News of a Pakistani man’s arrest over charges of selling online child pornographic videos raises important questions of state responsibility and subsequent media coverage. Online child pornography is surely just the type of threat that the government’s much touted Cyber Crime legislation is meant to tackle. Instead of which it appears to be busying itself on a single-point agenda: blasphemous content on social media. And even here, it is not doing its job well as we saw in the events that unfolded at a Mardan university campus where rumours of blasphemous postings on Facebook were enough to see a young man tortured to death. This is unacceptable on all fronts. And it is not even as if the government can play dumb – actually, to be fair, this is not strictly true for playing dumb is what the political centre excels at. Rather, it cannot now pretend that civil society had not warned it about what the fallout would be if it went ahead with such foolhardy measures. What we have today is yet more legislation that is tantamount to state sanctioning of murderous witch-hunts. Just what Pakistan needs -not. That the tip-off came from the Norwegian Embassy is significant, with initial reports indicating that the man arrested in Sargodha was involved in a much larger racket. This begs the question as to why local media took it upon themselves to name and – even in one instance – to video record his confession to a reporter. This is not about protecting anyone. It is about common sense. Meaning that identifying publicly a small-time player simply but surely signals to the big fry that the authorities are on to them. This is to say nothing of the risk of additional trauma to the victims that this public marking brings with it. They could, after all, be identified by association, especially given how the suspect used the cover of teaching computer skills to lure young boys in the first place. Let us hope that in our recklessness we, the media, have not jeopardised the closing in of the net. Yet hope is not enough. We must stop this practice of naming suspects in the gold rush of breaking news, as well as reporters’ efforts to secure named by-lines. And the order must come from the top. Both PEMRA and the All Pakistan Newspaper Society should take serious note of this, instead of wasting their time mollycoddling the powers that be and taking the media to task over ‘unfair’ representation. Yet even here the state is also responsible. It must ask who gave the go-ahead to the FIA to disclose the name of the suspect, if they did indeed do so. And if they did not, then a serious breach of security occurred and must be investigated accordingly. None of this must happen again. *