Sex Offenders in the state of Georgia must turn over all of their screen names and passwords under a strict new law that began yesterday. The purpose is to give law enforcement the ability to use their logon information to monitor the offenders’ activities online. While this might have been a good idea in theory, it is a horrible idea in practice.


Registered Georgia Statuatory Rapist Dannie Lee Clinage

From Daily Tech here by way of Hot Air:

An aggressive new law is set to take effect today which will force sex offenders to hand over their internet passwords, screen names, and e-mail addresses to the government for monitoring purposes.  Several other states also have efforts that track sex offender’s email and screen names.  However, Georgia, which has 16,000 registered offenders, will be the first state to demand the sex offenders’ passwords as well.

Critics of the law say that it not only violates the privacy rights of offenders, but it also places undue stress on the already tight-for-cash Georgian law enforcement.

State Sen. Cecil Staton (R.) who wrote the bill argues that it is necessary to strip the rights of some citizens to protect the rights to life and liberty of others, particularly children.  He states that the benefits of the bill, which will allow law enforcement to detect stalking by predators sooner “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.”

He states, “We limit where they can live, we make their information available on the Internet. To some degree, we do invade their privacy.  But the feeling is, they have forfeited, to some degree, some privacy rights.”

First of all, if you are worried about child molesters re-offending and molesting more kids when they get out of jail, there is a real easy solution-  longer jail sentences.

Secondly, providing the usernames and passwords will be completely ineffective.  It is easy enough to provide law enforcement with bogus active accounts and hide other ones that the offender uses to stalk children online or participate in other improper activity.

Parole officers are not trained computer forensics experts either.  They will probably not be able to tell that a parolee is using a hidden account on the internet.

The best way to monitor these offenders is to provide them a hard-coded computer that forces the offender to use a web proxy that law enforcement can monitor.  Or better yet, the ISP’s can simply route all internet connectivity of sex offenders through a monitored VLAN.  The technology exists and monitoring could be effective.  But making State Troopers manually log onto web services by hand is time consuming, stupid, and will ultimately FAIL.

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