Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen’s coding skills have led to the arrest of sexual deviant Andrew Lubrano.
Lubrano’s MySpace profile
Poulsen wrote a 1000 line script that automatically searched MySpace profiles for registered sex offenders. He soon found 39-year-old Andrew Lubrano, who was using MySpace to meet teenage boys, making comments such as “Thanks for the ass, I mean add”.
Lubrano had been arrested for sex crimes against children on three occasions; his third arrest leading to a nine-year prison term.
Poulsen’s script searched MySpace’s member ship rolls for 385,932 registered sex offenders in 46 states, which had been obtained from the Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Registry. He searched first and last names, limiting results to a five mile radius of the offender’s registered post code.
Lubrano had 103 friends; including a number of teenage boys
Poulsen ultimately found 744 sex offenders on MySpace. Any parent will find this statistic quite chilling, and don’t forget that this only includes really stupid sex offenders. More cunning offenders will have been much more discreet.
Poulsen wrote a very interesting story about how he wrote the code and about the subsequent arrest of Lubrano — you can read it here.
The code that led to the arrest of Lubrano will be made available under an open-source license later this week.
Well done Kevin Poulsen!
