The saga continues...
9News.com is reporting a MySpace prank that got a teacher suspended, and a 17 year old sued. After moving from Colorado to Texas, 17-year-old Todd Gugat began using the MySpace account of Bill Johnson, a Furita Monument High School Teacher, to send altered messages which included photos and suggestive captions. Mr. Johnson was suspended over the summer, but has since been reinstated. Mr. Gugat now faces felony charges of criminal libel and criminal impersonation.
"I wasn't dangerous. I mean, look at what's (stenciled) on my backpack -- it's a heart. I'm a very peace-loving person," said Julia Wilson, an honor student who describes herself as politically passionate. "I'm against the war in Iraq. I'm not going to kill the president."
This was a quote from a teen who was questioned for threatening the life of the president of the United States. Julie Wilson, 14, was frusturated by the war in Iraq and decided to vent her frustrations publicly, on her MySpace profile. She posted an image of a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand along with the phrase "kill Bush." She decided to take it down, after learning in her eighth-grade class that threatening the president is a federal offense, but not before the secret service caught wind and questioned her.
Arstechnica reports that Wired writer Kevin Poulsen wrote a Perl script that was able to sniff out at least one registered sex offender active on MySpace. Mr Poulsen wrote a small program that compared the profiles on MySpace to a sex offender database, and found at least one offender, Andrew Lubrano, brazen enough to publicly announce his infatuation with young boys. From the article:
The reporter narrowed his list down to one target, Andrew Lubrano of Centereach, NY, with three previous convictions, nine years served behind bars for molesting young boys, and a penchant for calling 16-year-old boys "sex toy" in public MySpace posts. Local police, grateful for the tip, let Poulsen sit in on the proceedings of running a sting on Lubrano, and the man was soon under custody although he could only be charged with a misdemeanor of endangering the welfare of a child.