Am I the only person when Government blunders into unfamiliar territory and starts trying to make waves?
The owner of the eyes, Home Secretary John Reid (terrible website, by the way), is proposing making paedophiles register their online details (such as their email and even their chatroom handles) with the Sex Offender Register.
I think the feeling from the home office is, if they can also force sites that primarily take children to pass any details onto the government of all their users, they will be able to stop all online paedophile activity. A noble thought, indeed.
But How completely unenforceable is that?! Asking perverts to register such a throwaway and temporary thing as an email address or nickname is just going to result in the Home Office having a database full of junk data.
Government don’t seem to realise that an email account takes seconds to sign up for. Changing nickname in a chat room takes even less time!
This was purely a PR stunt because there’s no way they can make sure somebody only uses their registered email address or nickname. This announcement came on the EU Safer Internet Day.
If they really wanted to do something substantial they should ban these people from the Internet completely. If convicted hackers are too dangerous to be on there because they might try to break into a computer, paedophiles who want to have sex with children by grooming them over the internet are just as risky.
Failing that, just keylogging their data, intercepting their web-traffic at ISP level or anything which means that police can actually do something to stop these convicted perverts re-offending.