It would try to keep pedophiles off social networking sites by Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Critics are ridiculing the latest legislative effort to combat online sexual predators, saying provisions of a law proposed Tuesday would be easy to circumvent and amounted to little more than political "window dressing" supported by the online social networking giant MySpace.com.
But sponsors -- which include influential senators like John McCain, R-Ariz., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., -- say the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2007 addresses a small, but important, part of ridding social networking sites of predators:
It tries to remove the known offenders trolling them.
Plus, the bill would make it a crime for anyone over the age of 18 to misrepresent their age with the intent to use the Internet to engage in criminal sexual conduct with a minor. Together, lawmakers said the provisions would give law enforcement more legal tools to ensnare convicted sexual offenders, should they try to prey upon minors again.
Introduced in the House and Senate, the bill requires convicted sexual offenders to register their e-mail and instant messaging addresses with the National Sex Offender Registry. The Department of Justice would make that information available to social networking sites, to compare with user profiles in their system.
Last month, MySpace teamed up with the security firm Sentinel Tech to create a database technology to remove sexual offenders from online communities. This week, it donated the technology to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. MySpace is currently beta-testing the technology, and has already removed a few known sex offenders from its site.
As for the bill's intent to stop age misrepresentation, Internet safety experts say nice try, but hardly enforceable. Parry Aftab, a cyberspace attorney and executive director of the 8-year-old WiredSafety.org, said only "the stupidest" online predators would use their registered online monikers, she said. And "while there's a lot of stupid sexual predators, it's easy to get around" (the proposal).
"I love the idea, but who's going to comply?" Aftab said. "I don't want to dismiss the efforts of anyone who's trying to help, but what we're coming up with is a lot of knee-jerk legislation."
"It's a step in the right direction, but how easy is it to change your e-mail address?" said Judi Westberg Warren, president of Web Wise Kids.
Tim Donovan, founder of
MySpace's support of Tuesday's legislation is its latest effort to try to blunt public concern about a few high-profile cases of predators meeting underage users on the site. Earlier this month, four families whose underage daughters were sexually abused after meeting people they encountered on MySpace sued News Corp., the site's parent company, alleging it was negligent in not creating safety measures to protect younger users.
MySpace policy bans children younger than 14 from the site, which contains 150 million profiles. Teens 14 or 15 years old can show their full profiles -- which can contain a variety of personal information -- only to people on their list of known friends.
However, it is up to users to confirm their ages to the site. MySpace announced this month that it was developing software to allow parents to see if their children were creating multiple profiles -- one to show to their folks, another to show to the rest of the world. Dubbed Zephyr, the parental tools are expected to be available this summer.
But critics said Tuesday's legislation will do nothing to address their main desire: They want MySpace to increase its minimum age to 16 and require that parents confirm their children's ages.
"This is the nothing more than window dressing," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal told The Chronicle Tuesday. Blumenthal is leading a coalition of 34 attorneys general pondering legal action against MySpace.
He also was concerned about a provision of the bill that would offer "liability relief," should a social networking site misidentify one of its users as a sexual predator based on information in the national registry. "It seems like that would provide blanket immunity," Blumenthal said.
The bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., said Blumenthal "may be reading (the legislation) too broadly."
"I think this legislation is another step to protect children from sexual predators," Pomeroy said. Convicted sex offenders are required to register their home addresses, he said, so why not their virtual ones?
E-Mail Joe Garofoli at snipped-for-privacy@sfchronicle.com.