MySpace Predator Caught by Code

by Actual News Geezer | October 17, 2006 at 05:09 am

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Five months ago, Wired writer Kevin Poulson had one of those crazy ideas: write some code that would catch sexual predators at MySpace.

Poulson took data from the national sexual predators registry, and wrote a program that would sift through the postings at MySpace to produce positive matches.
It succeeded - and now the question is: should other social software providors do the same?

Yaphank, NY -- The computer crimes unit of New York's Suffolk County Police Department sits in a gloomy government office canopied by water-stained ceiling tiles and stuffed with battered Dell desktops. A mix of file folders, notes, mug shots and printouts form a loose topsoil on the desks, which jostle shoulder-to-shoulder for space on the scuffed and dented floor.

I've been invited here to witness the end-game of a police investigation that grew from 1,000 lines of computer code I wrote and executed some five months earlier. The automated script searched MySpace's 1 million-plus profiles for registered sex offenders -- and soon found one that was back on the prowl for seriously underage boys.

That's something that MySpace has said it cannot do. Rather, it is seeking new laws that would make it easier to ban sex offenders from the site through an e-mail registry.