Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders | Hacker News Reader

Judge blocks California’s new ban on anonymity for sex offenders

arstechnica.com

46 pointsshawndumas19 comments

What is so interesting to me is that it passed with 81% support. Seems to be a class example of the "think of the children" argument run amok in that it's impossible to enforce and vague enough to mean that every convicted sex offender is breaking it every day.

The brunt of the proposed law was about "harsher punishments for human trafficking" and that is how it was described on the ballot (from the official voter's guide: "HUMAN TRAFFICKING. PENALTIES. INITIATIVE STATUTE."); the part about sex offenders having to register their usernames on all of the online services that they use was tacked on the end, related by way of pointing out that the "sex crime" classification that then requires sex offender registration "includ[es] some crimes involving human trafficking".

Many voters, thereby, probably did not even realize that this other aspect was a consequence; those that did may have not cared enough to think about it (as it doesn't affect them personally), and those that cared may have decided "on the balance, in this flawed democratic system where I have to vote on this as a single unit, I think the result is better despite this consequence" (I often wish I could vote "I agree with these specific diff hunks" as opposed to "I agree with this changeset" ;P).

(I say this not to defend the law, but as a way to try to explain why 81% of the people in my state apparently voted for it; when I saw the number I was thereby depressed, but not really surprised: human trafficking "sounds bad". Also, the official "CON" argument blurb was "I provide erotic services, and this (might) incorrectly label my son", which probably turned off a lot of conservative voters in addition to being an argument many would call "far fetched", even if it totally ends up happening.)

Another aspect is that there was exactly $0 in campaign funding to oppose the proposition, whereas there was $3.7MM in favor of it.

Campaign contributions are public record, and nobody wants to be seen to be supporting sex offenders. Instant social suicide.

Ref: http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition...

Interestingly, with the vast majority of that (especially so once you factor out some portion of the contributions that had been made to multiple simultaneous campaigns, which ballotpedia can't separate), came from a single person: Chris Kelly (former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook).

> those that cared may have decided "on the balance, in this flawed democratic system where I have to vote on this as a single unit, I think the result is better despite this consequence"

They would be wrong. Anyone who has enough resources to get a proposition on the ballot has enough resources to get the legislature to pay attention to them. And something like prop 35 would pass in the legislature for the same reason it passed at the ballot box. But the legislature can make amendments.

The argument being that someone (not the voter in this example) may have specifically wanted that sex offender registration part, but didn't feel that that one single part would be juicy enough, and so instead managed to get it tacked on to a much larger campaign.

For whatever reason it was included, however, as an individual voter, if you are for "increased punishment for human trafficking" but against that smaller part about sex offender username registration, you don't really have anything you can do other than decide "on the balance".

(To be clear, I went into this in more detail, as I think you were interpreting me to say that the sex offender registration part was the way to push through the human trafficking change: I was attempting to imply the reverse, although I think the argument stands even if the parts are just considered related to many people, as you still must decide what to do if you agree with the first half but disagree with the second half.)

As a specific example where I had to do this, I was for the changes being proposed to the California nexus tax formula that were on this same ballot, but was not certain if I agreed with having a large percentage of that new corporate income tax be earmarked specifically for clean energy (locking it away from education, infrastucture, or any number of other number of things it could be used for). However, as that part had a limited time horizon (five years), and as I felt the other change made sense, "on the balance" I decided to vote for that proposition.

If you disagree with any part of the proposition, or if you feel it is poorly constructed, then you should vote against it. It's easier, ultimately, to reject a poorly written law and try again with a new law than it is to accept a poorly written law and later try to repeal it.

Too many people fall into the trap of believing "we must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this."

That really seems to black/white for me: at some point you need to weigh the cost of starting over (along with the chance that starting over won't happen or will fail by default as people will say "didn't we reject this same thing last year?" without noticing the difference) with the cost of a compromise; imagine if absolutely everyone refused to ever budge or compromise on absolutely anything: if a single reason to disagree with a deal breaker... the world would simply be totally unworkable.

In some cases, (as some might argue is the case with 30 this year; I live in a town that is pretty much just a giant University, so I have gotten tirade after tirade about education funding), delaying by another year may also be too painful to bear for many people: some kind of relief, at least for them personally (as they are themselves voters, so imagine them making this choice for themselves at the ballot box) is required now, or you may as well just give up and not bother.

I mean, imagine if your choice were (combining the tradeoff I expressed for 39's largely innocuous energy funding clause with the despair many people felt surrounding 30) "vote for this thing that will continue to fund your profession as a lecturer and will keep college tuitions low enough that you will be able to afford to keep paying for your kid's education" or "vote no, get laid off, and tell your family things will be tight this year, all because someone threw in a rider that directs some of the funds to something you thought wasn't even bad, and probably needed funds anyway, but wasn't the most efficient way the money could have been spent"... would you seriously vote no? Would you judge someone else who did?

To me, those are not even remotely comparable, so you can't really use the same criteria for evaluation. On one hand you're talking about allocation of funds -- it's just money. On the other, you're talking about depriving people of fundamental rights.

When it comes to the latter, the litmus test I use is, "Is there a clear and urgent need for this law?" In this case, as horrible as human trafficking is, I do not believe that prop 35 passes muster on those grounds. Bear in mind that we're not talking about going from "no penalties for human trafficking" to "some penalties for human trafficking". It's going from significant penalties, to even more severe penalties. There is no urgent need for this law, and therefore no justification for skewering civil liberties.

In your tax example, that reasoning would make sense, since the legislature would be unlikely to pass those on its own. My point was that, even if "prop 35 gets enacted" is better than "nothing like prop 35 gets enacted", that doesn't necessarily mean you should vote for prop 35, since if it failed, its backers would be likely to take it to the legislature, which would be likely to pass it with amendments that may address your concerns.

In retrospect, though, the chances of all that happening conditional on prop 35 failing might not be enough to justify my original comment, even though each step is individually likely, since it requires 3 things to go right (and people often overestimate the probabilities of highly conjunctive events).

That's what I did--voted for it, because it was packaged together with "human trafficking", the main advertised piece.

I'm somewhat regretting voting for it now, after more careful research. The only "deal breaker" for me, at this point, is that this law (I think) doesn't take into account the difference in acts that constitute "sex offense"--i.e., peeing on the side of the highway and raping someone both fall under the same category here.

So that poor dude that got taking a drunk leak might have to expose his screen names.

Why would you think that paedophiles, rapists etc should be allowed online anonymity? If you can't behave by the rules of civilised society, then I don't think it's that big a stretch that you lose some privileges.

I'm one of the Californians who voted against this proposition. Why?

Because once someone has served their time and their probation the idea is that the state is saying their debt has been paid and the state no longer believes them dangerous. If that's not the case then there's a problem elsewhere and you're just treating symptoms (futilely I might add).

An even bigger problem is presented by the "etc." If it was the convicted child molester and rapist list that would be one thing but the etc contains a lot of other offenses that don't justify restrictions designed to stop child molesters from repeat offending. Maybe there should be a proposition to split the lists by the a Specific offenses so at least these measures could be targeted better. This prop also played fast and loose with the definition of sex offender IMO.

> Because once someone has served their time and their probation the idea is that the state is saying their debt has been paid and the state no longer believes them dangerous.

I don't think this is strictly true, otherwise an "incurable" paedophile would never be released, regardless of whether they have completed their sentence.

I take your point about the "etc". It needs to be serious, predatory offenders, not 15 year-olds sexting each other.

Even serious paedophiles do have the right to political speech though. The problem is that online identity covers both.

They do, but I'd say they'd lost their privileges to anonymous online political speech, though, in the same way a persistent drink driver can permanently lose their driving license.

Voted against this as well. My main reason is from an article from the Economist[1] that has still left an impression on me to this day.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/14164614

This looks like a dangerous slippery slope. This year, it's sex offenders who have to register their on-line identities with the police. But once they get their database going, someone will have the bright idea to also add people convicted of identity theft (who arguably pose an even more direct threat on the internet), or mail fraud or securities fraud. And, of course, convicted drug dealers might also try to sell drugs to kids on the web, so no anonymity for them. In a few years, anyone convicted of the heinous offense of illegal file sharing might also have to register their identities.

Also, the definition of "sex offender" is very broad in the U.S. An 18 year old guy who received a nude photo of his 16 year old girlfriend on his phone could be a sex offender. We're not just talking about rapists and child molesters here.

Right to anonymity? Convicted felons lose their right to own a gun. Some might never use one to commit a crime, but they still lose that right.

This is no different. It is not reasonable to call this a slippery slope. These people were convicted of predatory crimes against children, and those of us who do not commit such crimes have nothing to fear as regards our anonymity until and unless we commit similar crimes.

Not all punishments end when you're let out of prison. Nor should they.

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