By Tim Ferguson, 4 April 2008 00:01
NEWS
Registered child sex offenders could soon be legally obliged to supply local police with their email address to be passed on to social networking websites to stop them using the sites.
If Home Office plans come to fruition, registered offenders who fail to supply an email address or supply a false one could face up to five years in jail.
The UK Social Networking Guidance published today offers advice to the internet industry and parents to help keep kids safe online.
The guidance has been put together by a taskforce which includes the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre and the NSPCC.
In a statement, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "We are working together with police, industry and charities to create a hostile environment for sex offenders on the internet and are determined to make it as hard as possible for predators to strike, as in the real world."
Speaking at the unveiling of the plans, Home Office minister Vernon Coker said: "We want to ensure that as far as possible people enjoy the internet in the safest possible environment. We need to work with the industry, we need to work with law enforcement."
CEO of the CEOP Centre, Jim Gamble, said the plans have, "real potential to accelerate online child protection".
But it's not clear how effective the measures could be. Speaking to silicon.com, Simon Briskman, a partner at law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse, said: "I applaud efforts to help police these activities more effectively but I can see there's going to be a few hurdles along the way."
He said: "There's nothing to stop somebody setting up a range of email addresses or aliases, nor to stop them using computers from a variety of locations on different networks. So it seems very difficult to understand how it will work."
Briskman added it is unlikely police will have the investigative resources to check whether registered child sex offenders were using multiple email addresses.
He said another effective measure would be to bring in tighter codes of practice for ISPs around people signing up for email addresses in first place.
Privacy concerns about passing on the email addresses are likely to be easily surmountable, however. "If you're doing it because you're trying to prevent criminal offences and the action is proportionate, then the government should be able to do this," said Briskman.
Comments
There are 8 comments. Join the discussion
1. Roger Huffadine
Someone clearly doesn't understand the technology. This is a waste of time; by the time this comment get published - today - there will be instructions on unknown web sites and proxy servers offering routes around the restrictions.
If you want to police these people then get enough police to do the job properly.
2. Chris Stevens
Ineffective News Bite proposal. This may have good intentions but will be easy to bypass. It would be a lot better if the politicians who made these proposals actually had an understanding of how the internet works. Perhaps some form of British Computer Society certification before they are allowed to propose such regulations.
Now this would be far move effective if UK Internet users were required to present their National Id Card to a chip reader before they were allowed access to the Internet session. Perhaps the individuals sex offender status could be recorded on the card. That would work unless of course you'd been wrongly accused /prosecuted following Identity theft.
3. Aden Brill
Blah, Blah, Blah, cloud-cuckoo land time again from the government regarding IT. They (and those advising) just don't really understand.
4. John H Woods
I love the lawyer speak ... it's not clear how successful these efforts will be. It's very clear: unless some new fantastic plan is used to assign, require and monitor email addresses it will be of no use at all. It may even be negative ... giving people false assurance that something is being done when it won't stop any criminals.
How about a new domain policechecked.gov? You have to apply for one with proof of identity, and you have to use it for the initial sign up to a social networking site (or you don't have to, but if you do, you get a marker on your profile).
5. Roy Corneloues
Surely a better way would be to create a service where social networking or any other site for that matter could request validation of an e-mail address against a black or white list which would "hopefully" be regularly updated.
Any attempt to use a known e-mail address would then be logged by the server along with the service attempted to be used which could then be acted on without intervention from the site owners.
However the news is now out in the public domain and there will be workarounds before the solution is ever implemented.
They should have kept this quiet until they had nicked the first 10, 100, 1000 and then gone public!
6. anonymous
When you read a proposal like this, it's very easy to understand why there are so many govt. IT project problems & disasters like the HMRC data loss. It could only have been proposed & agreed by a group of people who haven't the slightest idea about IT. Though, no doubt, they're all highly trained (and costly) consultants.
7. anonymous
I can't believe the government actually thinks this is an effective policy for preventing sex offenders accessing social networking sites. Clearly they don't understand the problems inherrant in trying to police email. The average person has at least 4 email addresses, all legitimate, including those offered by mobile phone companies, so advising police of one email address is ridiculous, it cannot be policed, and never will be. Another example of bureaucracy providing advice on technology they clearly do not understand
8. anonymous
what ever it takes to protect a child i say do it!!!!!