@Daniel
>> I tend to agree with the principle of making life as awkward as possible for genuine paedophiles.
Yes, I agree. I think the governement should make badges for sexual offenders to wear (perhaps a fylfot symbol), and make standard issue pokie sticks for everyone else. If you see someone wearing a pedo badge, you may poke at will. Or better yet, they could have an elctro-shock device implanted, that could be triggered by random passers-by.
And of course, all sexual offenders should be required to use a dodgy copy of Windows ME, so that even if they manage to get online, they problably won't have time to load a social networking site, let alone chat anyone up.
>>One of the problems with the existing system is that paedophiles are very difficult to lock away. Not because they don't get caught, but because they're becoming increasingly adept at exploiting loopholes and getting away with a slapped wrist. If they have committed a crime for which the police want to prosecute, but they can't convict on the available evidence (or if the punishment is so small as to be risible) they can use this law to get a jail sentence anyway.
Damn habeus corpus! Mere suspicion should be enough! Those poor police, if they can't produce actual evidence, they have to come up with some trumped up bogus crap like "failure to register an email address" to lock people up!
It would be so much easier for the state to provide all sexual affenders with approved physical addresses. For convenience, it could be the address of a state facility, such as a prison. And they should be shot on sight if they try to exploit some "loop hole" like trying to tunneling out, registering a false email address, or attempting to visit any social networking sight, including Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google, and of course el Reg!