US to keep a master list of sex offenders' email addresses

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on December 8, 2006

A number of news agencies are reporting a new legislative effort in the US to make registered sex offenders register their email addresses.

Whatever you may think of the ethics of continuing to punish people after they've "done their time," I serious doubt the efficacy of the effort. The gist is simple: require all registered sex offenders to list their email addresses along with their street address that they already give. The problem, of course, is ensuring that offenders register all the email addresses and don't acquire any more that are unknown.

Given that there are at least three major Internet companies competing to offer users free email accounts (Gmail, AOL and Yahoo) which make little or no attempt to check that people are who they say they are, registering an email account anonymously is easy. One method is to use a high-turn over Internet cafe which doesn't clear the browser settings between users; hire a machine near the end of the day and the machine comes already logged into half a dozen different web-based email accounts belong to previous uses. Any of these email accounts can be used to receive the "verification email" for setting up your own new account, without being traceable. Smarter offenders will delete and purge the verification email after replying to it as well, so the owner of the account has no idea their account has been borrowed to set up a fake email address.

I'll admit that I have no real idea how the US system works, but I'm assuming that it works something akin to the UK system, which is likely to find email registration completely unenforceable. No amount of searching of the individual will find email addresses (they have no physical manifestations) and no amount of information matching between agencies will find them (because all the information is fraudulent and was registered from a "borrowed" email account).

Even worse than this, publishing the names of sex offenders would cause them to be deluged by unsolicited email. Not only would your regular breast enlargement, penis enlargement, pump and dump scams and invitations from mysterious women be coming their way, but I imagine a number of special interest groups of one colour or another who would be interested in targeting them on a regular and frequent basis.

Can you imagine anything more likely to make otherwise compliant sex offenders want to hide their email addresses?

See reports at: itpro.co.uk and news.com.com

cheers, stuart

Stuart's blog
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		US to keep a master list of sex offenders' email addresses Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on December 8, 2006 A number of news agencies are reporting a new legislative effort in the US to make registered sex offenders register their email addresses. Whatever you may think of the ethics of continuing to punish people after they've "done their time," I serious doubt the efficacy of the effort. The gist is simple: require all registered sex offenders to list their email addresses along with their street address that they already give. The problem, of course, is ensuring that offenders register all the email addresses and don't acquire any more that are unknown. Given that there are at least three major Internet companies competing to offer users free email accounts (Gmail, AOL and Yahoo) which make little or no attempt to check that people are who they say they are, registering an email account anonymously is easy. One method is to use a high-turn over Internet cafe which doesn't clear the browser settings between users; hire a machine near the end of the day and the machine comes already logged into half a dozen different web-based email accounts belong to previous uses. Any of these email accounts can be used to receive the "verification email" for setting up your own new account, without being traceable. Smarter offenders will delete and purge the verification email after replying to it as well, so the owner of the account has no idea their account has been borrowed to set up a fake email address. I'll admit that I have no real idea how the US system works, but I'm assuming that it works something akin to the UK system, which is likely to find email registration completely unenforceable. No amount of searching of the individual will find email addresses (they have no physical manifestations) and no amount of information matching between agencies will find them (because all the information is fraudulent and was registered from a "borrowed" email account). Even worse than this, publishing the names of sex offenders would cause them to be deluged by unsolicited email. Not only would your regular breast enlargement, penis enlargement, pump and dump scams and invitations from mysterious women be coming their way, but I imagine a number of special interest groups of one colour or another who would be interested in targeting them on a regular and frequent basis. Can you imagine anything more likely to make otherwise compliant sex offenders want to hide their email addresses? See reports at: itpro.co.uk and news.com.com cheers, stuart Cybersecurity \| Email \| email account \| hosted email \| sex offenders register Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 5037 reads
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