Wired magazine reports on a group in the USA called Perverted Justice that have taken the law into their own hands vis-a-vis the internet paedophile problem.

Posing as teenagers the group attempts, often successfully, to entrap men who enter chat rooms looking for teenagers to exploit. Their method is to set up a meeting with the man. The meeting is attended by two or more substantial males from Perverted Justice and video taped. The tapes and chat room conversations are then posted on their site.

It is very easy to feel a sense of righteousness over this behaviour however it does interfere with the proper prosecution of these individuals. The purpose of criminal prosecution, as well as punishment, is to remove the threat to society that these men pose. The Perverted Justice approach does little to achieve this second objective. It also abandons the concept of "presumption of innocence" that is the corner stone of British derrived justice systems such as US, UK, NZ and Australia.