TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: Tom Corbett

  • PA AG does things the right way

    MySpace Helps AG Crackdown On Sex Offenders:

    Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett is in the process of possibly cracking down on 185 Pa. sex offenders that are on MySpace.

    What is AG Corbett doing differently than most of the AG’s I’ve written about? He’s not grandstanding and he’s not putting the blame to MySpace to garner votes. (Unlike AG’s Blumenthal, Cuomo, and Cooper.)

    “So we were able to discover who they were – at least MySpace was. Our concern is that there’s other people who are registered sex offenders that probably have MySpace accounts that there’s no way if they use an alias that we’re going to discover.”

    Wow, he even addresses the issue of sex offenders using aliases on MySpace and he does it realistically.

    Once the records from MySpace have been reviewed the AG’s office will be forwarding the information to the sex offenders’ parole officers.

    Other AG’s should take note that this is how to get things done instead of pandering to clueless soccer moms.

    Thanks to Gage for the tip.

  • Even the AG’s admit it’s useless

    Even the AG’s admit it’s useless

    My not so safe space, still?:

    This is a great article from the Philadelphia Inquirer about how MySpace’s ‘pact’ with the Attorneys General is pretty much useless. Who says so? Why, Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett says so.

    That’s because the safety barriers it prescribes depend largely on MySpace subscribers’ truthfully reporting their ages when creating online profiles. And it offers no reliable means of identifying or policing the suspected millions who do not.

    “I’ve been arguing this point for more than a year now,” said Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett, who considers the agreement more blueprint than panacea. “Age verification has been the number-one issue for us from the very beginning.”

    Until that nut is cracked, no set of guidelines can keep 12-year-olds from registering their virtual selves as adults, or stop 60-year-old creeps from masquerading online as high school cheerleaders.

    Yet none of the Attorneys General have come up with a realistic way on how to verify age on the internet.

    The article also, at the very end, prescribes to common sense.

    But police say the best security of all is a vigilant parent – one who knows a child’s passwords, monitors his online friends and activities, and keeps the computer in a public area of the home. Some even buy spyware that can record their kids’ online conversations and Web visits.

    “A lot of parents don’t want to do that because they don’t want to invade their kids’ privacy,” said Montgomery County Detective Ray Kuter, an Internet-crime expert. “I say, ‘You are the parent. You need to decide what to do.’ “

    “Parents,” Kuter said, “are the best monitoring program we know of.”

    The police know this, why don’t the Attorneys General?