The Washington Post just ran an article that Virgina has a proposed law that would require sex offenders to register their email and IM screen names in an attempt to monitor and control their presence on social networking sites like MySpace.com

From the article:

If it is approved by the General Assembly, McDonnell said, Virginia would become the first state to forge a partnership with MySpace.com to try to prevent sexual offenders from using the site.

Here's how the plan would work: After the state obtained a predator's e-mail addresses, officials would turn them over to MySpace. The company, using new software, would then block anyone using that e-mail address from entering the site.

I am all for the protection of children but I question the ability to monitor and track offends through email addresses. I currently use about 15 emails and that's if you don't count the 'catch all' addresses (me-wildcard@example.com). I can't even begin to count all of the old emails that I have thrown away. I must admit that I have not read this proposal and that I also believe the intention is good, but what kind of money is going to be wasted in an completely futile endeavor? Anyone with a Gmail account can create new addresses on the 'fly' by merely adding a plus sign (+) to the end of the username - username+addition@gmail.com, so how do you monitor that? These criminals are using the internet because it offers them invisibility... This proposed law seems to take for granted that criminals are as computer illiterate as the law makers.

This just makes me ask all kinds of questions... first off is this just a political move to show effort without substance to back it up? I really hope that they do indeed make a dent in online sex offenders. But it seems that the resources could be better spent fighting this crime in other ways.