Wednesday, 21 February 2007

Paedophile Registration Petition

The petition is entitled require all Paedophiles to register all their Computer I.P Addresses as well as their E-Mail addresses and Chatroom names and the explanatory notes read
"Sex offenders should be legal obliged, ordered and required to register their e-mail addresses, chatroom names and I.P computer addresses. Whilst it is very easy to changes ones E-Mail addresses and Chatroom Names, it is very much more difficult and expensive to change the I.P Address that is linked to each individual computer. I.P Addresses are routinedly collected by many organisations to combat fraud, so why not to monitor paedophiles and persons on the Sex Offenders Register."

Now, I have a number of problems with this premise. Let's ignore, for the moment, the whole concept of "paying one's dues to society" and the fact that most sexual offences against children are by people known to their parents, and the impossibility of controlling this, oh, and the fact that only a small number of sex offenders are "paedophiles", and concentrate on the technical issues.

That is, that most IP addresses are not static, fixed addresses, but dynamic, changing addresses which are randomly assigned by people's ISPs. So ... it's not even vaguely possible. Oops.

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