Read the FDLE's interpretation of the October 1st Changes to the Registry Law
Read the FDLE’s interpretation of the October 1st Changes to the Registry Laws:
https://floridaactioncommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/10-1-16-Update-Notice-Summary.pdf
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Along a similar line regarding what the law requires and what law enforcement (LE) is willing to accommodate: Statute 943.0435 indicates that, upon re-registration, changes to personal data, including palm prints, MUST be reported to LE. However, Orange County is not ready/willing to take palm prints (a requirement added two years ago) except during one’s initial registration. Thus, they never took mine and, per the statute, I MUST provide them. I sent an email to FDLE over a year ago to let them know that I offered my palm prints to LE, but they would not take them.
JV – I hear what you are saying about stopping the panic but in this case what the FDLE is saying and the way the statute reads do not match and what you call panic I call outrage – actually the statute is extremely obscure – the interpretation of it by the FDLE certainly makes a little more sense (however as mentioned above they cannot just interpret the law the way they want to) – I have read the statute more than once and it is misleading and confusing – the fact is when laws are made that can put a person in prison they need to be clear and concise – period.
FDLE can attempt clarification all they want, it does not change the law. The law says URL, not domain. A URL, which need not be confined to web traffic only, per the governing RFC 1738 (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt) takes the mandatory form “http://[host]:[port]/[path]?[searchpart]” (RFC 1738 section 2.2). When any part is left blank, it is assumed to be null or default. These elements must exist, either explicitly or implicitly, to constitute a URL.
Using the FDLE example of Facebook, a site used for communication without a doubt, simply browsing to the site will be one unique URL, per the governing documents (Again, see the RFC). e.g. https://www.facebook.com/
If you then browse to the page https://www.facebook.com/directory/, this is a different and unique URL because the [path] is clearly different. To say that it is not is to break the very RFC which defines the term Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in the first place, and is such invalid guidance by FDLE. Using their example as the invalid interpretation that it is, we can just as easily say the [domain], [port], and [searchpart] have no significance in the URL. Therefore, https://www.facebook.com/ must be the same as https://www.google.com and http://twitter.com and http://floridaactioncommittee.com:80/wp-login.php?even=morestuff
If the law were written as the FDLE wishes it had been, it would replace “Uniform Resource Locator (URL)” with “Fully Qualified Domain Name”, which can still get pretty wild in variations, but even better “Second Level Domain and Top Level Domain”, which essentially is the usually-significant part FDLE seems to be after (e.g. facebook.com, twitter.com, facebook.co.uk, etc.). See RFC 920, which defines these terms and the domain name hierarchy (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920)
Plain and simply this law was written by incompetents who, per the usual, do not care about making sense or complying with the laws of the language, the laws of science, the laws of technology, and so forth. Ironic for a group of people whose job is to make laws. FDLE is doing their best to ensure it doesn’t get out of hand, by spreading official but unlawful and fundamentally incorrect information. Essentially, they are saying “despite the law and the true definition of the term URL, we only want you to tell us the main domain name”.
As an additional bit of fun information, every single page you visit, unbeknownst to the layman, is creating on average hundreds of additional requests in the background to other paths, other domains, and with other arguments, and even to other ports. In other words, when you browse to twitter.com, without having logged in yet, you have just requested 86 URLs (per my test as of this writing) for images, scripts, Async Requests (e.g. AJAX), etc. Even if we ONLY count domains, this single page visit requested resources from 9 different domains. This is on the low end, as large sites are able to significantly optimize things to perform fewer requests. Visit baynews9.com, a site which you can post comments (which is definitely considered communication), and on the home page alone you just performed 220 requests to individual URLs.
To be compliant with this law while still using the Internet in essentially ANY way is effectively impossible. If we were all to actually comply with the law as it is written, FDLE’s systems could not hold up against the onslaught of registered URLs that would have to be submitted.
Incredibly well informed! Thank you!!!
I wish I could hug you right now. Thanks for the post, which contains so much goodness I don’t know where to start praising it. In my hopeful dreams, you are actually connected with the FDLE and are trying to find a way to educate our legislators. Thanks to you sir/madam.
I think everyone should make screen names of supporters of this law and register them as identifiers.
That’s a lovely idea… only issue is the information is freely accessible so the supporters whose names are used as screen names will know the identity of the person who is using their name. Generally they are politicians or those in law enforcement. Here in Florida they will mess with you!
All I can say is I hope this challenge goes through. This law is insane. I may as well be a hermit in the Everglades. The Registration laws and penalties are 2 pages or more long..Next they’ll put me in a concentration camp and require bandanas on my arm:/