Will Home Office's new plan really snare sex offenders?

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 4 Apr 2008 at 10:05

The Home Office has announced plans to pass the email addresses of sex offenders to social networking sites, in a bid to prevent them contacting children.

Around 30,000 sex offenders will be compelled to inform police of all their email addresses, which will then be passed on to sites such as Facebook and MySpace. The scheme will be co-ordinated by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) centre.

However, CEOP and the Home Office don't seem to have any clear idea of how they're going to prevent sex offenders from simply registering new webmail addresses to access social networking sites.

"The announcement has just been made today," a spokesperson for CEOP told PC Pro this morning. "It's down to CEOP and the online industry to see how we can make that work."

When asked whether the technical practicalities of such a law had been considered before today's announcement, the CEOP spokesperson replied: "That's the challenge in front of us."

Not "completely foolproof"

When challenged on how the police would prevent sex offenders from registering new addresses on GMTV this morning, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith admitted the system is flawed.

"The fact that it cannot be completely foolproof I don't think is an argument against us trying and working with willing partners as industry have proved to be," she claimed.

A Home Office spokesman told PC Pro that offenders will be compelled to register any new addresses with the police and that "it will be an offence punishable with up to five years in prison to use an address that is not registered with police."

When asked how police would discover if an offender has registered a new address, the Home Office spokesman claimed "police have a range of measures through which they can risk assess and monitor offenders."

There's also doubt over whether UK law has any jurisdiction over MySpace and Facebook, both of which are based in California.