities. The legislation would see the Justice Department develop a system that allows social networking sites to check members’ addresses against individuals listed in the National Sex Offender Registry.
Violators who fail to comply with registering their online communication identities would face up to 10 years in prison under the bill. If the offender was on supervised release from prison, the individual’s probation would be revoked.
I have a number of concerns about this. It helps with convicted sex-offenders who are captured under this legislation, but does nothing for those who have never been caught. Since it is so easy for these offenders to acquire a new email address, the law doesn’t seem to be as effective as preventing problems as it may be to add to charges if a convicted offender is caught using an unregistered email address.
The proposal may have the support of MySpace and Facebook, but consider this proposal in the context of litigation. According to the Reuters story,
Sex offender data is currently collected by individual state authorities. MySpace and background verification company Sentinel Tech Holdings Corp. developed a technology that combines those registries to help police track some 600,000 convicted sex offenders.
MySpace is in a partnership with Sentinel.
Is anyone concerned about a barrier to entry for future social networking competitors, since new entrants will need to make use of the MySpace-Sentinel database. Does this database become a bottleneck that needs regulatory oversight? Any net neutrality concerns about this?
What will happen to sites that may not be able to access the data? What child abuse protections are there for foreign-based social networking sites?
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illegal content, net neutrality, MySpace, Facebook