Sex offender arrested for having unregistered email account
What’s an important take-away from this article (aside from the reminder to register all your email addresses or you could be hit with a third degree felony) is the highlighted sentence below. Apparently “FDLE is working to bring forensic analysis to sex offenders’ homes…” What’s that all about?
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ORANGE COUNTY, Fla.
A convicted sex offender was arrested and taken to jail because he had an email account that wasn’t registered with the state.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Robert Roberts violated his probation by having a Facebook account and an email address that wasn’t registered.
Channel 9 found out it’s a common problem that probation officers and state agents deal with.
“He knew he was not allowed to have an unregistered email,” FDLE Special Agent Tony Rodriguez said.
Roberts, 70, is on probation from a 2005 sex crime involving a victim under 16 years old. He reportedly told his probation officer he’s had an email account for years.
The sex offender is also accused of sending a friend request to the victim in his sex crime case.
Rodriguez said it can be tough to closely monitor sex offenders and their activity on the Internet.
“Some probationary agencies do not have the agents to go out and check the digital media,” Rodriguez said.
FDLE is working to bring forensic analysis to sex offenders’ homes in order to easily verify if they’re on the Internet.
“We are working. We are checking. We are out there and we will find them,” Rodriguez said.
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Also, how did they catch this elderly man? There had to be some kind of unlawful intrusion unless he actually told them -?
One thing that jumps out at me in this article also is the statement that he was not allowed to have a FB account? Last I knew FL Registered citizens were not stopped from having FB accounts? FB does not allow it but I understood that FL allows them to have them?
Correct – they can have social media accounts. They are just required to report them.
There is no restriction on having an “internet identifier”, however if you have an internet identifier that is not reported, it’s a third degree felony.
I like to quickly weigh in on this issue. This comes as no surprise to me. The monitoring of the Internet and those who use it is extremely easy to do, and is currently being done by companies across the country. The amount of data that can be obtained from someone visiting your website is enormous. Demographics, location, device being used, screen size, etc. It simply requires the Will to do so and a budget to support it. Here’s what I see happening. This creates an opportunity for law enforcement to request more federal/state/county funding, creation of more government departments/jobs, and prosecutors to increase conviction rates while fueling the prison system with low hanging registrant fruit ultimately generating revenue for the private prison sector. On the flipside is there a small amount of registrants who are abusing their Internet access? Yes there are. These few will cause the overreaction that always occurs allowing the above opportunities to happen.
Donavon – I agree with your comments on the cycle; opportunity for law enforcement to capture the low hanging fruit without much investigative work and with the largest upside potential (who will not agree to spending “if it only saves one child”).
There are stories that come out all the time about SO sweeps. They are usually “joint operations” between State and Federal Authorities and they pretty much universally confirm that the overwhelming majority of registrants are compliant. The small amount of “violations” uncovered are generally registration violations but hardly ever new sex offenses. It’s not like they are finding abducted children or solving molestation cases.
Donavon,
Please take a look at http://aclu-nh.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Online-ID-Complaint.pdf
About 10 days ago, the ACLU filed a lawsuit in NH challenging the compelled disclosure of online identifiers. This same challenge has been successful in at least four other states.
The fact pattern and federal issues are the same.
If anyone is interested in joining a subcommittee to take on this challenge or in participating, please contact [email protected] immediately.
Very good point! I’m glad people are seeing how much of a financial racket law enforcement and the prison system is here in this state
It’s probably the same thing they do when they plant files of CP on people’s computers and then go arrest them in the sting because they “possessed” the images. Yeah, that kind of forensic analysis.