The below came from The Legal Pad, Volume 4, Issue 5 (May, 2020), published by Cyrus Gladden from the gulag in Moose Lake, Minnesota.
Karen Floren, “A Window into a Sex Offender’s Life: State Can Remotely Access and Monitor Computer Activity of Those on Probation,” The Day, March 29, 2020
Text excerpts:
” … [T]he state’s Court Support Services Division has acquired a software program that enables officers to remotely monitor the computer activity of probationers. Sex offenders who use the internet pay $24 a month for the monitoring service. About 43 offenders are being monitored with Impulse Control”
“… [T]he software, which is a product of Internet Probation and Parole Inc., of King of Prussia, PA,[is] another tool in the box for supervising sex offenders.”
“The probation officers can tailor the Impulse Control software to each user’s situation. They can block access to social networking sites and chat rooms and sites containing keywords known to be associated with child and adult porn. The software captures the user’s activity and sends it to a main server, and officers can access the server from their laptops at any time…The program also provides information on any peripheral devices, like flash drives, that are used on a computer.”
“Courts have ruled, in general, that computer use is a necessary part of life, but that authorities can limit and monitor online activity of offenders.”
“A probation expert … has described computers as ‘the window into an offender’s mind.’ An officer can learn a lot about his client by reviewing his computer activity, and that can open up a dialog to help the officer learn more about the client… ”
Editor’s Closing Note:
This article excerpt allows us to explore the other fork in our road of logic, as it were. Despite my last comments above, let’s assume that keeping pedosexuals away from pornography or even non-pornographic but provocative images of minors is an actual need to prevent re-offense.
Addressing that assumed need, this article illustrates the amazing armamentarium that can be brought to bear to prevent access to such imagery when the pedosexual in question (whether on release or in confinement) is accessing the internet. It also interdicts all attempts of any pedosexual to contact children or to engage in any research that could produce any facts of use toward stalking any minor.
Therefore, by removing the feared harms from such internet access, such software also removes the perceived need to keep pedosexuals “offline.” The existence, then, of this alternative to completely banishing pedosexuals from the internet – whatever their current setting – shows beyond question that such total ‘banishment’ deprives them of their First Amendment right of communication through the only practicable means of communication in the modern world for all purposes.
