First The Hunt, And Then...

"Not cultivating virtue, not learning, not being able to take justice
on hearing it, and not being able to change what is not good: these
are my worries."
"Cultivated people foster what is good in others, not what is bad.
Petty people do the opposite." --Confucius
I was reading this article on Yahoo Tech on Cyber Predators. The article is pretty interesting and raises many questions. Instead of spending time, energy and money cultivating what is good in others and teaching youth and adults self-discipline; law enforcement were engaged in what I would describe as a hunt to catch cyber sex predators. Here is how I read the article, but feel free to disagree:

More Internet predators are challening agents
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090323/ap_on_hi_te/cyber_predators
by Todd Richmond

First, the hunt.

"Over the past decade, agents and computer experts have gone after hundreds of people like Paul2u who solicit sex from kids..."
Then the media wanting to profit on the hunt

"Police efforts around the country were all the rage with the media in the early 2000s, reaching a crescendo with Dateline NBC's 'To Catch A Predator' series."
Then the sophistication of predators.

"The bad guys got smarter, too. They wanted to talk to the person on the other end of the modem and see photographs. "To Catch a Predator" only made them more cautious...online child porn became more sophisticated."
Then the balloon gets bigger and bigger.

""We simply don't have enough cops on the street to do the work that needs to be done," Price said. "We've got so many offenders out there. I just see the balloon getting bigger and bigger and bigger."
Then the poisoning of the minds.

Analyst Chris Byars spends days scanning seized porn for clues. Last summer she sat outside her home in central Wisconsin, trying to watch people stroll by, and had to go inside."
Then the need for more money to finance the hunt.
"Van Hollen asked Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle for $732,000 in the 2009-2011 state budget...despite the state's $5.7 billion deficit."
Then the catch

"The agents' adrenaline surged. Paul2u's action in simply pulling into the parking lot was enough for them to make an arrest. The sheriff's deputies closed in and ordered the driver out. "
Then the betrayal of faith and ...

"The cyber predator was 46-year-old Robert E. Thibault — Szatkowski's children's religion teacher."
and the betrayal of teachers, police officers and politicians.

"Szatkowski has lured priests, teachers, police officers — even a mayor."
What happens when we follow this methodology to catch bad people, terrorists or people doing bad things? Well we catch alot of people. I mean alot. So much that we have overflowing prisons, overflowing shelter homes and overflowing juvenlile centers. Then we lose our faith in our religion, politicians, neighbors, and even humanity. And our time is spent poisoning our minds and hunting them down which leads to this:

"A judge sentenced Thibault to 10 years in prison on conspiracy to sexually assault a child, but stayed the time and ordered him to spend a year in jail with work release. That was modified to electronic monitoring. The jail was too crowded."