Big Brother always hones his skills with the superficially best of intentions:
Fund a series of pilot programs, lasting up to three years, to tag sex offenders with tracking devices that would let them be monitored in real time. The devices would include a GPS downlink (to provide exact coordinates), a cellular uplink (to transmit the coordinates to police), and two-way voice communications.
This is part of a catch-all bill that would cover a significant number of sex-crime related issues ranging from "tricking kids into viewing porn," to this. It will start with scoundrels like unrepentent child molesters, then it will move onto sexual assault convicts, and then it will move onto pretty much any violent crime. The end result will be the systematic destruction of the concept that when somebody has done their time, they are a free person again.
Here's a thought. We tag wild, predatory animals precisely because we want to know where they are and what they are up to. It's a not so subtle admission that maybe these people are too dangerous to be released, if we feel the need to tag them in a higher tech version of the way that we tag wolves.
Yes, if they are so dangerous as to need to be tagged, then shouldn't they be inside?
I think it goes deeper. I believe they are testing for future deliberate assaults or your freedoms (and ours).
Well, as we are already seeing in Britain, the most abusive state is the one that will not punish violent criminals, while preventing those who would be their victims from defending themselves. Even for all its faults, AFAIK, the Soviet Union had no qualms about executing violent criminals.
Gosh, maybe we should tag everyone so we know what they are doing.
Then we would REALLY be safe.
/sarcasm
Well, that would make it a lot easier for people to make plans. You'd be able to simply call up the police to find out what your buddies are doing...
We could tag them on the ear, that way norms could recognize the perverts from a distance and take precautionary measures.
Well, DBS, with the way that most sex offender systems work, pray that you're never get in a situation where you have to take a discrete wizz in public because if a cop catches you, you'll be sporting a nifty new radio tag on your ear ;)
Now THAT's civic virtue! You made it that much easier for the cops to catch you in the act, thus saving tax payers' dollars :)
Oddly enough I've never taken a discrete whiz in public before, only really obvious ones, generally while pretty drunk.
Well, it's pretty simple. It's a way of appeasing the idiot voters who think that this is actually some sort of "solution." It also doesn't prove criminal intent, either.
It's ironic, though, that they'll tag a man who raped a child, but will release a man who murdered a child and not tag him. I'm not a parent, but I would assume that it'd be just a litttttle bit worse to find your child murdered than to hear from your little kid that they were molested.
I wonder why stories like this never point out that tracking technologies do nothing to prevent or detect crimes of any kind.
Knowing your location with 2 meter precision does not tell anyone what you are doing.
"Why wouldn't you want rapist tracked?" is as about textbook example of the "strawman" fallacy as you'll ever see. Yet sadly, rhetoric never seems to fail because humans never change. After all the "forefeiture of collective liberty for some form of personal security that may or may not ever come in handy" grab has worked pretty well on America since 1911.
I can think of a good reason. Maybe you aren't one of this cynical bastards who believes that people can't change. Maybe you also believe that when you've done the time, you've paid off the crime. How about being a contrarian like me who thinks that a society that can't punish appropriately the first time, doesn't deserve a "second chance."