KP: There was a time, any story with any kind of possible MySpace connection would be linked to MySpace in the reporting. For example, the murder victim has a MySpace profile, the profile might be mentioned in the reporting and even made to sound like it had some role in the crime when it didn’t. Just as a natural part of the way reporting works, we saw that every incidence of sexual predation in which there was a nexus with MySpace, [that nexus] would be reported on, when had the exact same crime taken place through another medium, it wouldn’t be newsworthy at all. This led to a perception that MySpace is creating more crime …. When that’s not necessarily true.


Novelty is news …. Statutory rape, child molestation, these crimes are no longer the subject of headline news they’re so common but when the same thing started happening with MySpace involved that made it fresh again..


LCB: And creates an impression that MySpace is inherently bad.


KP: Right, which I don’t believe. I believe MySpace is good.


LCB: Wired published this morning the code, the automated script you created to search MySpace profiles for registered sex offenders. What might someone use that for?


KP: We’re releasing it primarily as part of a transparency-in-reporting ethic. You want to show how we did it. I’ve gotten a lot of requests from law enforcement for the code and I’m not comfortable just sending copies of this to people who ask and picking and choosing among requests so this takes the pressure off there as well. People can see what I did and how I did it. Other reporters can reproduce it if they choose to. We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries from local press who want to do it for their community, perhaps just a handful of zip codes. If they have geeky enough people on their staff they’ll be able to do that with this code — assuming, of course, that nothing changes, that neither MySpace nor the DOJ takes some action to try to stop automated searches.


LCB: Any concerns about doing this, about possibly promoting vigilantism of some sort?


KP: Yeah, I am worried about that. We’re going to put clear disclaimers in all caps saying first that the code itself won’t give you a list of sex offenders with MySpace profiles. It has a huge false positive rate. Anyone who tries to draw any conclusions just by running the code without doing the footwork is getting bad results. That’s the most important thing.


And it’s actually a crime under most states’ Megan’s Laws to use the sex offender registry to harass ex-offenders. These are generally people who have done their time and you’re not allowed to abuse this information… In my model MySpace would use the registry in the same way that we used them just to be aware that there are people in the community with a certain kind of history and then keep an eye on them.