WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a bill that would require sex offenders to submit e-mail addresses and other online identifiers for inclusion in the Justice Department’s National Sex Offender Public Registry.
The registry is made up of data on sex offenders collected by each state. Only 11 states require sex offenders to submit online aliases to state sex offender registries, according to the office of Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who wrote the bill with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Washington requires that sex offenders declare their aliases when registering but does not specify online aliases or e-mail addresses.
The legislation, dubbed the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act, or KIDS, passed committee late last week and is supported by several children’s advocacy groups as well as the Facebook and MySpace social networking sites.
“We commend the Senate Judiciary Committee for passing the KIDS Act that requires convicted sex offenders to register any e-mail address or online identifier they use, so social networking sites can block them from accessing their communities,” said Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer. “This legislation is another important tool that will make MySpace an even safer place for all.”
Last December, MySpace began purging sex offenders from its site based on registry information.
Facebook declined to say whether the company would use such e-mail addresses to deny or restrict sex offenders’ access.
Legal experts said that while it is legal to deny services to customers based on their criminal history, they were unsure that this bill would curtail sexual predation on the Web.
“Unlike moving from one house to another, which is visible and which probation officers can physically check, people can still create and respond to multiple e-mail addresses,” said Daniel Filler, law professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “Physically, you can only be in one place, but in cyberspace, you can live in a thousand places at once.”
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