Sex offender email monitoring plan mothballed A plan to require registered sex offenders to notify police of their email addresses and social networking identities has been shelved while the government battles a human rights judgment in the High Court, according to the Home Office. The measure was the centrepiece of a suite of announcements on child protection on and …
When, oh when, oh when ... will the government face up to the fact that there IS only one way to police the Internet ... which is to pull the plug on it. Anything else is insanity. Anyone doing anything criminal should already be encrypting their traffic and sailing straight under the nose of any effective form of policing.
The only thing sent unencrypted these days is spam mail. I feel for the poor civil servant who has to wade neck deep through that kind of stuff to find any meaningful correspondence that the government can prosecute someone with.
They have served thier time and have been released, so no there should be no restrictions.
If the government believes that they still pose a risk, which most predators do and always will, then they should be locked up for good.
The idea of a possible stretch in prison should scare no one as anyone in the public will realise that the cops cannot catch you, and if they manage to then the government has informed judges not to sentence people to prison time.
YOU CANNOT SEXUALLY ABUSE SOMEONE THROUGH THE INTERNET!
This whole "online predator" thing is complete bollocks -- if your child is young, naive or stupid enough to give out any real, usable, personal information on the internet then you have failed as a parent, simple as that.
In Wacky Jacqui's big brother world she has the right to do almost anything she wants and existing laws and interpretations thereof are only temporary inconveniences.
I always thought the idea of a prison sentence was to punish and also rehabilitate the offender. If the law calls for a particular sentence then how does the home secretary have the right to effectively extend that sentence to one of life?
Yes child sex offences are an emotive subject, anybody opposing WJ on this will no doubt be told to "please think of the children!" but if she pushes this one through how long will it be before she moves for similar legislation for other offences? How long before anybody with a criminal record has to report regularly to the police or probabtion service and hand over details of their personal life?
The problem here is that, in concentrating police efforts on previous offenders she is taking precious resources away from the hunt for new offenders. Remember that Sweeney style of policing where they just pulled in all the known scrotes on the manor until one of them coughed to the blag? That's the way WJ thinks policing should still work. Great, we've got Gene Hunt as home secretary.
"Jacqui Smith said failure by the more than 30,000 registered sex offenders to supply online identities or supplying false identities would attract up to a five year jail term. "We need to patrol the internet to keep predators away from children in the same way as we patrol the real world,"
In other words "We need to be flailing around making it look as if we have the power to stop things simply because it is our will. In reality we have neither the resources or brains to achieve anything useful".
Also, If sex offenders are required to supply details of their on-line identities then it means the authorities do not have the ability or wherewithal to find these out for themselves, so what is the likelihood of someone supplying false identities being caught for having done so?
Teenage sex offenders are given a life of luxury. There's one that lives in a flat above me.
There's a private organisation that takes care of them! They actually support them.
He's been put up in a privately owned flat, and the furniture, kitchen appliances all bought for him! It's unreal. And they send him on holidays too.
So, a sex offender, which the officals have presumably decided has had a bit of a rough childhood is treated to holidays and a privately owned flat, he's loving every second of it.
He should be banged up! And whilst living in the flat, he's sexually assaulted another girl and the Police have been round to question him about that.
He needs to be chemically castrated.
It's madness.
This sounds to me like a blatant attempt to discredit the Human Rights Act (even further).
As for Sarah's Law ..... Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I visited a large electrical retailer in my home city to buy a washing machine. I chose the model I wanted and went to the desk to discuss my payment options. All seemed to be going well, until ..... "COMPUTER SAYS 'NO'!" I was refused credit, on the basis that a former occupant of my address had run up substantial debts.
Being turned down for credit in front of a store full of customers -- all of whose eyes I could feel turning on me, staring at me, drilling into me -- for the actions of somebody else far beyond my control felt bad enough. A false positive under "Sarah's Law" (which, by the way, would not even have helped Sarah Payne) is a horror I can't even begin to imagine.
Anyway, either someone has learned their lesson and repaid their debt to society, in which case they deserve exactly the same rights as if they had never been convicted; or they haven't, in which case they deserve still to be in prison.
Not only does it remain fundamentally unworkable, but they still don't "get" the idea that once you've served your sentence, you're no longer 'owned' by HMG. Once you've done your time, you are (or should be) a free person again.
Oh, I hear people saying, but we're talking about paeds here, they deserve no rights. Really? Who decided that certain classes of criminality strip you of basic and unalienable human rights such as privacy?
'Sex offender' does *NOT* equal 'child abuser'.
In any case, if parents weren't so stupid as to give their little darlings unrestricted access to the internet and computers in the privacy of their own bedrooms, complete with webcams, digital cameras, and mobile phone cameras, then there wouldn't be aparticular threat to children anyway.
Letting a child use the internet unsupervised, even without cameras, is about as bad as letting underage children tart themselves up and go out to nightclubbings at weekends getting drunk, and no parent would be so irresponsible... oh... wait... *sigh*
Always getting in the way of the government's perfect world.
Cause and effect constrain reality to be one of a number possible worlds. Not so for imagination, where cause and effect need not apply, even tho imagination has effects, particularly in the autonomic nervous system.
Observe, then, the real states of mind of our governing politicians. No joy there. No happiness. Fear. Lots of fear. Fear of the masses. Fear of loss of power. Fear of motivated individuals. In some cases, fear of themselves.
Government is always getting in the way of reality's perfect world.
If a person is this much of a risk to society that we actually need to listen to every phone call they make, read every email they write and watch their daily activities through electronic tagging, shouldn't we be looking at why they're being released rather than what to do about it afterwards?
The major qualification for gaining parole is satisfying the parole board you won't re-offend. If the parole board isn't qualified to make that decision, perhaps it should be left to people who are. Psychiatrists that specialise in kiddy-fiddling maybe? And if they don't satisfy the same conditions as everyone else who makes parole, why are they being let out? Completing a prison sentence is not supposed to be sufficient to gain release. The fact most parole boards accept verbal promises as evidence of rehabilitation simply proves they don't understand what their jobs are.
Reality is most people that get released from prison probably don't qualify for that release. But we let them out anyway because our prisons are overcrowded and they've completed the minimum prison sentence they were ordered to serve. If we're just going to let predators walk free after a set number of years, what's the point of putting them in prison in the first place? All we're doing is delaying the inevitable. Perhaps, and I know this is controversial, but just perhaps it would be better to actually try to do some real rehabilitation? If we intend to let predators move back into society, wouldn't it be better just to let them do it right away when we still remember who they are and what they did? Or perhaps you prefer that we stealthily insert perverts and rapists into communities that aren't paranoid enough to monitor predator lists on a daily basis.
"if your child is young, naive or stupid enough" ...well D'uh, my kids are naive and often stupid. Kind of goes with being a kid. Oh, and they're *young*, too.
Me and the missus do try our best, but I think we'll just have to wait for them to grow up. That will cure the 'young' bit. Not so sure about the other two.
So until then its my fault if a sexual offender gets at them via the interweb thingy? Maybe there should be a sentence for being the parent of a sexually abused child. That might help me and the missus try even harder....Oh but wait. No it wouldn't.
Please see a selection of the USA responses, here:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendId=326633304
Reg, feel free to write a follow-up piece, based on this information, if you do not wish this URL to be here
BTW, the HO has until the 20th to decide if they were going to contest the HC decision ... you may like to ask them if they are gong to - definitely?
TY for your work.
NLO
"So until then its my fault if a sexual offender gets at them via the interweb thingy?"
Yes, partly. It's your job as a parent to 1. Teach your children the skills they will need to be safe online. 2. Assess your success in step one. 3. Monitor their internet use until step one is complete. This really shouldn't be too hard, the Internet is much safer than the real world after all, it's not like anyone can actually stab you or rape you through the computer.
Of course it depends on what you mean be "get at". If a sex offender talks to your child online, that's not your fault. That's not necessarily a fault at all. If a sex offender (or anyone else) convinces your child to send naked pictures and then uses those pictures to blackmail your child into some unwanted act, then it probably means you failed step one, two or three above.
I wonder how the government would take it if a sex offender got his own mailserver, and generated 10 million random email addresses for himself, each day, and sent the adresses as the wouldbe law states to police. There's no law that says you can't have more than one email addresses for yourself.
In a year police would end up with 3 650 000 000 email addresses for that single individual, provided it isn't a leap year. If the addresses were 30 letters long, that would mean 100 giga bytes of useless information, each year. And there's nothing stopping him from generatin 100 000 000 or even a few orders of magnitude more email addresses for himself each day.
If the government wants useless information it's best to provide them with it, overflowingly them with it. :)
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