Justice Blocks MySpace Sex Offender Code

10-23-2006 National:

The Department of Justice has just rolled out a CAPTCHA in front of its National Sex Offender Public Website, forcing you to prove you're human before you start running searches.

That kills the screen-scraping code we released Friday -- which, no doubt, was the intent. The only explanation on the site reads, "This form is necessary to prevent abuse by automated user agents."

The site seemed pretty abuse-resistant before. Running too many searches too fast got you banned; consequently, the sex-offender-scraping portion of my code performed one transaction every 30-seconds -- slow enough to be replaced by an extremely-patient human.

It could be that the DoJ just has a broad interpretation of "abuse." Policing virtual communities probably wasn't in Justice's institutional mind when it created the site.

I don't know if this completely closes the door to a repetition of my MySpace offender search. After satisfying the CAPTCHA once, you're currently allowed to search over-and-over again. That means you might be able to slip in a search of all the ZIP codes in, for example, one city, but I doubt you could perform the 8,500 queries needed to cover the entire U.S.

Is this enough to let MySpace off the hook? Now the company can legitimately claim it has no easy access to the sex offender registries, even if that wasn't the case when it said so last June. ..more.. by Kevin Poulsen

Official CAPTCHA site: