To make the matches I relied primarily on photographs. MySpace is very photo-heavy and people post all sorts of pictures and the sex offender registries tend to have mug shots of offenders so it was fairly easy to make a positive match just by seeing they were the same person — and that’s in addition to the fact that their names matched, their zip codes matched, their ages matched, in some cases they had their zodiac signs on their profiles, in some cases exact birth dates were provided. There were a few tough cases where before I was able to make a positive match I had to go through their public message board posts and find references to where they worked. And that would also be listed as their place of employment in the sex offender registry.


LCB: Sounds pretty labor intensive.


KP: It took several months, it was just a part-time effort. In the end it produced 744 matches — that was after having gone through one-third of the data, about 7,000 profiles.


LCB: So again, what was your intention for this story? What did you expect to do or what did you expect would result from your analysis?


KP: I didn’t set out to bust anyone, if that’s what you’re asking.


LCB: You must have considered the possibility.


KP: I really didn’t consider that possibility. I didn’t go in with any assumptions. I went in to see what I would find. One thing I was hoping to do was to hear from sex offenders and get their own words on what they are using MySpace for. For the innocent ones, if there were any, I was interested in whether they felt vulnerable being a sex offender on MySpace given the amount of cases of predation linked to the site. It’s like an ex-shoplifter going into a store and being convinced everyone is watching him. I sent out of bunch of messages to some of the matches and I never got any responses. There were lots of ways this story could’ve turned out depending on what I found.


LCB: Your editors also had no particular plans for this story, no particular intentions?


KP: It’s hard to make plans for this kind of story until you’ve done the reporting.


LCB: You, in effect, worked hand-in-hand with the police department to put someone behind bars, which is somewhat unusual for a journalist.


KP: I’m not sure I’d put it that way.


LCB: So how do you describe what you did? Proactive journalism? Or what?


KP: Like I said, I didn’t start off looking for people to report to the police, but when I found Lubrano [the man eventually arrested] I found his activity disturbing. I didn’t rush to the phone and call 911. My first move was to send him a message to try to get an interview. When he didn’t respond and the kids corresponding with him didn’t respond, then the question was, ‘What next?’ At that point, I was at least a month away from having a story. Eventually I’m going to call the police that cover [Lubrano’s] jurisdiction to get a comment. Do I wait until I’m closer to publishing and what’s the purpose of that? Given that [Lubrano] appeared to be actively trying to meet young people I thought this is a call I’m going to make sooner or later in course of reporting, in the interest of being socially responsible, I’ll make that call now.


LCB: Did you have any qualms as a reporter about working in concert with authorities [like that] to, eventually, put someone behind bars?


KP: Generally, the whole story isn’t the kind of story I normally do. My last piece on MySpace was an attempt to deflate what I thought was a lot of the hype over the site being unsafe. That is much more in tune with my personality. Just because it was not in my normal experience in the beats I cover to call the police … I don’t think saying I had qualms about it would be accurate … I have called law enforcement in stories before.


It wasn’t the first time I got someone arrested. There was a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who had a long history of breaking into corporate networks, pulling some sort of harmless and clever hack, and then calling the press and telling them about it. I reported on him extensively and when he hacked into the New York Times Web site a couple of years ago I broke that story and he was indicted for it and arrested. He turned himself in.


LCB: Did your past in hacking help you get that story?


KP: I never understood anything of [Lamo’s] motivations.


LCB: Are you familiar with NBC’s Dateline series, “To Catch a Predator?” Are you a proponent of such projects?


KP: I have to say I always find those things kind of distasteful. It feels like a tabloid freak show, let’s bring in these people, display them on camera, set up crimes that might not otherwise have taken place.


LCB: What are your thoughts on how the press at large covers/has covered MySpace?