Cyber News Reporter Nabs MySpace Predator

Kevin Poulsen is a great cyber news writer and I usually catch his columns at Security Focus. His latest, at Wired News, is a doozy. Kevin took the National Sex Offenders Database and wrote about 100 lines of code to scour MySpace.Com to see if he could come up with any matches.

From the article:

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.

The smarter sexual predators stick to private messages, and diligently prune their public comment boards of any posts from young friends that hint at what’s happening behind the scenes.

Today’s investigatory target, 39-year-old Andrew Lubrano, has been less careful, and now he faces his fourth arrest for a sex crime. Lubrano was sentenced to three years probation in 1987 for sexual abuse against a 7-year-old boy, according to police. In 1988, he got another probation term for second-degree sex abuse. In 1995, he earned a 3 to 9 year prison term for sexually abusing two boys he’d been babysitting, one 11, the other 9.

The parole board turned Lubrano down three times, and he was cut loose in September 2004 largely unsupervised, having served every day of his nine-year max. By November 2005 he was on MySpace, making friends.

In April, he began adding teenagers to his friends list. One of the first was Jacob, a gay 14-year-old high school student in Virginia, who reports his age as 16 in his profile. Lubrano starts calling him “sex toy” and asking him about his living situation. Lubrano thanks another Virginia boy for adding him to his friends list by writing “Thanks for the ass, I mean add.”

In May, I began an automated search of MySpace’s membership rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, mined from the Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Registry website — a gateway to the state-run Megan’s Law websites around the country. I searched on first and last names, limiting results to a five mile radius of the offender’s registered ZIP code.

Excluding a handful of obvious fakes, I confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles, after an examination of about a third of the data.

Kevin was invited to the police station to witness the arrest. He says:

Later, the detectives tell me that Lubrano claimed in the car that he didn’t go any further with his online friends than some dirty talk. If true, that’s good news for the kids, and for Lubrano. Under a July state appellate court decision, merely soliciting a minor for sex online in New York is no longer a felony, unless the perpetrator sends explicit photos as part of the enticement.

What kind of moonbat idiot judge ruled that it was not a crime to solicit a child online? Here’s a tip to New York Congress and Governor- Outlaw online solicitation.

This creep is still logging into his MySpace page here, which features a background of a child scribbling the word “pancake” as of 10/13. His young teenage friends are deriding him for being a child molester. Its also humorous that the MySpace site was running a large banner for the Center for Missing and Exploited Children on his site as an ad.