1-30-2008 New York:
ALBANY — Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and state lawmakers, with the backing of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, are pushing a bill that would crack down on sex offenders’ use of the sites.
The law would require all registered sex offenders to submit any e-mail addresses and other Internet identifiers, such as screen names used for instant messaging, to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services within 10 days of their creation, just as with their home addresses.
Offenders who fail to do so would be violating their parole or probation, Mr. Cuomo said.
Under the bill, Level 3 sex offenders, whom the state considers the most dangerous and most likely to commit another sex crime, and sex offenders who used the Internet to commit sex crimes or who committed crimes against minors would be barred from social networking sites. Such offenders would also be barred from communicating online with children.
Lower-level sex offenders and sex offenders who did not use the Internet in their crimes would not be barred from the sites under the bill. MySpace and Facebook said, however, they would bar them anyway.
The bill also would allow the state to share the e-mail addresses with sites like Facebook and MySpace. Officials with both companies have agreed to check their databases against the lists provided by the state. If the addresses match, the companies said that they would terminate the users’ accounts and alert the authorities. When setting up accounts with the sites, users must submit valid e-mail addresses.
Mr. Cuomo, along with the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and other lawmakers, unveiled the bill on Tuesday. “This will take us to the next level,” said Mr. Cuomo, who applauded the bipartisan support for the bill. “It’s not just a conceptual agreement we have. There is a specific bill that is written.”
“We have to admit that life is different than when we were growing up,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Democrat from Brooklyn and a supporter of the bill. “We avoid letting our children go to the playground now. We avoid the opportunity for them to walk to school alone and not have some protection, or go to the mall alone. Yet our children are as much at risk in our own homes as they are anywhere — on our computers.”
Mr. Cuomo said that he did not believe that the bill, in tracking sex offenders and possibly restricting their Internet access, would violate their rights.
In May, MySpace implemented a program to find the profiles of any registered sex offenders on the site and remove them, said Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for the company. ..more.. by TRYMAINE LEE
1 comment:
Even though New York has had it on the books for several years that RSOs must register their e-mail addresses. They have only required this of new registrants. They do not require registrants to update their information.
It seems that the people who have to enforce this law know how useless it is.
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