FOR the past three and a half years, Brandon Chau has been one of the few civil servants in Hong Kong who, found reading a pornographic magazine at his desk, could honestly claim he was just doing his job.
And it is not just magazines: as sectional head of the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority's newspaper registration section, Chau has had the daily task of monitoring the territory's dirty comic books, computer disks and 18 daily newspapers to check they are no dirtier than Hong Kong's laws allow.
He has also worked with police to nail consistent offenders during anti-pornography raids, and organised numerous operations where members of his surveillance team dress up in the Hong Kong equivalent of dirty raincoats and hang around on street corners to observe pornographic retailers - especially those encouraging juvenile customers - in action.
Dubbed ''Mr No Comment'' by the media, the soft-spoken 37-year-old family man admits that he has tended to keep a low profile. ''I always left the commenting to my bosses. I prefer just to get on with my job and remain anonymous.'' Only now, after leaving the department last month for a new civil service posting would he agree to give an interview to the press.
The department Chau has left is much as it was a decade ago, with three small teams, each tasked with monitoring a separate area of entertainment: films and videos, amusement arcades and - his own section - the control of obscene and indecent articles. But recent advances in technology have left the department understaffed, and he says the revolution in information transfer might soon force the Government to rethink its approach to monitoring pornography.
''In 1990, when I started at TELA most of the stuff we saw was traditional pornography - dirty magazines and videos, with a few comic books thrown in.'' BUT, he says, all that has changed dramatically with the arrival of computers. Punters can call erotic telephone hotlines for saucy messages from ''A Lonely Widow'' or ''Sex Crazy Female Boss'', run a CD-ROM drive on their personal computer for interactive video games like ''The Interactive Adventures of Seymour Butts'' or, hardest of all for the authorities to monitor, they can call up a bulletin board in Amsterdam or Manchester and download hard-core paedophile pictures down telephone lines.
''It's all changing so quickly, and going far beyond what an untrained controller can monitor; we already have to borrow staff from other teams to help us out.'' The hi-tech advances have also caused some changes in the procedures for the Obscene Articles Tribunal - the legal body with ultimate responsibility for determining whether an article is Class 2 (indecent and available for adults in Hong Kong) or whether it is classified as Class 3 (obscene and therefore banned in the territory).
