By Jon Brodkin
Network World

In the fall of 2006, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement tracked down a sex offender who was supposed to be dead. The man, who had been convicted of a lewd or lasivious offense against a child, was one of possibly 100,000 sexual predators nationwide who fail to comply with address registration laws and are therefore considered "missing." This one was so missing police though he had died.

"This man was hopping from state to state and not registering anywhere," says Mary Coffee, who oversees planning and policy for the department's sexual offender and predator registration program. The last state we were able to track him to [Illinois] felt that not only was he not at the last place we thought he was in, they thought he was dead."

Luckily, Florida was using a protoytp verions of LexisNexis's Advanced Sex Offender Search (ASOS) technolgy, in combination with the company's Advanced Investigative Solution (AIS). Together, the programs crawl public records, criminal databases and various other data repositories to find the most current addresses and, in some cases, aliases used by unregistered sex offenders.

The program helped Florida investigators track the "dead" offender to Indiana, where he was found alive and, subsequently, arrested for failure to register both in Florida and Indiana.

Read entire article at PC World web site.