Digital forensics is altogether a cleaner job than the more traditional kind but sometimes the secrets can be just as lurid. When the sensational story of Cezanne Visser – Advocate Barbie – hit the media, the news machine was kept well supplied with an astonishing level of detail: indecent assault, rape and the manufacture of child pornography.

The reason for such detail? There was plenty of electronic evidence and a lot of hard work done by the authorities in the form of digital forensics. More traditional police forensics involves ageing corpses or determining ballistics; digital policemen scour hard drives for pictures, movies and e-mails.