MySpace kicks out sex offenders -- but not in Canada
Mark Brennae, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, July 26, 2007

OTTAWA -- The man who created a detection system used by MySpace to track and expel 29,000 American-registered sex offenders from the online social network site says Ottawa's information laws are preventing detection verification companies from tracking Canadian offenders.

"We can't even work with any private companies or law-enforcement agencies because we simply can't get hold of the data," said John Cardillo, CEO of Sentinel Tech, who said predators are more free to use Canadian social networking sites to lure young victims.

The public does not have access to the national sex offender registry -- a database that provides Canadian police services with information to investigate crimes of a sexual nature.

MySpace, which has an estimated 180 million profiles, announced Wednesday it had "partnered with Sentinel Tech to build technology to remove registered sex offenders from our site."

"Through this innovative technology, we're pleased that we've successfully identified and deleted these registered sex offenders and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead," Hemanshu Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer said in a release.

Speaking from his company's offices in Miami, Fla., Cardillo said keeping sexual predators off the Internet is no longer a technical challenge, it's become a political challenge, with only the United States freeing up information to companies like his to integrate a database of predators into a detection system.

"I'm hoping something breaks to use this data," he said about the policies of government's such as Canada.

"It's going to take a few daring members of Parliament to change this," the former New York City police officer said.

Cardillo said Sentinel takes records of offenders, released by the U.S. federal government, puts them into a database and makes them searchable by various criteria such as name, or, using photo recognition technology.

"When the bad guys have to cover their tracks, they get caught," Cardillo said, who added it was only in May that MySpace began to use his Sentinel Tech's technology, after signing a seven-figure deal reached with MySpace's owners, News Corp.

But because Canada's federal government has not publicly released the names of registered sex offenders, those people are able to travel on the information highway, virtually undetected, Cardillo said. "We can't see who they are so we can't see where they are."

Canada's sex offender registry came into effect in 2004 and as of April, 2006, contained the names of some 12,000 sex offenders.

The Conservative government has said it would not make the registry publicly available.

Calls to the office of Justice Minister Doug Nicholson were not returned