Virginia Attorney General Proposes MySpace Bill:
Another State Attorney General who doesn’t get it jumps on the MySpace scarewagon. This time from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell announced plans today for legislation to require convicted sex offenders to register their online identities with the state.
That would allow social networking Web sites like MySpace to delete or block access. McDonnell’s says in a statement that Virginia would be the first state to propose registration of e-mail addresses and instant messaging identities on the state’s sex offender registry.
McDonnell says it’s important these changes be made at a state level because most prosecutions of sex offenders happen at the state level. There are more than 550-thousand registered sex offenders in the United States and 13-thousand in Virginia.
MySpace officials applauded the Virginia announcement, saying the Internet “is a community as real as any other neighborhood and is in need of similar safeguards.”
In my opinion, this proposed legislation is just to garner votes from the equally clueless soccer mom types.
Again I say, what’s to stop the sex offenders from creating another account different from one registered with the state. And how will this prevent those predators who haven’t been caught from claiming another victim?
When you have those questions answered, then you’ll have some legislation with teeth instead of the same old crap that legislators have been trotting out.
Politicians and lawmakers should learn how to use the internet first before they start legislating it.
And again, not one mention of more vigilant parenting.
