San Fran DA’s Bill Bans Sex Offenders from Facebook: But Is That Constitutional?

San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris announced a bill this week that would ban California's 63,000 registered sex offenders from social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The proposed law doesn't go as far as a similar one that went on the books in New York in 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle says. In New York, registered sex offenders must register their e-mail addresses and online aliases with with authorities, who then turn them over to social networking sites, KGO-TV says. Sex offenders who are caught on those sites face a felony charge.

Harris told KGO-TV that the law would be enforced by responding to tips.

"The carrot is don't get on these sites, and the stick is we will prosecute you," Harris told the Chronicle. "In my experience, these types of predators are a slimy group, and they don't want to go to jail, and what we're telling them is that if you go online and start chatting with my 12-year-old niece, you're going to jail."

But Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's information privacy programs told the San Francisco Examiner's Under the Dome blog that he thinks the law might not pass constitutional muster.

“Cutting a class off from a very important communication medium could implicate First Amendment issues," Hoofnagle told the blog. “For instance, what if a law was proposed that sex offenders couldn’t use the telephone, or the mail? I mean that clearly would be overbroad and problematic. Well, social networking sites are the new mail, right?”