Judge: Sex offender requirement is unconstitutional

7-10-15 Illinois:

BLOOMINGTON — A requirement that Illinois sex offenders report all Internet sites they use to police is unconstitutional because it violates the offenders’ free speech rights, according to a ruling by a McLean County judge.

Judge Robert Freitag agreed with arguments from the defense lawyer for Mark Minnis, 22, of Normal, that state law is overly broad in its mandate that all e-mail addresses and sites a sex offender uses or plans to use, including Facebook, must be registered with police.

Minnis was charged with failure to register the address of his residence after he missed his annual registration deadline by three days in August. As part of that requirement, he disclosed two e-mail addresses, but did not list a Facebook and Ebay account he uses, according to court records.

States’s Attorney Jason Chambers said Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office plans to ask the Illinois Supreme Court to review the decision. The high court's ruling will impact all future Illinois cases on the First Amendment issue in sex offender cases.

Defense lawyer Stephanie Wong said Thursday the Internet portion of the law “is not well-written and provides no guidance as to what the requirements are. The statute has to be more narrowly tailored.”

According to Wong, no other court decisions have been issued on the free speech aspect of the state’s Sex Offender Registration Act. In Wong’s opinion, the opinion issued Tuesday by Freitag bars authorities from enforcing the Internet requirement at this point.

In his order, Freitag cited a federal court decision challenging a similar mandate in Nebraska (Doe v Nebraska - only the Internet portion of the Doe ruling). The court there said ordering a sex offender to report all access to Internet sites “clearly chills offenders from engaging in expressive activity that is otherwise perfectly proper, and the statute is therefore insufficiently narrow.”

Freitag noted that he is not bound to follow the federal opinion, but found the reasoning in the case “to be persuasive and sound.”

Chambers said his office “takes sex offender cases very seriously.”

The conditions imposed on sex offenders living in the community “are not meant as a penalty, but for the safety of those living around them,” he said.

The rules related to Internet access are one of many requirements for Illinois sex offenders. Restrictions on where offenders can live, work and visit puts them at risk for criminal charges and incarceration if not strictly followed. ..Source.. by Edith Brady-Lunny

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Hotmail launches accounts you can throw away

If you could only see my face now, I'm roaring with laughter. Why? Well, let Lawmakers hear about this, what do you think will happen? They may choke on their swallowing. Can you imagine what will run through their minds, they are going to need computers and law enforcement personnel by the thousands to chase down false thrown away e-mail addresses in order to see if registrants are in compliance. This is a monkey wrench in registering sex offender Internet Ids. Lets see, 700,000 X15 X15 X15 X15 etc.

2-6-2011 Global:

Microsoft knows you're making throwaway e-mail accounts, and wants to make that process easier.

Today, Hotmail is getting a new feature aimed at "e-mail enthusiasts," which lets anyone create multiple e-mail accounts that can be read, replied to, and managed from their everyday e-mail inbox. These additional e-mail addresses can be had in the same manner as signing up for new accounts, but they require no extra log-ins or upkeep.

The idea is to give users a safe way to provide third parties with an e-mail address, without giving up the address they've provided to family and friends, which, if compromised, can end the usefulness of that particular account.

"Today we all often have multiple e-mail accounts for many different reasons," Windows Live director of product management Dharmesh Mehta told CNET in a phone interview yesterday. "One of which is that I don't want to give my real address out to any site in the world. I might be worried they'll spam me with newsletters, or they might resell it to other marketers. Who knows what can happen?"

The other problem, Mehta said, is balancing a single e-mail address with work, family and friends, and everything else you're doing on the Internet. "If I'm a hardcore gamer in one environment, and a conservative professional guy in another environment, there are different reasons for multiple accounts," Mehta explained.

The solution Microsoft's Hotmail team came up with was to make use of some of its existing technologies like account sign-up, message filtering, and multiple e-mail address integration to give users these aliases within the same account. Each user can create up to five aliases, any of which can be deleted and replaced with another at any time. Over time, Microsoft will increase that limit to 15 aliases per account, making it so that the true heavy users won't need to juggle between two or more Hotmail accounts. ..Source.. by Josh Lowensohn

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E-mail addresses of registered sex offenders now harder to find

The reporter mentions that, "States sell sex-offender registries to private companies such as Facebook" that is completely INCORRECT. It is clear that the reporter has not done her homework. Congress passed the Kid's Act which permits the U.S. Department of Justice -on a contractual basis- with social networks sites like Facebook (if they chose to) access to registrants' Internet identifiers in a PRIVATE DOJ data base, but their is no money involved. Further, all the information MUST be kept private and used only for comparison to the social network's accounts, who MAY delete the registrant's account after notifying registrants.

1-9-2011 Colorado:

Sex offenders don't want the government to know what they are doing online or posting on news and social-networking sites and intend to challenge e-mail registry requirements to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Colorado and other states are taking notice of legal challenges to sex-offender registry database requirements and recently scaled back e-mail information that was previously available for the public to view.

In Colorado, felony sex offenders are required to submit their e-mail addresses and any identifiers they use before logging into Facebook, MySpace or making comments on newspaper websites.

On Dec. 6, the Colorado Department of Public Safety made it tougher to find the e-mail addresses and Internet identifiers

of registered sex offenders on the public database.

Now when looking up a name, for example John Smith, the e-mail address no longer shows up. But if a searcher already has an e-mail address in hand, such as jsmith@domain.com, the database will reveal the identity of the offender.

Sex offenders say the registry requirements infringe upon their anonymous- free-speech rights.

"The government has no right to unmask a speaker unless they have probable cause," said John Doe, a registered sex offender whose case filed under the alias was heard at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

"If someone goes online and commits a crime, the government has a right to go in and find out who that is," he said. "But they do not have that power without circumstances arising and they are trying to get around that now."

In 2008, John Doe filed suit against the state of Utah, arguing the e-mail registration requirements violated his constitutional rights. A Utah federal district judge agreed and issued an injunction barring the state from collecting the Internet identifiers.

Utah then amended its statute in 2009 and restricted the Internet identifiers to law enforcement only, and the district court then determined the law did not violate Doe's constitutional rights.

Doe appealed his case to the 10th Circuit and lost.

His attorney, Elizabeth Eager, now intends to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear it.

"Thirty states (including Colorado) have these laws, and there is not much guidance out there about what states can and cannot do," she said. "There is a confluence of issues coming together and I'm hoping that would interest the Supreme Court in taking up this case."

States sell sex-offender registries to private companies such as Facebook, which has a policy of purging sex-offender accounts from the site. Colorado does not sell e-mail identifiers with the database, said Lance Clem, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.

"We have been working proactively with states' attorneys general to run their lists of registered sex offenders against our user base," said Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for Face book. "If we find that someone on a sex-offender registry is a likely match to a user on Facebook, we notify law enforcement and disable the account."

Doe was 22 years old when he got a 14-year-old girl pregnant. They now share custody of the child and he is not on supervised release.

Because his crime did not involve the Internet and the law does not consider him a danger, he doesn't believe they need his e-mail address.

Doe called the state of Colorado to tell them about his lawsuit and he believes they took a look at his case and changed the database because of his concerns.

Clem said the changes were made after reviewing litigation, but also with the advice of federal guidelines, which caution how Internet identifiers should be displayed.

But the department did not want to completely stop parents from checking to see if e-mail their child received was from a predator.

"The feature available to the public online is there to help parents take a look at suspicious e-mail addresses," Clem said. "Not just parents, but anybody who has interest." ..Source.. by Felisa Cardona, The Denver Post

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