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.

Comments

May I be the first to say...

[Capella or Bust]

PWND.

Re:May I be the first to say...

[megaditto]

Einstein said: "there are two infinite things, the Universe, and the human stupidity. And I am not sure about the Universe..."

What kind of a dumb criminal would willingly give their real name and address while indending to then break the law.

What next? Robbing your local sperm bank's register after leaving a DNA "deposit"? Stealing a credit card to pay your utility bills?

Re:May I be the first to say...

[Achromatic1978]

The only thing that worries me about this is 'authenticity'. What's to stop a vigilante group creating Myspace accounts in the names of registered sex offenders, and then reporting said accounts to the police? Sure, it's traceable with a bit of effort - but you just know that there'll be slips made, especially when you connect the words "sex offender", "children", "myspace", "police", and "media" in the same sentence.

MySpace told congress...

[sdBlue]

[sarcasm]While most of us here know how trivial searching for string a in string b is, I for one believe that Tom couldn't do it. Aside from all the horror that it is conceptually, the (lack of) stability of their site actually makes that statement believable![/sarcasm]

Don't believe it

[illegalcortex]

This article isn't credible. It must be a hoax. I mean, c'mon, you really expect me to believe someone wrote a 1,000 line perl script. And that it did what it was supposed to?

Re:Don't believe it

[jazman_777]

you really expect me to believe someone wrote a 1,000 line perl script.

It was originally only 17 lines, but he had to make it 1,000 so it'd be readable.

Re:Don't believe it

[bitt3n]

This article isn't credible. It must be a hoax. I mean, c'mon, you really expect me to believe someone wrote a 1,000 line perl script. And that it did what it was supposed to?

actually, the script was originally intended to locate hot teenage girls.. like any good programmer, when he saw the results, he updated the spec sheet.

Re:Is this legal?

[omeomi]

Isn't this a breach of privacy and wouldn't this person or MySpace be vulnerable to lawsuits?

Anything you put on a public web site is--by definition--not private. It would be a breach of privacy if MySpace used private, personal information, but if the script just culled information from public pages, there's no breach of privacy.

didn't have the capability

[nizo]

...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.

Thus spake the article:

...Lubrano was so easy to find. "He registered on MySpace using his real name? What a nitwit."

No amount of rummaging through any database is going to detect someone who registers under a false name, so no MySpace will NEVER really have the ability to find all the sex offenders, unless they can somehow verify that people are who they say they are when they sign up. Though they do now have the ability to catch the really stupid ones it seems.

Easier

[MrSquishy]

That seems like a complicated way to get the same results as:
SELECT * FROM userbase WHERE SexOffender="1";

Re:Easier

[sdBlue]

or SELECT * FROM userbase WHERE interests LIKE '%molest%' OR interests like '%catholicism%' ouch, yes he did!

Okay, the FBI is a bunch of *******

[adaptive_tech]

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.

Re:Is this legal?

[KiltedKnight]

If you are only sifting through public information, then there is nothing illegal about this.

If you are sifting through private information, then one of the following is true:

• If you are a Law Enforcement Official, anything you discover cannot be used to obtain a warrant, nor can this evidence be used against someone without it being lawfully reacquired once a warrant has been issued
• If you are a private citizen, unless you violated some sort of Terms of Use or other agreement to obtain the information, it is not illegal for you to use it

Yes. It is perfectly legal for a private citizen, acting on his or her own volition, to perform searches. The illegality occurs when laws are broken to obtain the information (breach of contract, breaking and entering, etc).

Names

[ezzewezza]

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.)

Re:Good Job Kevin

[inviolet]

I can deal and respect many of the objectionable ones, but I think a couple of crimes are universal. Child (a real child not 'underage' teenager, a *child*) molestation . . .

Now why is that, exactly?

We know that child molestation has occurred for untold eons. Humans are therefore resilient, resistant to such things, for the sake of survival. And at the risk of getting flamed, I want to point out the evidence that most victims of such mistreatment do in fact go on to lead normal lives. Natural selection sternly requires it.

So. Why is child molestation such an obviously hideous evil?

Is it just because we in the West are presently obsessed with sex?

I swear I am not trolling. I myself am actually a victim, from age 8, but I seem to be fine (although my level of slashdotting may be a sign of a deep malfunction). Ever since I realized that I survived unscathed, I have been wondering for a long time why this subject gets an automatic "OMG teh molestation!!!11!" response, when it is actually such a commonplacde in human history.

It almost -- ALMOST -- smells like we are protesting too much.

Heh, don't ask me - and I posted it!

[NotQuiteReal]

I was only looking for a "funny".

I posted it under another "funny".

I think there are folks who take the mod system way too seriously and have some sort of problem with the fact that "funny" doesn't garner "karma", so they feel obliged to give it "insightful" or some such. I don't care, If I post a "funny", I don't expect "karma".

My personal opinion is that "funny" is just that - for those who think it is funny. Maybe having zero karma for funny is "right", maybe it is "wrong".

I dunno.

Hey mods - don't zap me down too much. I didn't mod myself up. You are in a pissing match with other mods! (Not that I give a shit what my "karma" is, I am soo going to hell, maybe, depending on who you ask.)