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But seriously, I had to have a bit of a chuckle this morning as outraged politicians slammed Time Magazine's claims that New Zealand had become a haven for paedophiles due to its failure to publicly follow up on information given to it by US investigators some four months ago.

Time Magazine is wrong of course, but as I suggested on Wednesday, factual inaccuracies and sensationalist headlines are what I've come to expect from the media when the matter of child pornography is in focus.

This morning I heard RadioNZ's National Radio calling those on the list of porn-site customers uncovered by the US investigators "child pornographers" -- more long bows and gross inaccuracies.

According to my dictionary, a "pornographer" is someone who creates or distributes pornography -- not someone who merely consumes it.

But, like the rest of the media, NatRad was not about to let facts get in the way of a good story eh?

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For some time the media and our politicians (by way of their own departmental officials) have been spreading FUD in regards to the child porn issue in New Zealand through the use of press releases that have been printed virtually verbatim by a lazy media.

Now, it would appear, that those who live by the sword must die by the sword and a sensationalist, lazy media can hurt as much as it helps -- as witnessed by the Time Magazine article.

But Minister for Police, George Hawkins, proudly informs us that those investigating the matter in New Zealand have all manner of clever devices that can pluck evidence almost out of thin air (more grounds for worry).

When challenged that the NZ authorities' sloth-like approach to acting on and prosecuting those on the US list might result in much of the evidence on their PCs being destroyed, George told a NatRad audience that his boys had forensic techniques that could recover it even if the suspect had deleted the files.

Now Aardvark readers will know that this can be done in the case of casual file deletions -- but there are dozens of bits of software out there that will repeatedly write random patterns to the unallocated clusters of a hard drive and carefully flush out all trace of files that users really want deleted.

Then there's always the chance that offenders will have simply junked those hard drives and bought new ones -- $100 to avoid a year in prison and the public shame of being convicted (or even accused) is a small price to pay isn't it?

And here's a question I've not seen answered -- or even asked...

Were those who ran the child porn websites from which the lists of customers were obtained ever identified or prosecuted? Surely their crime is even greater than that of their customers -- yet we hear nothing about them. Why not?

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