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Colorado Representatives Kerr and Swalm and Senators Sandoval and Johnson have released another bill in the long tradition of saving the children through the ineffective application of unexamined legislation. This particular case, HB1326, would enact "a requirement that certain sex offenders provide electronic communication identifiers when registering as sex offenders." The idea is to prevent further sexual abuse by restricting access to one of its main tools: the wild frontier of cyberspace.
Terrified of MySpace and Facebook, AOL and email, these members of the Colorado General Assembly are asking for a law that would require "a sex offender, who committed a sex offense involving a victim who was less than 18 years of age, when registering as a sex offender, to provide any email address, instant-messaging identity, or chat room identity prior to using the address or identity." The idea, of course, if that these lists can be passed on to parents and service providers, who will be able to block the criminals from interacting with children.
Lawmakers, who as a group are often woefully unhip to the ways of modern information technologies, can jump on a bill like this without fully exploring just how silly and ultimately useless it is. In the mad rush to do something, no matter what, about online sexual predators, they're willing to vote for costly new programs that will burn government resources and taxpayer dollars while accomplishing nothing effectively.
Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and countless others hand out free and unchecked email accounts like beer at a keg party. Some of these, like Hushmail, even offer extraordinarily high levels of encryption on email servers, making them virtually immune to use by prosecutors: "When one Hush user communicates with another Hush user, ... the mail they send is completely safe. To anyone other than the sender or the recipient of a Hush message, email appears as a jumble of numbers and letters. It is completely illegible." These services cost nothing use, take only minutes to sign up for, and leave no paper trail.
But won't using unregistered email addresses be illegal? If the bill passes, that'll be the case. Yet we need to keep in mind that the people the legislation targets, the ones who would be prosecuted for sending messages through email address not on the state's list, are sex offenders--and they're probably using those illicit accounts to lure minors into sexual encounters. Being convicted of utilizing an unauthorized chat room name is low on their hierarchy of concerns. Congress wants us to believe that a typical sex offender, faced with the need to register his new email address, would think, "You know, I was going to spend this weekend surfing the web to find children to rape but I'd have to do it with an unregistered chat room identity. I just can't bring myself to break that law, so I'll have to stick to picking up legal women at neighborhood bars."
The costs of setting up, maintaining, and enforcing the online identity registry will be considerable and the impact on sexual abuse negligible. Perhaps that money can be better spent educated children to avoid online predators instead of adopting measures calling for new and ineffective layers of government bureaucracy.
