top priority for U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, after the war on terrorism, is improving protections for children online.

Kevin Poulsen, an editor at Wired News, described a project he undertook to match names in the Federal government’s list of convicted sex offenders with names of people with MySpace pages. His careful, multi-month effort identified over 700 matches, some of whom were and calling them obviously sexual names. Poulsen was critical of MySpace for only now attempting similar efforts on its own. He believes the service could do dramatically more to police its content using software tools.