State asks MySpace for list of predators

Amid growing national concern that sex offenders are finding new victims on websites popular with young people, state Attorney General Lori Swanson is asking MySpace officials for help investigating whether Minnesota teens may be at risk online.

On Tuesday, Swanson became one of a number of state attorneys general to ask MySpace for the names of sex offenders from the 7,000 it says it has identified and expelled from its popular social networking website.

Swanson has requested the names of sex offenders with Minnesota ties and said the information will be shared with local authorities. This could help stop offenders from linking up with MySpace's 180 million devotees, many of whom are teenagers.

"Due to the anonymous nature of the Internet, social networking sites such as MySpace.com provide sexual predators with unprecedented access to children," Swanson said. "They're really con men using the Net to develop rapport with unsuspecting kids."

MySpace announced last week that it would assist officials in all 50 states and provide this information.

For some offenders, posting a profile on MySpace or other such sites could violate conditions of their release and send them back to prison, Swanson said.

More than 100 criminal incidents have been reported in the media in the past year involving adults who linked up with minors using MySpace.com, according to Swanson's office.

Last July, Ronald Abshire, 30, of Inver Grove Heights, was sentenced to three years in prison for third-degree criminal sexual conduct with a 15-year-old St. Paul girl he contacted on MySpace. He earlier was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl in Washington County.

"These guys are going to go and hang out where the kids hang out," St. Paul police Cmdr. Neil Nelson, head of the Minnesota Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said after Abshire was arrested. "The kids hanging out in these blogs and websites give up a lot of information about themselves."

Swanson said she sent a letter Tuesday to MySpace requesting names from the Minnesota registry or those on other states' registries who have used Minnesota addresses.

Earlier this month, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan requested the same information from the Los Angeles-based company. The list of 584 included 19 who were in prison and another 17 were on parole, according to Madigan's office.

Facing increasing allegations of facilitating sexual predators' search for new victims, MySpace developed its own software to match registered offenders nationwide with its database of user profiles. The hits started coming as soon as the effort was launched in early May.

"We have zero tolerance for sexual predators on MySpace," Hemanshu Nigam, the firm's chief security officer, said in a news release last week. "We look forward to working collaboratively with the attorneys general on all future efforts to make the Internet a safer place for teens.

"We will also continue to promote legislation requiring sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses so they can be kept off social networking sites in the first place and urge other sites to join our lead and implement technologies designed to keep predators away from younger users."

While the number of sex offenders known to have used MySpace may surprise some, authorities believe it may be only a fraction of those whose profiles don't use their real names and can't be matched to offender registries.

And even those who do aren't likely to reveal their criminal backgrounds. When Wired News last year ran the names of California sex offenders through MySpace's search engine, it turned up five matches.

A 41-year-old, a Sagittarius, nonsmoker and nondrinker on his MySpace profile, omitted his convictions for forced sodomy, oral sex and "lewd and lascivious" conduct with a victim younger than 14.

At Swanson's urging, Minnesota legislators this year passed a bill making it a felony for an adult to send sexual communications to a minor or to groom a minor for sexual contact over the Internet. Gov. Tim Pawlenty signed it into law on May 7.