Wired News Editor Helps Catch Sex Offender
Journalist Kevin Poulsen is making news again. Having in the past made headlines for hacking, today he's outing sex offenders on MySpace. Using a custom coded script he wrote five months ago, Poulsen has shown that among the 70 million or so MySpace profiles, there are 744 sex offenders.
The difficulty of this sort of data-driven reporting is that the data can be hard to evaluate.
The code swept in a vast number of false or unverifiable matches. Working part time for several months, I sifted the data and manually compared photographs, ages and other data, until enhanced privacy features MySpace launched in June began frustrating the analysis.
Poulen deserves praise both for his initiative and apparent thoroughness. Let's hope every such investigation includes such careful fact checking.
