Computer Code Finds 744 Sex Predators On MySpace, Paves Way for Arrest.

Wired's Kevin Poulsen went undercover online & found some some alarming information about who's lurking on MySpace. Armed with a sheaf of information on convicted sex offenders, and his knowledge of the cimputer language Perl, the reporter confirmed a total of 744 sex criminals with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data. Almost 500 of them are registered for sex crimes against children, 6 listed as repeat offenders and at least 243 of the child sex offenders have convictions in 2000 or later.

Poulsen built an automated program, using Perl, to sift through all of MySpace's profiles looking for 385,932 convicted and released sex offenders from 46 states. He says he mined the list from the US Department of Justice's National Sex Offender Registry website which he says is "gateway to the state-run Megan's Law websites". He used first and last names and limited results to a five-mile radius around each offender's ZIP code. Here is the guy that Poulsen's code caught, which enabled him (the sex offender, not Pouslen :) to be busted for trying to solicit sex online with a 14 year-old gay boy.

WiredSafety.org is working with MySpace to fight this kind of thing, according to Poulsen's article.

Wired News published the code Poulsen used last year under an open-source license. It's not a plug and play application however. And it's not perfect. And it's not an excuse, he points out, 'to go vigilante', it only finds matches by name - the person could easily be someone else with the same name who not the offender. Poulsen went through the entire possible list of potential offenders which the program dug up, using his own eyes to verify if the people were the same as the offenders - age, mug shots, etc. He did find false positives. Lots of them. The program cannot find anyone who is using an assumed name, nor anyone who has legally changed their name. Here's Wired's follow-up article about the code. The article has a link to download the gzipped tar file with the program. If you have to ask what a tar file is, you will not be able to use the program. To use it you need to have at least some familiarity with Perl, says Poulsen, who also notes that the program's code could use some cleaning up.