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MySpace Predator Caught By Code
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Oct 16, 2006 05:02 PM
from the true-names dept.
from the true-names dept.
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.
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May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody around here did almost that. Stole a credit card, bought some home furnishings, and had it delivered. She was still trying to come up with a coherent explainantion as they took her away.
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Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Funny)
Please.
We can't seriously be getting this stupid as a species.
*cries*
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MySpace told congress... (Score:5, Funny)
Whack myspace hard (Score:4, Insightful)
MySpace needs to be whacked, hard. Harder.
The lazy, lying bastards should be shut down, made an example of. At the least, they're now liable because someone showed it could be done, and because they were too lazy to do it themselves, they now have a liability exposure for any child that was preyed upon through their web site.
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Re:Whack myspace hard (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the question could be posed whether they would have liability if they went hunting for "sexual predators" and made a public spectacle of someone who could be guilty of nothing more than propositioning a police officer posing as a street walker - in other words, someone who could be required by their state to be registered as a sex offender but has shown no predilection towards the exploitation of children or forcing sexual contact on someone.
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Re:MySpace told congress... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure it's trivial to find some child predators with a 1000 line perl script, but finding everyone of them would be nearly impossible.
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Re:MySpace told congress... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sad, but true. I can't tell you how many times I've heard similar things from legal folks over the years.
That said, if it can be shown that a trivial amount of effort could have prevented someone from being injured, that falls into the category of gross negligence, for which liability cannot be waived. In much the same way, if you serve alcohol at a party and someone has a wreck because they drove home while severely intoxicated, that person and/or his/her victims can sue you for not taking responsibility. The reasons for this are twofold: A. you should reasonably have known that people at your party would get drunk (since you served the alcohol) and B. the effort needed to prevent people from driving home while severely intoxicated is relatively low.
In short, not taking responsibility doesn't get them off the hook. It makes it a little harder for the parents of some abused kid to sue them, but only a little.
IANALBIPOOSD
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Re:MySpace told congress... (Score:5, Funny)
What's frightening to me is not the (presumed?) sex offenders on MySpace, but that I could translate this acronym into words.
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Re:MySpace told congress... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why it's not as simple as searching for string a in string b. You'll end up with half a million names, and not only do you have to monitor those half a million users to see what they're up to, you have to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Dougy is the infamous sex offender, and not an 11 year old trying to pick up 16 year olds.
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Don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't believe it (Score:4, Funny)
*Hides*
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Re:Don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
It was originally only 17 lines, but he had to make it 1,000 so it'd be readable.
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The results from the script was only the start... (Score:5, Funny)
I sure hope he wore gloves and/or other protection for that part!
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Heh, don't ask me - and I posted it! (Score:5, 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.)
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Re:Don't believe it (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
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didn't have the capability (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus spake the article:
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.
Re:didn't have the capability (Score:4, Insightful)
That's all we ever catch. The stupid ones. Well, that and the really unlucky ones. The ones that are smart enough to kidnap some kid from some non-surveillance location, abuse them, and release them far away from either the pickup point or the place where they abused them are seldom caught - and the ones that are so successful at their emotional abuse that the victim (regardless of age) never even reports the abuse. I'm not sure if that's intelligence or just skill at manipulating people.
Ever watch 60 Minutes? They had a special on a sting they did and guys just kept showing up at the house all day. Some of them even saw a cop, or some other guy, and waited for a while, then came back. I mean, what kind of idiot do you have to be?
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Re:didn't have the capability (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:didn't have the capability (Score:4, Insightful)
a) all of them
b) half of them
c) none of them
d) just the dumb ones
And the real answer is...
e) half of the dumb ones
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Re:didn't have the capability (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:didn't have the capability (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not need to be red flagged and reviewed based on these criteria. I can think of a variety of reasons why an adult could potentially have many people on their friends list who are underage. Do some of them coincide with people who "could be" sexual predators? Of course they do, but that is because sexual predators are attracted to positions that afford them opportunities -- and not because we should be red flagging every teacher, priest and family member that uses a website!
You know what else? Alot of children turn to these people with sexual concerns during maturity. Not everyone speaks as formally in private as I am right now, people do talk about sex, and sometimes people are just crude. You want to investigate every football coach who gets asked about the birds and the bees, or has some kid moon him via webcam?
Innocent until proven guilty; remember that always. Having people on your buddy list and being crude on the internet isn't anywhere close to probable cause. Not for the commu^H^H^H^Hterrorists, not for witc^H^H^H^Hmuslims, and not to 'think of the children'.
~Rebecca
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Does slashdot lead by example? (Score:4, Funny)
So the question is... does Slashdot check all users if they are registered sex offenders or does this Paulsen guy have to run his script here too?
The best line in there... (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder how many false positives he got (Score:4, Interesting)
I think these quotes says it all (Score:5, Insightful)
And then there is Jacob, one of the kids this 39 year old had "friended":
So Jacob's parents can't be bothered to, you know, go see wtf this kid is doing on MySpace? The earlier comment snippet makes it seem like the parents of this kid are totally off the hook here, but guess what? Wether your kid is hanging out at the local corner or someplace online, you really need to know where they are and what they are doing. And then there is the whole issue about not talking to stangers in the first place; apparently his parents have completely missed the boat in that area. Scary.
Okay, the FBI is a bunch of ******* (Score:5, Interesting)
Names (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
MySpace told Congress (Score:4, Funny)
Should read: Jim Foley breathed a sigh of relief when MySpace told Congress last June that it didn't have this capability.
Reporters should not be agents of the state. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Is this legal? (Score:5, Informative)
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).Parent
Easier (Score:5, Funny)
SELECT * FROM userbase WHERE SexOffender="1";
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Re:Easier (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Easy? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The only thing suprising about this is... (Score:5, Informative)
And speaking from unpleasant experience, doing something like this in a language without features dedicated to text parsing (like C++ without the Boost Perl regexp library) would take at least three times the lines.
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Re:Good Job Kevin (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Good Job Kevin (Score:4, Interesting)
See how far we've come?
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Re:Good Job Kevin (Score:4, Insightful)
My personal feeling on this specific issue is that I don't think MySpace has any true responsibility to monitor this, any more than other social networking programs/websites (like the many IM programs). The only real recourse society has in this case (barring violation of MySpace's rights) would be to legislate them into things like requiring credit cards for access (thus supposedly proving adult status), boycotting the service or going "vigilante," rooting out the pedophiles Dateline style.
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Re:Good Job Kevin (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Sex crimes and the big picture (Score:4, Interesting)
Again, how does that imply it's not evil? Only things that kill, maim, or emotionally scar someone for life are truly evil?
I think the point he was making was NOT that child molestation isn't a bad thing; rather, that it's no different than murder, rape, etc. Possibly even less of a crime than murder or other violent assault. Murder deprives you of your life, and it is thus the highest of crimes. Assault deprives you, sometimes, of physical health and capabilities. Lesser forms of assault deprive you of your rightful control of your own body and leave nothing but psychological scarring; non-violent rape (e.g. the kind where you are not beaten or stabbed, etc) falls into this category. (Violent rape obviously falls into the former category, and nonviolent rape can segue into for former if STDs or unwanted pregnancy follows). Mind you, I'm not in any way saying that these lesser crimes are at all OK; I'm just saying, look at them in comparison to other, much greater crimes.
Child molestation is categorically no different than rape; the victim is just younger. Some "child molestation" (statutory "rape" of 16 or 17 year olds, who are biologically adult) is even less of a crime, since the act would by all objective standards be considered consensual if it weren't for the legal fiction that people younger than 18 are incapable of giving consent.
But we freak the hell out about child molesters and lose all sense of rationality when anything about them comes up. We don't freak out this much about murderers. We still *do something* about murderers; that's why we have police, and courts, and jails and such. We still do something about people who physically assault others, but you don't see this vigilanteism toward your run of the mill violent criminals around. You don't see people writing 1000-line perl scripts to try to identify known gang members on MySpace - particularly because there's not as convenient a list of known gang members to compare with. But a lot of those people are violent criminals guilty of much greater offenses than the pedophiles that every mom in America is terrified of.
Americans just get particularly worked up about sex, and particularly worked up about children; combine the two together and you get instant emotional frenzy, no rational thought involved. Pedophiles, rapists, witches, communists, terrorists... hell, the whole terrorist scare seems sane in comparison to the frenzy that people get into over sex offenders. At least terrorists actually murder people. Pedos and rapists are the next nearest the top on that little list I just gave, and at least they're a step up from just persecuting people with different beliefs (witches and communists). But next time you or anyone else starts to get riled up about sex offenders, ask yourself why you don't feel the same way about all the more violent criminals out there. Do you want them all on watch lists too? Every man who's ever gotten into so much as a fist fight, a much more violent act than rape? Are you constantly concerned about your children running into people like them on MySpace? If not, why not?
If so, well, at least you're consistent. I have to give you that.
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Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:A little perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:A little perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Make that little girl that he targets your daughter and we'll see how your "perspective" changes.
You're absolutely right, that sort of thing is enough to change anybody's perspective and turn just about anybody into somebody who would suddenly support torture and summary execution.
That is, perhaps, the best reason of them all that it should be impartial parties who administer justice and decide the punishments for these sorts of things. Child sexual abuse is just one prime example. Replace it with "terrorism" and you have another one playing out each day before our very eyes.
Often times it is best to leave the emotion at the doorstep and debate things logically and dispassionately. Pretty much any issue with as much emotion behind it as this one is going to be one of those cases.
Another thing to consider with these "lock them up forever!" attitudes toward some crimes: You run the risk of making things worse. Somebody sexually abusing a child is bad. Somebody sexually abusing a child and then killing him/her because, in terms of their sentence, it is essentially free--that is worse. I'd rather get my child back and the offender get out of jail than have him/her killed and see the offender locked away forever. No contest.
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