Well, add one more to the list of completely useless laws. In what can only be seen as a ploy to butter-up voters John McCain wrote and G’Dub passed the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008 (sic) on Monday.

The intent of this law is to keep perverts from being able to sign up for accounts on social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. How it will work is that registered sex offenders will be required to submit their email address to a database which sites can then query during the registration process to help weed out the bad eggs. Granted this all sounds well and good until you consider the fact that it takes like five minutes to register an anonymous webmail account.

Wired has a little better coverage on the law, along with the history of where this bill came from. My favorite tidbit of the article it this:

Here, Fox’s interests and McCain’s converge perfectly. For any social networking site, it’s much easier to check an e-mail address than to effectively police message boards and friends lists for signs of predation. And this plan allows McCain to appear tough on child predators, while opposing more serious efforts against pedophiles that offend the far right.

In television ads he ran last month, McCain slammed a 2003 Illinois measure once supported by presidential rival Barack Obama that would have taught children how to recognize, and avoid, sexual predators. McCain called the plan “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners.

In other words, to McCain, teaching children to avoid predators is as bad as teaching sexually active teenagers about contraception. But setting up an e-mail database that relies on pedophiles being honest and respectful of the law — well, we can all live with that.

Come to think of it, that’s half the article right there. Seriously though, who is dumb enough to think that this sort of law will ever be effective in keeping children safe from pedophiles. Talk about wasting tax payers dollars.