Where is the Outrage?

The government has secretly been listening in on any phone calls to telephone numbers that were on the speed dial list of known terrorists. When news of this program was leaked to the press, there was a huge outcry by liberals around the country that it was an invasion of civil rights – of terrorists.

Now those same liberals, emboldened by November’s victory, want to create a national database of email addresses of known sex offenders. This is supposed to prevent perverts from logging into Myspace. Any registered sex offender that tries to use a non-registered email address will face jail time.

From Reuters here:

Two U.S. senators said on Thursday they would introduce legislation that would potentially protect users of popular social networking sites like News Corp’s MySpace from registered sex offenders.

New York Democrat Charles E. Schumer and Arizona Republican John McCain, in a press release, said they planned to introduce a bill at the beginning of the 110th Congress in January that would require registered sex offenders to submit their active email addresses to law enforcement.

The legislation would enable social networking sites like MySpace to cross-check new members against a database of registered sex offenders and ensure that predators are unable to sign up for the service.

Under the proposed legislation, any sex offender who submits a fraudulent email could face prison.

The danger in this is that the Federal government suddenly gains the power to monitor the email activity of everyone in order to enforce a law against a small portion of the population. Otherwise this law banning the use of non-registered email addresses is unenforceable. Are liberals going to be outraged over the civil rights of sex offenders being violated?

Myspace can easily enforce a ban on child molesters if it wants to without resorting to a National Database of known pervert email addresses. It should switch to a for-pay service and track usage based on credit card purchases by known offenders. Or, Myspace can pay to increase a staff level and monitor conversations of its users to find illicit behavior, or make the ease of offender reporting better.