Louisiana lawmakers being tough
A new bill was passed in Louisiana on Friday that requires all registered sex offenders to note their criminal status on all of their social network accounts — like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — similar to how state registration requirements work.
“It provides the same notice to persons in whose home you are injecting yourself via the Internet,” Louisiana State Rep. Jeff Thompson said. “I challenge you today to walk down the street to see how many people and children are checking Pinterest, Instagram, and other social-networking sites. If you look at how common it is, that’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week for somebody to interact with your children and your grandchildren.”
Thompson is the bill’s author and said that it’s the first of its kind in the U.S. The law goes into effect August 1.
Filling the gaps
Facebook and other social-networking sites have long prohibited sex offenders from signing up for accounts and have removed those that managed to log on. “You will not use Facebook if you are a convicted sex offender,” the social network’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities reads.
Louisiana’s new law is meant to catch those people the social networks miss. The law says that a registered sex offender “shall include in his profile for the networking Web site an indication that he is a sex offender or child predator and shall include notice of the crime for which he was convicted, the jurisdiction of conviction, a description of his physical characteristics… and his residential address.”
Those who violate the new law face up to 20 years prison time with hard labor, without parole and along with fines of up to $3,000.
wow! in a way this is good, but at the same time it can be bad. good because we want to know whose living next door, but bad because if an offender makes one wrong comment (or even no comment at all) they are automatically a target themselves just because. I’m not defending any predator or offender, just thinking.
all the information it will have on the offenders page is wowing to me….where it happened, when it happened and how along with their address…..dam
they will be easy targets for random acts of violence!
Except they wont be random, but rather preconceived,and specifically targeted acts of violence.
It would be interesting to see the ethical arguments used by those who eventually decided there should be a constitutional protection against forcing someone to incriminate themselves. Yes, such people as we are discussing here have already been found guilty of a sex-related offence, but that is a legal argument, not an ethical one.
Regardless, this l;aw reeks of being no more than a “feel-good” campaign issue that make them difficult to oppose for any reason whatsoever, while in practice these laws frequently reveal themselves to either be completely useless as a crime-prevention strategy, but very often are found to actually exacerbate the very issue they were supposed to guard against. The creation of a multi-billion dollar .black market in drugs that immediately began serving as the principal source of money gangsters could use to fund vast criminal enterprises that now dwarf any conceivable problem marijuana itself might pose us.
Here we have a law that is sure to drive sex-offenders who may simply wish to socialize with others in an entirely normal way, to now learn hacking/phracking skills they would otherwise have avoided. And like drug abuse, whenever society tries to prohibit a behavior out of existence, what happens instead is to drive it so far underground that it once again begins to flourish behind closed doors, thereby removing our ability to deal with the issues it creates as they come along. That lesson has been available to our leaders for decades now, however the benefits offered them by engaging in cheap, emotional politicking seems to be more important to them than actually taking the time and money it often takes to approach these kinds of issues in a coordinated and professional manner.