14 DAY TRIAL // The Texas authorities managed to arrest seven convicted sex offenders who used the Internet and created MySpace profiles although the parole terms didn't allow them to connect to such websites. Most of them were convicted for rapes, sexual assaults and child abuse. MySpace is a social website that is based on teenagers and children, so the presence of sex offenders is quite dangerous. The Texas Attorney General Greg Abott sustained the 2-week operation led to seven arrests, most of them being discovered using valuable information offered by the social networking website.
"Texans will not tolerate criminals who prey on our children," Attorney General Abbott said. "These convicted sex predators established online identities on a Web site that is popular with teenagers and children. The Cyber Crimes Unit will continue its aggressive crackdown on sex predators who threaten our kids."
Greg Abott is not satisfied with these results and urges all the Internet websites to provide details about their users in order to catch and punish them as long as their activities infringe the law. "By providing law enforcement with this critical user profile information, MySpace.com has taken an important first step towards a safer Internet. We urge all social networking sites to do whatever is necessary to protect children from Internet predators," he said.
The investigations were started in May, when the Texas Attorney General demanded MySpace to provide details about several members of the service that could be sex offenders convicted b the authorities. This was only one of the police attempts to protect teenagers and children from sex offenders, as the online illegal activities are continually increasing.
The case is somehow similar to the one involving TorrentSpy, a famous BitTorrent website. The authorities required private information about the users of the webpage although their internal guidelines claim that the service would never offer details about them.