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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Because We All Know ‘Sex Offenders’ Only Get One Username

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira

In a truly ‘bad design for sex’ story out of Virginia, a 41-member task force investigating child pornography has released its findings and suggestions for how to combat “the dangers of the Internet.” Virginia State Attorney General Bob McDonnell, speaking with the usual smarts of politicians trying to make sense of the… what did he call it?

“The Internet represents a new frontier of the last 10 years or so for criminals,” McDonnell said during an afternoon news conference. “The big challenge is, How do we take those good old warnings we heard as kids into the cyber age?”

Oh, cyber. I was wondering where that prefix went.

In addition to proposing an educational campaign aimed at parents, the task force has discovered a peculiarity of user interface specific to those who have been convicted of sex crimes:

Last week, McDonnell announced he would seek a law requiring sex offenders to report their e-mail and instant-messenger addresses to the state so they could be blocked from the popular Web site MySpace.

That’s right. Of all the people who sexually abuse people, the tiny percentage who are actually caught and then convicted, plus all those people who find themselves labeled sex offenders for life for being queer in the wrong place at the wrong time (cruising at a truck stop, or in a tea room, for example)… once any of those folks crosses the line into registered ’sex offender’ territory, they automatically lose the ability to sign up for a new gmail account or a secondary iChat login.

If ever there were a reason that teenagers needed to be able to run for government, not just be protected by it, this is it — or maybe we just need some late-term politicians who manage their own Top 8.

Bonus polisex sleuth points to someone who can track down former Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s IM screennames (and I am so going to a special place in Google hell for just searching the pornalicious string, ‘republican foley IM teen’) so we can start adding to that upcoming database like the good citizens we are.

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