Your Email Address Known by Police?

An E-Mail Registry for Sex Offenders? by David Garrett, newsfactor.com

Two of the Senate's biggest names, Charles E. Schumer (D.-NY) and John McCain (R.-AZ) plan to push for legislation that will compel sex offenders to register their active e-mail addresses with authorities in an effort to save kids from online predators.

Schumer and McCain will introduce the bill at the start of 110th Congress in 2007. If passed, it would send convicted sex offenders to prison for providing false e-mail accounts.

The news follows on the heels of a MySpace announcement to vet its user base against the sex offender registries of 46 states, the nation's first attempt to combine database systems across state lines into a single, unified system.

Technology or Talking?

MySpace is the star of the social networking universe, and a fixture in most teens' after-school time. While popular, MySpace has been dogged by reports of known sex offenders using it to solicit teens and tweens with abusive and often nightmarish proposals.

It's a problem that's well known to John Shehan, program manager of the CyberTipline, a project by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. According to Shehan, parents need to rely on talking, and not merely technology, to keep their kids safe.

"It's old fashioned communication," said Shehan. "You put every type of technological advantage online, but there are ways around all of them."

Yet talking -- and above all, talking with teens -- is sometimes the hardest part of parenting. Shehan and colleagues performed a set of focus groups in which parents quickly admitted that not knowing as much as their kids did about was a roadblock to even the simplest dialogue.

LOL No More

Teens' language, including the dozens of acronyms they use for on-screen chats, was among the most confounding facets of their online lives. Yet some of those very acronyms reveal the danger that unpoliced computer use can pose:

IPN: I'm posting naked LDR: Long distance relationship LULAB: Love you like a brother LULAS: Love you like a sister OLL: Online love RPG: Role playing games WIBNI: Wouldn't it be nice if WTGP: Want to go private? A/S/L: age, sex, location

To help parents talk with teens, CyberTipline offers a list of acronyms, tips, and talking points on its Web site at

as well as a way to report the actions of suspected predators.

"Even little tips like getting the computer out of kids' bedrooms and putting it into a central location" can make a difference, said Shehan. He added that sex predators' attempts to contact kids seem to know no limits of deception.

"We've even seen cases where individuals have gone online posing as atheists," said Shehan, "then go into chatrooms and look for kids who are devout in a particular religion."

The adult -- often posing as a teen -- claims to find religion in an attempt to groom the victim into sending photos, meeting offline, or worse.

Copyright 2006 NewsFactor Network, Inc.

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. Hundreds of new articles daily. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at (or) For more news and headlines, please go to: [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There are so many holes in this proposal! For on, what prevents a sex offender (or anyone else) from using two or more different email addresses? You use one address, when it gets to be 'too hot' to use further, then ditch it and start again. After all, its not like getting a driver's license or State ID card where a lot of people can get involved. Email addresses are like 'throw-away' things. The second problem I see is what happens to the user -- sex offender or not -- who gets a 'joe job' done on him? In other words, someone impersonates him, for the main reason of covering up his tracks. So does the former sex offender get punished again for 'not registering' his email address, or how will that work? And with the huge amount of p*rn and spam on the net these days, which of you can say with assurance your email name/address has never been forged? PAT]