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MySpace Predator Caught By Code
An anonymous reader writes, "Wired News editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen wrote a
1,000-line Perl script that checked MySpace for registered sex offenders. Sifting through the results, he manually confirmed over 700 offenders, including a serial child molester in New York actively trying to hook up with underage boys on the site, and who has now been arrested as a result. MySpace told Congress last June that it didn't have this capability." Wired News says they will publish Poulsen's code under an open-source license later this week.
I'm quite glad for this guy; but law enforcement's malaise still cheeses my off a bit. Indeed, writing a Perl script to spider MySpace is not rocket science -- I whipped one up six months ago as part of a graduate school project. Immediately sensing the possibilities of catching people like this, I contacted several people in the CIA and FBI through my school. After several painfully blunt explanations, none of them could grasp how the script could be used in their agencies. Governments and major corporations wonder why China can get into "secure" sites and "kids" write viruses like "ILoveYou" or "Blaster". It's because they're so monolithically slow, stupid, and blind that they can neither see nor react to their environments. Maybe law enforcement will "wise up" and start offering prize money / sponsoring competitions, just like the recent Bio-Tech news here on Slashdot.
So how many false positives and false negatives does this produce? i.e., how many non-offenders does it misidentify as being offenders and how many offenders does it misidentify as non-offenders? Furthermore, of the offenders properly identified, how many of them are actually committing, planning to commit, thinking about committing, wanting to commit, or some other way being involved with the committing of a sexual offender related crime on myspace?
While the tool may produce results, are the results good enough and non-damaging enough to be useful? (I'd consider any given non-offender being identified as an offender and subsequently harrassed as such rather extensively damaging.)
> Though they do now have the ability to catch the really stupid ones it seems.
We had a sliding screen door that didn't work too well. My wife left it half-open one day. I asked her how many flies she thought that would keep out:
a) all of them
b) half of them
c) none of them
d) just the dumb ones
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hey folks.
Picking and choosing when it is/is not OK to cooperate with authorities in a criminal investigation might be very convenient for Kevin Lee Poulsen, but it should give his sources -- past, present, and future -- significant pause.
Wired News -- and Kevin -- have shown that writing a splashy story means more to them right now than the danger of blurring the lines between reporter and cop. This isn't about protecting kids, or about what MySpace should or should not do. It's about eroding the role of the journalist as a fair and impartial witness, in a time when too many people are already barking up that tree.
A hacker should know better.
-- Adrian Lamo
It's because people want to outlet their aggressive tendencies someplace, and we've all collectively aggreed that "child molesters" (and now, to some degree "terrorists") are a target that no one will object to our over-reactive hatred for. Other acceptable groups include "cop killers". Let's get all righteous and bloodthirsty over these groups of people, now that it isn't socially acceptable to hate a group based on their skin color.
See how far we've come?
Actually, not exactly, natural selection just requires that the problem doesn't get so bad that it has a significant impact on the ability of the species as a whole to survive. It's perfectly compatible with natural selection if, say, 2% of the population, despite being totally innocent, meets some horrible unfair death, as long as the other 98% gets along fine. If that's enough to keep the species going, then it's all that natural selection requires.
I think there's a common misconception that evolution is a force which is so powerful that it eliminates all imperfection. That's not necessarily the case. It only eliminates perfections that threaten the ability of the species to do the minimum necessary to survive. All other imperfections are relatively unimportant, at least as far as evolution is concerned.
Having said that, I've heard it said that of the people who experience some form of severe trauma or abuse, there is a certain percentage who become pretty much permanently (or at least over the long term) messed up in the head and have trouble coping with life in a wide variety of ways. But then there is also a large percentage of people who come from a messed up background who grow up to be perfectly healthy adults. In fact, these people tend to take their messed up background and find some way to make it into something positive. They may even be more successful than the average person. Years ago, I knew someone who came from a background where he and his siblings had all been abused. He wasn't able to deal with it very well and his life was, I hate to say, a serious mess. (I hope he's managed to iron some things out by now.) His sister, on the other hand, had earned a graduate degree in social work (I think) and had written at least one book on the subject of child abuse. She had done well for herself and was making a real difference in the world, and I think she was emotionally healthy as well.
Basically, it seems like when something really terrible happens to someone, either they are never able to overcome it or they are able to overcome it, and they grow from it in ways that others never would even have the ability to grow. I'm thankful that a good percentage of the people are able to totally recover and be a stronger person as a result. But the reason child molestation and similar things are so bad is that a certain number of people will fall into the first category and never get past it. I don't know why some people are able to get past it and some aren't, but it seems to be the case, and that's why I think we should continue to treat it as a very serious issue.