State seeks MySpace sex offender crackdown
BOISE – Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and seven other state attorneys general wrote to MySpace on Monday asking the company to provide the names of sex offenders who are registered users of the popular social networking Web site.
“I tell parents every day that MySpace is a dangerous place for teenagers,” Wasden said. “MySpace is very popular with teens and no place for registered sex offenders to be trolling for their next victim.”
The attorneys general were reacting to reports that MySpace, through a joint effort with a private firm that maintains a national database of registered sex offenders, had identified thousands of sex offenders on its site.
Brett DeLange, a deputy Idaho attorney general and chief of the consumer protection division, said, “Now that we understand it’s identified all these sex offenders, we’re really concerned. We need to know.”
The offenders could be using the site to seek out and groom new victims, DeLange said. In some cases, their activities on the site could violate their terms of probation or incarceration.
“We’d like them to identify those Idaho sex offenders who are on MySpace,” DeLange said.
That information, provided to state attorneys general, could help states decide if they need to report to their governors and legislatures on the issue, and whether policy changes are needed regarding sex offender sentencing conditions or monitoring.
“Until we get all the facts square, it’ll be hard to make the right policy decision. This is the first step,” DeLange said.
MySpace officials were not immediately available for comment. In a December news release, the company announced a joint effort with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. to build “Sentinel Safe,” a technology designed to identify registered sex offenders and block or remove them from MySpace.
“We are committed to keeping sex offenders off MySpace,” Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace chief security officer, said at the time.
The company also noted that it’s been advocating federal legislation to require convicted sex offenders to register all their e-mail addresses in a national sex offender database.
The letter to MySpace was signed by the attorneys general of Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The attorneys general requested a response from MySpace by May 29.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said in a statement Monday that law enforcement agencies have identified more than 200 cases nationwide of children “lured out of their home by predators they met on MySpace.”