Well this is interesting:

Sex offenders could be forced to register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names, the government says. Home Secretary John Reid said he was considering making paedophiles include details of their online identities on the Sex Offenders Register.

Mechanisms would be set up to “flag up” approaches by them to sites popular among youngsters, he told the BBC.

So the process by which you get them thrown in jail would go:

1. find your local suspect paedophile
2. google around until you get their e-mail address
3. plaster the e-mail address around on various child-friendly websites
4. shop them
5. watch them get hauled-off and banged-up

If some muppets are stupid enough to attack the homes of pediatricians then somewhere on the spectrum of stupidity is someone smart enough to think of this and dumb enough to try it.

The problem is exactly like it says:

Child internet safety expert John Carr, of children’s charity NCH, said: “This is a very welcome move.

“It will mean that we can extend the Sex Offenders Register regime into cyberspace and that will be a great comfort to many people.”

Exactly so, a great comfort to many people who don’t know any better.

I am also amused by:

The latest proposal means their online identities would be treated in exactly the same way as their real name, a Home Office spokesman said.

“The home secretary also wants to look at whether it is technologically feasible to set up a system where if someone enters a chatroom with an identity that was already listed on the register, it would `ping’ an alert on the relevant people’s computers, enabling them to take appropriate action,” he added.

Who are relevant people and what is appropriate action, I wonder – and what is this concept of online indentity (nb: singular / constrained / known) of which they speak?