Say Anything Blog

I don’t have any sympathy for sex offenders, but this seems stupid:

The latest scuffle over online privacy is brewing up in Georgia.  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.

A similar law in Utah was already struck down by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the privacy rights of an offender who challenged it.  However, that ruling was rather narrow as it applied to an offender tried on a military conviction who had never been in Utah’s court or prison system.

Critics of the Georgian 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.  Sara Totonchi of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights states, “There’s certainly a privacy concern.  This essentially will give law enforcement the ability to read e-mails between family members, between employers.”

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.”

First, let me point out that this system would be almost impossible to enforce because it relies entirely upon sex offenders offering up their own information.  How hard is it to just create a MySpace profile or something under a fake name and simply not disclose that to authorities?  Sure an offender could be slapped with non-compliance after they get caught in a crime, but the point here is to prevent that from happening.

Second, the administrative cost is going to be enormous.  Who is going to sit around all day reading the email and online postings of sex offenders?

Third, even if there were a way to solve the problems in my first two points in a satisfactory manner, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with the idea that we’re letting sex offenders out of prison that are apparently so dangerous they can’t even be trusted with an unmonitored email account?  Maybe instead of letting them out into the public and then trying to monitor every little thing they do we should just keep them in jail.

Given the amount of cost that goes into tracking where they live, where they work and now apparently what they do online, keeping them in jail would not only be the safer alternative it’d be the cheaper one too.