The just-signed Illinois law banning sex offenders from social-networking sites might seem like a good idea to protect children, but it will have virtually no impact on their safety and could wind up making things worse.
The law, which was signed Thursday by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, would prevent registered sex offenders in Illinois from using a social-networking service defined as an "Internet Web site containing profile Web pages...that include the names or nicknames of such members, photographs...or any other personal or personally identifying information."
The definition also includes "the ability to leave messages or comments on the profile Web page that are visible to all or some visitors to the profile Web page," which might be interpreted to include news sites, including CNET News, that allow visitors to register and leave comments.
But let's start with the problem the law is trying to solve. It's aimed at adults who troll the Web in search of children to sexually exploit. While such people do exist, they are rarely successful in harming youth whom they meet through the Internet. Every peer-reviewed study conducted by the Crimes Against Children Research Center and other scholarly organizations, as well as the report of Internet Safety Technical Task Force, has concluded that the risk of online predators is greatly exaggerated.
I'm not aware of any cases of a predator harming a prepubescent child whom he met on the Internet, and there are very few publicly known cases of sexual contact between a teenager and an adult they met online. In those few cases where contact has occurred, it is often because the teenager was aggressively seeking the contact and where the teen was also engaged in offline risky behavior. These cases are typically between a teenage girl and young adult male between 18 and 25.
Law enforcement officials and politicians will point to plenty of Internet predator cases, but the overwhelming majority are either sting operations, in which no child was harmed, or child pornography cases which, while horrendous, are not addressed by this law.
A January 2009 analysis of Pennsylvania cases by the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use found, during a four-year period, that "only eight incidents involved actual teen victims with whom the Internet was used to form a relationship," compared to 9,934 children who were sexually abused in a single year in that state.
If the law had no negative consequences, I would give it a pass. After all, who cares about the rights of people who have been convicted of sex offenses? Well, I do. Not because I think they're wonderful people but because it's in all of our interest that, if they're not in prison, they be integrated into society to the extent that they can function and be able to find and hold appropriate jobs. Keeping these individuals away from the very types of sites that can help them in their careers is counterproductive to the goal of rehabilitating them.
The other issue is how we classify sex offenders. Not everyone on every state sex offender list is a danger to children. A recent article in The Economist, entitled "Unjust and Ineffective, observes that "Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely."
Citing a report from Human Rights Watch, the article says "at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of those states, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers."
The article describes the plight of a young woman who, in 1996 at age 17, was charged with having oral sex with a 16-year-old boy. She was given jail time and probation, and wound up on a sex offender list. Should she be banned from having a Facebook account or the ability to publicly comment on posts like this one? I think not.
I'll leave it up to others to debate our sex offender registry policy. Adam Thierer and Robin Sax have just written thoughtful responses to The Economist's article, taking differing points of view, but I do think that we need to be careful about not indiscriminately shutting down social-networking access to all registered sex offenders. Some probably yes, but not every one of them.
Another reason to question this law is that it can lead to more than one false sense of security. To begin with, the most dangerous sex offenders aren't necessarily the ones who are registered but the many who haven't yet been caught and convicted. And if we focus exclusively on predation, we're likely to lose track of the most dangerous aspects of youth online behavior, which are mostly either kid on kid--such as bullying, harassment, and impersonation--or self-imposed risks such as sexting or posting information that could be embarrassing later in life.
CBSNews.com's Declan McCullagh has also weighed in on this case.
If you believe its sponsors, a new Illinois law will keep sex offenders from recruiting children on the Internet.
"If the predator is supposed to be a registered sex offender, they should keep their Internet distance as well as their physical distance," said sponsor Bill Brady, a Republican state senator, according to the Chicago Tribune. "The object is to protect innocent individuals on the Internet from sex offenders."
If that were its effect, this would be a laudable piece of legislation. But in reality, the state law is written so broadly, it would effectively prohibit registered sex offenders from using the Internet.
It says "social-networking Web sites" are off limits, and defines those as "an Internet Web site containing profile Web pages of the members of the Web site that include the names or nicknames of such members," or photographs, or any other personal information. Offenders must "refrain from accessing or using" such Web sites.
Unfortunately, the Illinois state legislature didn't seem to recognize that many popular Web sites--perhaps even the majority of the large ones--fall into those categories.
Google.com features user profiles, including name, photos and personal information. So do Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, geek site Slashdot.org, and aggregator site Digg.com.
Sites like Hulu.com, Netflix, and Pandora do, too, as do TV.com, MP3.com, and CNET.com. This overly broad scope makes the law vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge. (Those last three are our sister sites and are owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive.)
(It is surely coincidence that Bill Brady is a candidate for governor of Illinois, whose campaign biography says: "He fought for and passed legislation to protect children from sexual predators.")
Now, perhaps Brady's intent truly was to ban sex offenders from the Internet, although if that's true you wouldn't know it from the former developer and real estate agent public statements on the topic. Nor was it probably apparent to his colleagues in the state capitol, where the legislation was unanimously approved by both chambers--or to Gov. Pat Quinn, who signed it into law this week.
Like it or not, using Google, Yahoo, TV.com, and so on is part of modern life, and it's reasonable to hope that even sex offenders could be reintegrated into society rather than cordoned off from it and therefore more likely to relapse. One Justice Department release says that 5.3 percent of male sex offenders were rearrested within three years after their release from state prison.
Brady's legislation also does not distinguish between violent criminals who have served prison time for rape--and adults who are registered sex offenders because of youthful hijinks.
The Economist published two stories on this topic last week. One, called "America's Unjust Sex Laws," says: "Janet Allison was found guilty of being 'party to the crime of child molestation' because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms. Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender."
A second article tells the story of Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old high school student in Georgia, who preformed oral sex on a boy in her class. "Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms. Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told," the magazine reported.
No wonder a Human Rights Watch report recommends a rethinking of U.S. laws in this area.
It would be one thing if Illinois' new law said "sex offenders shall not use the Internet to harm or seduce a minor," or language to that effect. Unfortunately, the man who would be governor of that state seems to be more interested in taking credit for enacting a law rather than ensuring the right law is enacted.
CNET Blog Network member Larry Magid has also weighed in on this case.
The Connecticut attorney general's office on Friday served MySpace a subpoena demanding that MySpace hand over the identities of registered sex offenders it claims the social-networking site discovered and subsequently removed from its roster of members.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal also told CNET News that his office is reviewing independent research about registered sex offenders said to still populate the site. Blumenthal declined to comment on whether he plans to take further action.
Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said in a statement provided via e-mail that MySpace was using "state of the art technology to aggressively identify and remove registered sex offenders from our site." He added that MySpace was cooperating with Blumenthal and other state attorneys general requesting information.
Law enforcement officials and parents are concerned that sex offenders can easily find victims on social networks. From deleted profile information, officials can see whether sex offenders have violated parole by joining a social network and whether they have been communicating with minors on the site.
This screenshot shows a registered sex offender on the Texas registry Web site.
(Credit: Texas Department of Public Safety)Friction between MySpace and the states around this issue is not new. Some attorneys general have criticized the company for failing to do more to keep sexual predators off its site. A couple of years ago, MySpace initially rebuffed efforts to share sex offender data, but the service finally agreed to provide officials with the requested information. It then reportedly removed 29,000 sex offenders from the membership rolls. A year ago, when MySpace reached an agreement with the attorneys general, it said it would cooperate with law enforcement officials and develop technology for age and identity verification.
As social networks have grown in popularity (MySpace had 125 million unique visitors in December), law enforcement agencies have warned about the potential danger to minors posed by sex offenders trolling through cyberspace. Politicians, who have picked up that battle cry, have urged social networks to put in place tougher measures to protect minors.
Politics aside, the threat is not just theoretical. Steve Rambam, who is the director of private investigative firm Pallorium, said he found 100 registered sex offenders with MySpace profiles. One man used his mug shot as his main photo, while another, who was convicted of using the Internet to solicit a minor for sex, lists a 15-year-old girl as a friend on his MySpace page.
In carrying out his research, Rambam said he ran a list of 40,000 registered sex offenders against more than 2 million MySpace member pages. He came up with nearly 12,500 likely matches. After comparing the MySpace member photos with mug shots on a registered offender database, Rambam found 100 confirmed matches and said he would have found more if he had continued the research.
Among those matches, CNET News confirmed that at least half a dozen included registered sex offenders. One member's MySpace profile headline read, "Daddy, Oh My Goodness," while another featured a photo caption that reads, "Never accept a ride from a stranger, unless they give you candy first." A third member, who was convicted of sexual assault, uses violent, misogynistic language on his profile page.
"Based on the number of hits we're getting as a percentage of genuine MySpace users we believe that there are anywhere from 3,000 to 39,000 sex offenders on MySpace," Rambam said on Friday.
This is the MySpace page of what appears to be a registered sex offender who used his mug shot (see image above) as his profile photo.
(Credit: MySpace)MySpace is using technology from a company called Sentinel Tech to help find and remove registered sex offenders from the site. According to MySpace, the company takes information members provide when they sign up and information they put on their profile and runs it against Sentinel servers that contain information about registered sex offenders, and follows up with manual checks of suspicious members.
John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel, questioned Rambam's methodology.
"We audit our database against all the sites out there, against the states' registries and the federal government registries... It could just be an issue of an individual maybe entering false information and we'll catch them down the road. Without seeing (the research), I can't really comment on it," Cardillo said. "MySpace deploys the most robust and impressive scrubbing apparatus in the business."
Rambam said he stands by his research. "We have a high degree of confidence that the first 100 matches we've compiled match on first and last name, city and state, exact age, and the photos clearly show the same person," he said. "Because of certain information and certain technology we have available to us, we were able to de-anonymize a lot of data and then do a second scrubbing run."
The matches all came directly from state sex offender registries and from the Megan's Law sex offender database, all publicly accessible data, Rambam said.
Rambam did the MySpace research on behalf of California lawyer Gary Kurtz, who is representing a company called Blue China Group in defending itself against a spam lawsuit filed by MySpace. "As part of that defense we are investigating a number of aspects about MySpace, and this pedophile issue popped up as something astounding," Kurtz said.
"These sex offenders and the efforts to find them are a small portion of a year-long investigation we conducted into MySpace," Rambam said.
"MySpace filed a complaint against Blue China Group in federal court in Los Angeles alleging that BCG repeatedly phished and spammed millions of MySpace users," MySpace Chief Security Officer Nigam said in his statement. "Unfortunately, while that lawsuit continues, BCG has apparently decided to raise this unrelated issue without providing any data to support its assertions."
Rambam said two state attorneys general offices have been in contact with him regarding his research. He found hundreds of potential matches from one of the states on MySpace and is preparing a report to give to that agency next week, he said, declining to name the states.
"This ongoing evidence completely refutes claims that child predators are an overblown threat," said Blumenthal, who is on a panel of 11 state attorneys general who have been investigating MySpace and other social-networking sites. "This is the tip of the iceberg."
A report issued last week by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that minors are less vulnerable to sexual predation than previously believed.
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