Report Your Neighbors

Ever wonder if that jittery guy down the street is really a speed freak? If you lived in Tennessee, you wouldn’t have to. Authorities there recently launched a website listing state residents convicted of methamphetamine offenses– searchable by name or address. Why only people involved with this single drug and not, say, murderers or rapists? Well, that’s what Jack Shafer calls the moral panic over meth for you.

And then there’s illegal immigration, which outrages some private citizens so much that they’ve set up a similar database
where Minuteman-types can post the names and addresses of anyone they suspect of being undocumented.

All of which ought to make things easier for any excitable vigilantes out there – like the guy in Maine who murdered two sex offenders whose addresses he found on the state’s online database.