New York Lawmakers Jump on the Useless Social Monitoring Bandwagon

It wasn't enough to just go along with the useless MySpace “agreement,” New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo joined forces with State Sen. Joseph Bruno and State Assemblyman Sheldon Silver in announcing the Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (E-Stop… isn't that CUTE?), which is a new bill that promises to prevent sex offenders from accessing social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Without getting into the nitty gritty of the bill, it proposes to do this by (wait for it), requiring registered sex offenders in New York to disclose their email addresses and online identities. New York will them compile this data and turn it over to the sites, allowing them to cross-reference this list with their user database, and then block access when they get a match.

Have you stopped laughing yet? The proposed law would view a change of email address without notification within 5 days of the change as a parole violation.

I'm a New York State resident, and I honestly have to believe that the Attorney General's office just can't figure out how to actually get anyone with any kind of technical knowledge to give input when proposing this sort of legislation. The number of ways to avoid being caught at this are astronomical, especially when you consider that New York has 25,000 registered sex offenders who could possibly be on this list. I can probably register for 10 new email addresses in the next five minutes using a Web anonymizer program. The sex offender registry has shown time and time again that they can't even keep track of WHERE many of the sex offenders are, and I'm supposed to believe they will be able to track something as changeable as an email address?

These initiatives are getting a great deal of press lately, and are nothing more than empty attempts with no real protection behind them. I'm far more interested in the proposal that Symantec has floated at DEMO this week, which is supposed to put more of the responsibility for staying safe online in a combined effort between parents and children. Anything has to be better than what the legislators are coming up with.