Category Archives: KlaasKids

Assembly Bill 755: Online Safety Legislation in California

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In her continuing efforts to protect children from sexual predators online, Assemblymember Cathleen Galgiani, in conjunction with the KlaasKids Foundation for Children and former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, introduced on Friday Assembly Bill 755 (AB 755), the California’s Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act (E-STOP) legislation.

AB 755 will require convicted sex offenders to register their email addresses and online identifiers and service providers with the California Department of Justice. That information is then made available to social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook to assist them in removing sexual predators from their sites.

“I understand that MySpace and Facebook have long had policies banning sex offenders on their websites and they have routinely used state registries in the past to block thousands of convicts from joining.” stated Galgiani, “AB 755 will help with this labor-intensive process for social networking sites. I look forward to working with KlaasKids and Mr. Kelly on this important child protection legislation.”

“As a leader in child safety legislation, the KlaasKids Foundation realizes that few safeguards exist to protect children who use the Internet.” said Marc Klaas in a statement on Friday, “That is why we are proud to serve as a Sponsor of this bill authored by Assemblymember Cathleen Galgiani that provides protection to California’s children who use Social Networking websites. By bringing a framework to California that has proven successful in New York, we can contribute to the safety of this dynamic virtual playground that has so greatly impacted society.”

 At the end of 2010, New York State Attorney General Cuomo announced that Facebook and MySpace have removed approximately 11,721 profiles associated with 4,336 dangerous sexual predators registered in New York since the law was implemented in 2008.

First proposed by then-Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly in 2006, the E-STOP framework allows more effective policing and removal of sex offenders from online sites where minors may congregate.

“E-STOP’s implementation in New York and the use of sex offender registries by Facebook, MySpace, and other sites have helped build a safer Internet by removing tens of thousands of convicted sex offenders from social networks. We need to upgrade our protection systems here in California. At Facebook, we led the way in supporting E-STOP and I’m excited to stand with Assemblymember Galgiani as we put the right framework in place to build a safer California for kids and adults alike” said former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly.
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A Modest Proposal

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Psychics don’t solve missing person cases, yet they insist upon injecting themselves whenever a missing person report reaches the media. Psychic saturation in a given case is dependent upon how widespread it has been reported, the amount of reward offered, and the location from which the person was reported missing. In other words, a case reported in suburban San Francisco will receive more psychic chatter than a case reported out of Western Texas. At best psychic involvement constitutes a distraction, at worst it diverts resources and delays resolution.

Psychics exploit family member’s fears and a desperate desire to know what happened. Psychics don’t have special insight; in fact their predictions tend to veer widely off the mark. They are either impossible to prove, or they tend to be so generic as to be useless. They may say that the missing person is dead and at the bottom of a body of water, or they may say that they see rolling green hills, a highway off ramp, and hear a babbling brook. Well you can’t check at the bottom of every body of water and the geographic description includes all of Northern California and beyond.

The temporary hope delivered by psychic predictions is dashed by the realization that they are inevitably wrong. Any other profession with a zero success rate would be acknowledged utter and hopeless failure, but psychics deny their reality and move onto the next case. Peer review doesn’t exist, but if it did, the baseline for judging and evaluating performance would be a continuum of total failure.

Psychic involvement could be curtailed if there was a consequence for inaccurate predictions, thereby allowing investigative resources to continue pursuing viable leads. One logical way to achieve this goal is to charge psychics for resources wasted when diverted to their unfounded predictions.

Obviously, families are not in a position to charge for this information because they are desperate for information, regardless of the source. And psychics can be very convincing through a combination of lies and fear. However, law enforcement is another matter all together. If the jurisdictional law enforcement agency secured a written promise from psychics that any resources diverted to their involvement in a case would be charged to them should the investigation prove fruitless, you wouldn’t find a psychic in America willing to sign on the dotted line.

The trickledown effect of this action might conceivably impact so-called psychic credibility. Once it became known that psychics are unwilling to put their money where their predictions are, they would be exposed for the frauds that they are. All of the relevant parties would be better served. Families wouldn’t hang false hope on mindless guesses and law enforcement wouldn’t have to distract attention away from a viable investigation.

If you don’t believe me just ask Shawn Hornbeck’s parents. In 2003, Browne claimed that eleven year old Shawn Hornbeck had been abducted by a very tall man with long black dreadlocks and a blue sedan, and that his body could be found near two large, jagged boulders in a wooded area about 20 miles southwest of Richwoods, MO. Shawn Hornbeck was found alive 4-years later. Sylvia Brown has never apologized for the agony that she put Shawn’s parents through.
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