Social-networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace have identified and disabled accounts used by more than 3,500 registered sex offenders in New York State using a law passed last year that requires sex offenders to register their emails and online aliases with the state, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday.
Cuomo said many of the offenders were violating their parole by being on social-networking sites and are prohibited from interacting with young people. (Let's be clear, this law only applies to those on probation/parole. Any sex offender who completes his probation would be permitted to be on such sites)
Under the state's Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act passed last year, registered sex offenders are required to register their emails and other online identifiers with the state. The law sets mandatory restrictions on a sex offender's access to the Internet where the offender's victim was a minor, the Internet was used to commit the offense or they are among the highest-level offenders.
Cuomo's office is sending letters to 17 other social-networking sites encouraging them to take advantage of the data gathered under the law, including classmates.com and Friendster, Cuomo said.
We have posted on this topic several times. What these buffoons are unable to understand is that any sex offender can get a secondary email address and sign-up with an unregistered email address and false name. This is not rocket science, people. Furthermore, research shows that the median age for facebook /myspace is 27/26 years of age respectively. In other words, social networking sites are not the Internet equivalent to children's playgrounds, as the media would have us believe.
Hysteria about these social netowrking sites has long ago been proven to be overblown.
See our postings “Report Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown”, and “Sex Offender on Social Site = Felony”
