Over the weekend, the always-terrific Lenore Skenazy published a provocative editorial in Forbes entitled, “Shred Your Sex Offender Map.” (For more on Skenazy, see my review of her amazing book Free-Range Kids here last year). In her Forbes essay, Skenazy argues that, as currently constructed, America’s sex offender registries “are making our kids LESS safe.” How can that possibly be? I explained why in a lengthy essay on this topic I penned last summer entitled, “
Rethinking ‘Sex Crimes’ and Sex Offender Registries.” In it, I made an argument similar to Lenore’s. In a nutshell, if we really want to keep kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country because a significant percentage of the people listed on sex offender registries pose almost no threat to children, making it difficult for us to know who really does pose a threat to our kids and what we should do about them.
Consider two groups of people. Let’s call Group #1 the “petty sex crime crowd.” This would include anyone convicted of indecent exposure (streaking / public nudity / public urination); a 19-year-old teen who gets caught having sex with a 17-year-old girlfriend; two gay men who had consensual sex in a state where sodomy was previously illegal; etc, etc. The crucial distinction for this group is that their actions were consensual and non-violent. No serious harm came from their actions, even if
some of these activities are less than socially desirable. Now, let’s talk about Group #2: violent rapists, child molesters, child pornographers, and other creeps who sexually abused people (or even animals!) These people are the wretched scum of the Earth.
Anyway, here’s the first problem with the current sex offender registries: Group 1 and Group 2 are all mixed together! There’s a word for this:
Insanity. How in the hell did it ever come to pass that non-violent, consensual sex “offenders” got stuck on the same list as sadists, pedophiles, rapists, and other violent, evil scum? Honestly, I don’t know and I don’t care. I just want that nonsense to end and end right now because as I noted in my earlier essay and Lenore argues in her’s, this means current sex offender lists / maps are largely worthless to parents like me unless I take the time to drill down into the details of who was guilty of what. (Even when you do, it can still be confusing since some crimes aren’t made clear). But the public is basically being subjected to a panic attack when they hear sex offender registry numbers or see maps of sex offenders in their neighborhood because the overall number of “offenders on the lists,” or dots on the offender maps, is being artificially raised by the presence of Group 1 “offenders.”
Continue reading →
Last year, my PFF colleague Adam Thierer asked whether State AGs + NCMEC = The Net’s New Regulators? Adam noted that NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit organization, was playing a law enforcement role in regulating child pornography—but without any clear mechanisms for ensuring its accountability and effectiveness. Adam’s point wasn’t just that transparency is a good thing, but that when it comes to a cause as important as protecting children from exploitation, it’s vital to ensuring that we’re that we’re actually doing a good job at it!
Yesterday, Emmanuel Lazaridis commented on that post:
Given the increasing regulatory and investigative powers of the NCMEC, it is no longer clear whether or not the [Freedom of Information Act] applies to NCMEC records. We are about to find out. I am right now bringing a case against the NCMEC in federal court for access to records under the FOIA and, failing that, for discovery under 28 U.S.C. § 1782(a).
Mr. Lazaridis’s complaint in the D.C. District Court claims that Lazaridis (a Greek national) has been unfairly deemed a fugitive from U.S. justice for having taken his daughter to Greece over the objections of the girl’s American mother, Lazaridis’s ex-wife. NCMEC got involved by placing the girl on their MissingKids.com registry of abducted children. Lazaridis wants the court to recognize his custody, deem him not to be a fugitive, and to order NCMEC to turn over all their records on the girl.
This is, of course, just one side of the story (and such cases are usually so complicated as to be indecipherable to outsiders). But even if Lazaridis’s case were wholly without merit, his basic argument would be a sound one: Why shouldn’t NCMEC, in exercising any of its essentially governmental functions, be subject to the same accountability requirements through FOIA as the FBI would be?
When the issue is the Lazaridis family’s trans-Atlantic custody battle, it may seem easy to ignore this question. But when NCMEC is essentially making policy regarding filtering Internet content, blacklisting websites, turning over user logs to law enforcement, or “cleaning up” Craigslist, the question of NCMEC’s accountability under FOIA cannot be avoided as a critical decision about the future of Internet governance. Continue reading →
Adam raises some important questions below about the legislation introduced in Congress to ban silent cell phone cameras. Like many things Congress does, I wonder if the proposed solution might end up being worse than the perceived problem.
Is cell phone camera voyeurism actually a serious problem in the U.S.? Or is this just another problem being blown out of proportion by politicians? Some actual data on the incidence of camera phone “predation” would be useful in deciding whether digital voyeurism is a matter that demands Congress’s attention. The bill’s current language offers up only the vague statement, “Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”
I also wonder why the legislation targets phones rather than silent compact cameras of all sorts. Ridding from the market all silent mobile phone cameras would just make bad guys switch to compact, silent cameras with memory cards. (That’s not to say that Congress should ban them, either).
There’s a case to be made that in some situations, it might actually be a good thing for people to have cell phones equipped with silent cameras. What about somebody who’s being assaulted, or mugged, or raped and wants to photograph their attacker but fears retaliation? Or someone who’s just witnessed a crime, unbeknownst to the perpretator, and is trying to get a snapshot of the fleeing suspect? Or a whistleblower who wants to collect evidence of illicit activity by snapping covert photos?
To be sure, these are all hypothetical, unlikely scenarios. But for all we know, incidents involving “cell phone predators” are just as unlikely. And the person with the “good” use for their silent cell phone camera is much more likely to be impacted by a ban, because the bad guys will just skirt the law by hacking their phones or buying regular cameras.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.