I attended a marketing and advertising conference in 2009. It was very soon after the death of Michael Jackson and the keynote speaker began the session by asking, “how many of you woke up this morning, walked outside to get your newspaper and learned, for the first time, that Michael Jackson had died?” Not a hand in the crowd of over a thousand was raised. He then asked, “how many of you came home after a long day of work, turned on the 6 o’clock news and learned for the first time that Michael Jackson had died?” Maybe a couple of people in the audience raised their hands.

He then asked, “how many of you, within minutes, got an email, text, tweet, Facebook post or read on AOL that Michael Jackson had died?” The entire audience raised their hands.

The point of the speech was that the way people receive information in 2009 is dramatically different from the way we received it ever before. Although many people might enjoy holding a newspaper on a lazy Sunday morning reading editorials or human interest stories, nobody in present times walks into their office, sits down at their desk and typewriter and gets their relevant information from the morning paper anymore.

That was 2009. We’re now in 2017 and things have moved online at an even faster pace. Barak Obama was the first president to “tweet” on January 18, 2010 and the President we are going to inaugurate today uses Twitter as his platform to communicate with his constituents. Things have changed.

Major newspapers have ceased traditional print and gone digital only. Even the Wall Street Journal, which has the largest subscriber base of any US Newspaper, acknowledged this past October that the future of it’s paper is online. The NY Times, amid similar concerns with it’s print version, acknowledged it intends, “to chart a path forward as readers move online and increasingly onto mobile platforms.”

Businesses communicate through email, not letters or even faxes. Many offices have gone “paperless”, using electronic document filing systems and e-signatures. Internet access has become indispensable in all aspects of modern life and business. Without it you can’t communicate effectively with family and friends, you can’t work in most jobs, you can’t participate in political discussions and you can’t integrate meaningfully into society.

Many states block or severely restrict sex offenders’ access to the internet. Even those who are no longer on probation. The Supreme Court will soon hear the Packingham case, challenging the North Carolina law that prevents all registered former sex offenders from “accessing” sites that also allow children to “access”, such as the New York Times website. Such a ban is like telling someone convicted of wire fraud they can never use the telephone again, but ‘that’s alright because they can still write letters’.

And they don’t call it punishment! Ha! Even a five-year old can see that as punishment. After all, taking away one’s ipad is harsher nowadays than being sent to your room.

Times have also changed when it comes to technology to track and prevent online sexual victimization. There is a wealth of free software for parents to track their children’s online and mobile use. The FBI and local law enforcement has access to technology such as “Fairplay” which tracks illegal images through “hash marks” or “hash values”. Private companies even have their own technology, such as Microsoft’s Child Exploitation Tracking System. Florida-based Child Rescue Coalition claims it “has trained investigators in every state and 62 countries” and that it’s software “has led to the arrest of 7,400 people and rescued 1,700 children around the world from child porn. For those on probation, there are several applications that can run on a probationer’s computer to detect and report suspected prohibited activity. There are so many ways to work through this concern that don’t infringe on citizens’ First Amendment rights.

The other reality that laws need to accept, after decades of research, is that 9 out of 10 sexual crimes are committed by someone NOT on the registry, that sex offenders have among the lowest recidivism rate of any criminal class and that someone intent on committing a sexual assault is not going to worry about using an un-registered internet identifier. In fact, they would be stupid to use a registered one to commit a crime!

Instead of operating sites to perpetuate it’s distribution, law enforcement should focus on removing illegal pornography from the web. Instead of hyper-focusing on the less than 10% who are NOT likely to repeat their crimes, they need to focus on the more than 90% who are presently ignored. Instead of passing “feel good legislation”, legislators need to pass sex offender laws that get with the times, consider what decades of empirical evidence proves, consider the realities of modern times and employ the tools out there that focus on prevention, rather than punishment.