Wired News identifies 744 sex offenders on MySpace;

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Wired News identifies 744 sex offenders on MySpace; police arrest one
Public Radio
October 18, 2006

Police in Long Island, New York recently nabbed a registered sex offender who was trying to use the social networking site MySpace to arrange meetings with underage boys. The arrest comes after Wired News senior editor Kevin Poulsen identified the man, Andrew Lubrano, and more than 700 other sex offenders on MySpace.

MySpace has come under fire for not doing enough to protect children. The site recently announced a new safety campaign designed to educate children about online predators.

Poulsen wrote a few lines of computer code that scanned MySpace for predators. He used data from the Web site of the National Sex Offender Registry. Poulsen says 497 of the offenders he found are registered for sex crimes against children.

MySpace declined an interview request, but provided the following written statement:
"We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace and are evaluating all functional and scalable solutions. In the meantime, we will delete profiles of any convicted sex offender we find on MySpace. Long term, we are working on tools to identify and report to law enforcement all inappropriate use of MySpace and we support legislation that forces sex offenders to use registered email addresses so we can keep them off social networking sites."