Please Hold

[lilmissnever]

I spend a lot of time on the phone with strangers at the Mysterious Workplace. Sometimes, they're good phone calls. On Tuesday morning, I spent twenty minutes on the phone with a gentleman who had some questions about the legal rights of users on Facebook. I did not have particularly cheery news for him, but when we were done, he asked me to put

Comments

[theweaselking]

Hmm. While I sympathise with your position and your unwillingness to take his case, I have to wonder if "barred from using the internet for non-work-finding, including doing-my-current-job purposes" could, in fact, be deemed "cruel and unusual".

I imagine the ruling would come down similar to "even if you're a cabbie, losing your license for repeated DUIs is not a violation", but even that... you need a license to drive. You don't need one to use the internet.

Also: If they're going to ban using the internet on convictions, I can think of a few dozen people who need to lose it *long* before an (alleged?) sex offender. Spammers cost man-centuries of productivity, annually.

[theweaselking]

Uh, Congress *hasn't* passed decent anti-spammer legislation. In the US, they passed "Yes You CAN-SPAM", which is not only toothless and useless but also gutted the few semi-effective state laws AND legally required an entire generation of newbies to *click on the links they're sent in email* if they want to stop receiving mail from the spammers.

And there are still a whole pile of American spammers and American spammer ISPs running, even now. UCE is still big money, and the main reason the massively-destructive spammers aren't getting prosecuted is that the US Congress *legalised* destructive trespass to chattels as long as you sign your name at the bottom when you're through.

[avar1c3]

Yeah, I too would be at least willing to entertain the idea of it being cruel and unusual punishment, that's basically sentencing someone to subsistence-level employment these days. Also, while I'm unfamiliar with New Jersey specifically, 'registered sex offender' covers such stupidly broad territory that in and of itself it doesn't tell me much about whether the person in question would be someone I have sympathy for (19 year old dating a 14 year old whose parents disapprove? That was every relationship I had before I came of age). That said, I'm assuming the internet ban isn't an automatic thing in NJ and would have to be specifically handed down as part of the sentencing? In which case it's more likely to be justified, but you still never know when you're dealing with a conservative yahoo in a robe. Seems far from cut and dried unless there were pertinent details about his crime that were just too harsh to get into on lj.

[lilmissnever]

Megan's Law merely requires sex offenders to register their location. This tells me that the caller is a registered sex offender, but it does not give me an indication of what his offense might have been. In my "did they find anything? was it child porn?" experience, the fact that the caller, in all of his time on the phone trying to elicit sympathy from me, did not specify his offense, leads me to believe that it was somewhat more serious that underage dating.

[avar1c3]

That's fair, it wasn't clear if he didn't specify or if you weren't in the mood to share the messier details.

Might be off topic, but the topic inspired the rant...

[drkaos]

Sex offender status is a tricky thing. A fine example is the number of underage girls and boys now facing charges for the production, possession and dissemination of child pornography based on the naked pictures of themselves they took and sent using their cell phones. If a little judicial wisdom doesn't prevail, their acts of sexting will make them all registered sex offenders for life. And when trying to get a job, I'd imagine that would be kind of hard to explain

[wyndebreaker]

Some days you just have to weep for humanity, don't you?

[ammonoid]

If that is cruel and unusual what about Kevin Mitnicks probation terms? Geez.

[ammonoid]

Well, yeah. I was specifically referring to the no computers part of his probation - getting money out of an ATM would violate that.

[edge_of_within]

Are you ever amazed that for a place like your Mysterious Workplace (TM), that exists soley because and for The Interwebs, that so many people would still contact you via the phone?

One of the biggest changes in life for iphone owners is the weird self-migration from "mobile phone" to "mobile internet/messaging device".
(I rarely use my phone to make calls)

[frandroid]

Phones are for conversation. Email isn't. And in most cases, Organizations don't take customers/citizens' queries over IM.