Once again, Senators with little knowledge of how the Internet works are writing flawed legislation. John McCain (R-AZ) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) are pushing a “feel good” bill to the senate floor that would require sex offenders to submit e-mail addresses, instant-message names, and other identifying Internet information to federal authorities.
Sure, who doesn’t want to protect children online from sexual predators? The problem is that the legislation is difficult to near impossible to enforce, and would require nearly every website that has social interaction to link to a sexual predators database. The blog MyCrimeSpace has a good posting on this as well.
From the article:
As for the bill’s intent to stop age misrepresentation, Internet safety experts say nice try, but hardly enforceable. Parry Aftab, a cyberspace attorney and executive director of the 8-year-old WiredSafety.org, said only “the stupidest” online predators would use their registered online monikers. And “while there’s a lot of stupid sexual predators, it’s easy to get around (the proposal).”
“I love the idea, but who’s going to comply?” Aftab said. “I don’t want to dismiss the efforts of anyone who’s trying to help, but what we’re coming up with is a lot of knee-jerk legislation.”