A firewall between predators and prey

Easier said than done, as Myspace tries to keep its site safe from those on the prowl for sex with kids.

n March, a 15-year-old student at Honeoye Central School left campus with an 18-year-old she met on MySpace, the online networking site. The girl was found in his company in Syracuse a day and a half later.

Protecting teens from predators and other dangers is why MySpace recently announced it will address complaints by developing a way to help block convicted sex offenders from the site.

By messaging, sharing photos and creating personal pages, MySpace users expand their circles of friends online at the site — and critics say those circles could include sexual predators.

The site, owned by News Corp., is partnering with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to build and deploy a database, to be called Sentinel Safe, that will contain the names and physical descriptions of convicted sex offenders. An automated system will search for matches between the database and some 135 million MySpace user profiles. MySpace employees will then delete any profiles that match.

According to Ontario County Sheriff's Investigator John Abraham, who has specialized in Internet safety for about 10 years, predators are using the Internet not only to contact potential victims but to coach other pedophiles how to do it.

Were parents to peruse some of the communiques police see exchanged between fellow sex offenders, "it would make your hair stand up on the back of your neck — it's just sickening," Abraham said.

"They learn what to say," Abraham said, referring to a 12-page glossary he just released citing hundreds of acronyms used online, primarily when instant-messaging on sites like MySpace. The online lingo includes codes like: P911 (parents are coming), RPG (role playing games), QT (cutie), WTGP (Want to go private?), 143 (I love you) and LMIRL (let's meet in real life).

Predators are "getting smarter and using technology as a tool, " Abraham said. "These sex offenders are starting to send text messages to kids in school. "

Teenagers "think it's a friend they met online when it's someone watching them walk home from school," Abraham said.

Forty-six states, including New York, now maintain registries containing more than 550,000 convicted sex offenders.

Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace’s chief security officer, said such high numbers mean “there was absolutely no real way to do this (screening) in a real-time, scalable fashion.”

Instead, Sentinel will build a search tool for MySpace using a database of sex offenders, to be updated monthly, that will include details such as names, age, hair color, height, scars and tattoos.

But the problem remains that "no one is getting on saying 'I'm Joe Blow, a sex offender recently released from prison and I want to talk to your 13-year-old daughter,'" Abraham scoffed. "There's really no way of knowing whether the information given is really true."

Abraham would rather see legislation barring convicted predators from Internet access, "banning any sex offender from ever touching a computer again," he said.

Dave Henderson, director of computer services at Victor Central Schools, agreed that there was no way a "straight technological solution is going to be the be-all, end-all. It just won't be."

Victor has blocked student access to MySpace at school not just because of potential danger from predators but because officials have deemed the site has no instructional value. Nonetheless, Henderson added, Victor students are supervised when online "because even a good content filter won't filter out all inappropriate Web sites," he said.

"Parents have to be vigilant regardless," Henderson cautioned.

In June, MySpace adopted restrictions on how adults may contact the site’s younger users and request to view their full profiles, which contain hobbies and additional personal details. That, too, was criticized as ineffective because adults may simply register as teens to skirt the restrictions.

"It's not too hard to pull off a fake identity on it," said Alyssa Eddinger, a junior at Bloomfield who visits MySpace every couple of days. While a teenage MySpace user has to first approve a the request of a new "friend" request to view the teen's full profile, she has seen little concern among fellow students they might be unwitting targets of a prospective predator.

"More often than not, it just gets shrugged off as something that isn't going to happen to them," Alyssa said.

Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, a group dedicated to Net safety, credited MySpace for trying, but doubted a database will make anyone safer.

“The fact that it sounds more effective than it really is, that’s a big problem. The people who they really need to protect kids from in most cases are not (convicted) sexual offenders,” she said. “They are people who haven’t been caught yet."

The only way MySpace could "truly pull this off," Inv. Abraham suggested, would be to require users to register their e-mail addresses, thereby enabling authorities to identify the point of origin through something known as an Internet Protocol address. Once authorities had the IP address, they could permanently block anything from that account at the site, he said.

However, even that alternative would produce limited results because while the IP address for high-speed modem lines remains the same, IP addresses on dial-up modem lines change each time the user connects to the Web, he said. Enforcement could prove challenging given the free Internet access available in places like public libraries, he added.

If sex offenders were completely prohibited from computer use, Abraham said, it would be easier to protect the public. Parole officers could monitor whether a sex offender under their supervision has a computer, for example, Abraham said.

But with changing technologies, more and more portable devices, such as Blackberries, cell phones, and video game consoles, are also able to access the Web. Those advances, he said, make it harder for authorities to track or catch predators, and tools officials hope may help today could prove obsolete in the near future.

"It would be great to see it go back to the days where they had to order stuff through the mail and the Post Office could set up stings," Abraham said.