Law Students

It Won’t Work But We’ll Do It Anyway

Senators Charles Schumer - whom you may recall is the Senator who keeps trying to reinstate the draft - and John McCain have had enough of sex offenders using Myspace, and so they’ve come up with a Great Idea for a federal law to solve the problem. They want to require sex offenders to submit their active email addresses to law enforcement officials so that these officials can create a nationwide database, and then sites like Facebook and Myspace will cross reference the email addresses of new members with that list. Any offender who submits a fraudulent email address could be facing some jail time.

Now, this sounds like a great idea, right? Umm, just one problem: it’s ridiculously easy to get an email address. Or ten email addresses. And it’s not like the cops are going to come by on a weekly basis to see how many email accounts you have. Besides, since sex offenders can quite easily trot down to the local [restaurant/cafe with free internet access] and never get caught anyway, what exactly is the purpose of this legislation? That’s right, kids: it’s a little thing I like to call “grandstanding.”

Just like the CAN-SPAM Act, which has been about as effective as bullspit in a bucket at keeping SPAM out of my inbox, this proposed legislation will do absolutely nothing to solve the problem, but it just might make some people happy that their Senators - at least one of which is a potential presidential campaigner in 2008 - are doing something “for the children.”

Full post as published by UnCivil Pro on December 14, 2006 (boomark / email).