Kudos is to be dished out to Kevin Poulsen, Wired Senior Editor and former code monkey (to say the least); who has written an extremely interesting article about how he, using a search algorithm he programmed himself, managed to do what MySpace has said is not possible in catching registered sex offenders on the site.

You can read the riveting article to see exactly how he did it, but suffice to say police in the US were able to apprehend a convicted and potential repeat sex offender who had been sending suggestive messages to a young boy on MySpace. Poulsen has just come as legally close as any of us could ever hope to get to beating one of these perverts into a bloody pulp with our bare fists.

The only problem is that Wired says it will be publishing the code Poulsen created under an open source license later in the week, thus perhaps enabling some less restrained individuals to go on a witch hunt across the internet. Some of you in the UK may remember the tabloid name-and-shame campaign against sexual predators a few years back, which led to angry mobs terrorising innocent people who were mistaken for some of those named in the campaign. What, I daresay, is to be gained from publishing the code of Poulsen's search to the public at large other than to incite a more high-tech angry mob and drive sexual predators deeper into hiding, where police may not be able to catch them before they can commit their crimes?

I think that Wired has done the world a big favour in pointing out a way to catch at least some of the less intelligent sexual predators who are poisoning social networking sites. They will be doing us less of a favour by giving lynch mobs the tools they need to go out and visit mob justice on predators and perhaps totally innocent people as well. When police set out to nab a sexual predator one of their tactics is to set up a fake meeting at which they can arrest the person who believes he is about to meet with an underage person. I daresay that a lawless lynch mob is not going to pay such particular attention to the laws of entrapment, and some innocent person could find themselves being dragged from their bed in the middle of the night to have justice vested upon them by people convinced that they are putting a paedophile out of business.

This is an emotive issue - so emotive that I myself could not assure you that if presented with a sexual predator and a baseball bat that I wouldn't be inclined to put two and two together to get five. Mobs and vigilantes tend to be less reflective, and I think that Wired could find itself with innocent as well as guilty blood on its hands if it takes the unnecessary step of releasing this search code to the world at large beyond law enforcement agencies.