Conspiracy Of Dunces

When I was a kid, the conventional detective wisdom was that the criminal would always return to the scene of a crime. I suppose that's a natural enough impulse, if you wanted to revisit the site of your most glorious triumph, or if you really wanted to get nabbed by Columbo. That was one of the dumb things that crooks used to do. Now they don't have to. They just post their crimes on Youtube.
An Oregon man filmed the speedometer of his car while driving more than one hundred forty miles per hour so he could post it on Al Gore's Internet. The oh-so-clever master of speed forgot that law enforcement has recently acquired access to the world wide web, and the easiest part of their job is now typing "stupid things I did" in the search box and pressing the enter key. Anything that shows up as a local disturbance can be checked out, and if the crime in question is in a neighboring county, just send an IM over to the sheriff's office over there. The rocket scientist in Oregon was pulled over by a state trooper, but the old "do you know how fast you were going" rhetoric was unnecessary in this case. He was arrested and tossed in jail Saturday night, charged with reckless driving and speeding. It was his third speeding incident in the past year. The video was confiscated and will be used as evidence against him.
It's part of the world we live in. For many people, some of them less than honest and most of them less than clever, if it doesn't appear on Al Gore's Internet, it didn't happen. So we get footage of boys and girls, men and women, beating and cheating, stealing and breaking, in the service of instant notoriety. Who needs Big Brother when you post your own surveillance video? It's a creepy contrast to the images we have seen coming out of Egypt in the past few weeks. Discuss amongst yourselves,