When will they get it?

When, oh when, oh when ... will the government face up to the fact that there IS only one way to police the Internet ... which is to pull the plug on it. Anything else is insanity. Anyone doing anything criminal should already be encrypting their traffic and sailing straight under the nose of any effective form of policing.

The only thing sent unencrypted these days is spam mail. I feel for the poor civil servant who has to wade neck deep through that kind of stuff to find any meaningful correspondence that the government can prosecute someone with.

new rule

no laws named after victims or pepol there is a good reason a law needs to be made logicality for a good reason to manage a country of millions in the future a law made after a victim is about 1 person and in the past it is bound to be badly thought out with emotion and hindsight

The thin end of the wedge

In Wacky Jacqui's big brother world she has the right to do almost anything she wants and existing laws and interpretations thereof are only temporary inconveniences.

I always thought the idea of a prison sentence was to punish and also rehabilitate the offender. If the law calls for a particular sentence then how does the home secretary have the right to effectively extend that sentence to one of life?

Yes child sex offences are an emotive subject, anybody opposing WJ on this will no doubt be told to "please think of the children!" but if she pushes this one through how long will it be before she moves for similar legislation for other offences? How long before anybody with a criminal record has to report regularly to the police or probabtion service and hand over details of their personal life?

The problem here is that, in concentrating police efforts on previous offenders she is taking precious resources away from the hunt for new offenders. Remember that Sweeney style of policing where they just pulled in all the known scrotes on the manor until one of them coughed to the blag? That's the way WJ thinks policing should still work. Great, we've got Gene Hunt as home secretary.

Teenage sex offenders

Teenage sex offenders are given a life of luxury. There's one that lives in a flat above me.

There's a private organisation that takes care of them! They actually support them.

He's been put up in a privately owned flat, and the furniture, kitchen appliances all bought for him! It's unreal. And they send him on holidays too.

So, a sex offender, which the officals have presumably decided has had a bit of a rough childhood is treated to holidays and a privately owned flat, he's loving every second of it.

He should be banged up! And whilst living in the flat, he's sexually assaulted another girl and the Police have been round to question him about that.

He needs to be chemically castrated.

It's madness.

Those pesky human rights.

Always getting in the way of the government's perfect world.

Typical govt. ineptitude

So they can't do this for sex offenders, but still plan to keep a database of everyone else's emails.

When does the revolution start?

Tim#3

*sigh*

'Sex offender' does *NOT* equal 'child abuser'.

In any case, if parents weren't so stupid as to give their little darlings unrestricted access to the internet and computers in the privacy of their own bedrooms, complete with webcams, digital cameras, and mobile phone cameras, then there wouldn't be aparticular threat to children anyway.

Letting a child use the internet unsupervised, even without cameras, is about as bad as letting underage children tart themselves up and go out to nightclubbings at weekends getting drunk, and no parent would be so irresponsible... oh... wait... *sigh*

Reality

Always getting in the way of the government's perfect world.

Cause and effect constrain reality to be one of a number possible worlds. Not so for imagination, where cause and effect need not apply, even tho imagination has effects, particularly in the autonomic nervous system.

Observe, then, the real states of mind of our governing politicians. No joy there. No happiness. Fear. Lots of fear. Fear of the masses. Fear of loss of power. Fear of motivated individuals. In some cases, fear of themselves.

Government is always getting in the way of reality's perfect world.

Righton

If a person is this much of a risk to society that we actually need to listen to every phone call they make, read every email they write and watch their daily activities through electronic tagging, shouldn't we be looking at why they're being released rather than what to do about it afterwards?

The major qualification for gaining parole is satisfying the parole board you won't re-offend. If the parole board isn't qualified to make that decision, perhaps it should be left to people who are. Psychiatrists that specialise in kiddy-fiddling maybe? And if they don't satisfy the same conditions as everyone else who makes parole, why are they being let out? Completing a prison sentence is not supposed to be sufficient to gain release. The fact most parole boards accept verbal promises as evidence of rehabilitation simply proves they don't understand what their jobs are.

Reality is most people that get released from prison probably don't qualify for that release. But we let them out anyway because our prisons are overcrowded and they've completed the minimum prison sentence they were ordered to serve. If we're just going to let predators walk free after a set number of years, what's the point of putting them in prison in the first place? All we're doing is delaying the inevitable. Perhaps, and I know this is controversial, but just perhaps it would be better to actually try to do some real rehabilitation? If we intend to let predators move back into society, wouldn't it be better just to let them do it right away when we still remember who they are and what they did? Or perhaps you prefer that we stealthily insert perverts and rapists into communities that aren't paranoid enough to monitor predator lists on a daily basis.

double standards?

Hmm, so they cant monitor those dangerous people but a database of exactly the same information for the whole law abiding population is fine?

Good work government.

@David Glasgow

"So until then its my fault if a sexual offender gets at them via the interweb thingy?"

Yes, partly. It's your job as a parent to 1. Teach your children the skills they will need to be safe online. 2. Assess your success in step one. 3. Monitor their internet use until step one is complete. This really shouldn't be too hard, the Internet is much safer than the real world after all, it's not like anyone can actually stab you or rape you through the computer.

Of course it depends on what you mean be "get at". If a sex offender talks to your child online, that's not your fault. That's not necessarily a fault at all. If a sex offender (or anyone else) convinces your child to send naked pictures and then uses those pictures to blackmail your child into some unwanted act, then it probably means you failed step one, two or three above.

@David Glasgow

Ont let your child have a PC in their room. Have it out in the open.