I stole things.

Or as my father would say, I LIBERATED THEM!

That’s a term we used back in the sixties. It permeated the culture, kind of like “bling” and “baby mama” do today. Petty theft was seen as a way of sticking it to the man. But the stuff I stole would have no value to most people. I loved trail signs.

More archaic than today, less formulaic and more unique, ski trail signs were nailed to trees, and if you hiked up the mountain in the middle of summer, it was free pickings.

But not anymore.

You can steal stuff today, but you’re gonna get CAUGHT!

What did they say ten years ago, 9/11 changed everything?

Well that didn’t turn out to be true. But technology did.

Watching this week’s shenanigans in Boston was like having a ringside seat at the best movie ever made. One that reached out from the screen and scared you, just ask the people in Watertown.

It started with the information. Used to be you had to wait until the next day, at school or work. Or there was an interruption on television. But now you turn on your smartphone and something incomprehensible is transpiring. When I boarded the plane in Denver it was a slow, snowy day. When I landed in L.A, the sun was shining and all hell had broken loose. I was jumping from e-mail to tweet to newspaper site, what exactly was going on?

And my initial reaction was it wasn’t Muslim terrorists. I figured it was right wing crazies, a la Oklahoma City, I mean does the Boston Marathon fly on the radar screen of the Middle East?

But the nature of modern day America is you jump to conclusions. Especially on television, where the “news” channels do no reporting and all the talking heads do is bloviate. But I’m sophisticated enough to know how unsophisticated I truly am. I was sure Richard Jewell was responsible for the Olympic bombing in Hot Lanta. Come on, he was nervous and fidgety and he looked the part! I used to believe in the knee-jerk reaction, instant judgment. Ah, youth. But life is complicated and the longer you live the less you know, you realize that very rarely is the world cut and dried and you’ve got to keep foraging for information. If you’re not surprised on a regular basis, you’re not alive.

And the first surprise came Thursday night, when they revealed the bombers’ pictures.

Huh?

They looked like no one was watching. They’d seen too many movies. They thought there was nothing better than hiding in plain sight, acting like you’re innocent.

But that doesn’t work anymore.

In other words, if you’re going to break the law, if you’re going to commit a heinous crime, be prepared to die. Because the odds of escaping are close to nil, because now we’ve got CAMERAS!

Forget the ATMs, the security cameras attached to buildings, it was the casual snaps that delivered the definitive information. Instead of one Zapruder film, we can piece together seemingly any live event via crowdsourcing. P2P and social networks are not only for copyright infringement…

And then there was the Reddit thread. Wherein they identified one of the perps.

Only they didn’t. But to watch it play out in real time was mind-blowing. I couldn’t sleep for following the thread, was it really Sunil from Brown? Who’d disappeared and gone underground to commit this awful crime?

Turned out it wasn’t. But blind alleys are de rigueur in law enforcement. If you’re not willing to make mistakes, if you’re not willing to fail, you’ll never solve the mystery.

In other words, we were all in it together. Whether monitoring police scanners or sifting through websites, the entire country was focused on capturing the men in the photograph. And we got them.

Thank god. Hopefully the younger brother will live and we’ll get some answers.

But it ain’t your papa’s world anymore. It’s not even the twentieth century. Crime could be eradicated in our lifetimes. Well, not exactly, but unless you’re willing to sacrifice your life or want to get caught, you’re gonna hew to the straight and narrow.

You’ve given up your privacy.

Now you’ve got to manage your behavior. You’re building your resume from the instant you can type. Employers and universities will be combing for bad behavior. We live in “1984” already, it happened when we weren’t watching.

And the right wing nuts believe they need arms to fight the government.

You’re better off with a smartphone. Networking is more important than bullets. Information is king. The Man of the Year? It’s inanimate, it’s DATA!

Meanwhile, the movies have devolved to irrelevancy, fantastical creations focused on special effects with no credible connection to reality. While television knows it’s all about story. And politicians are beholden to the NRA and big money not knowing that it’s data that will trip them up.

What am I saying?

I’m not breaking any laws.

And most likely you aren’t either.

If you want to do something wrong, do it in the privacy of your own home, alone, in the dark.

P.S. In 2004, Bush defeated Kerry by playing the gay marriage card. Just ask John Glenn, Ohio was the linchpin. And not even a decade later, gay marriage is flourishing. And we’ve got a black President. Everything we thought impossible has not only happened in our lifetimes, there’s much more to come.

P.P.S. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. To be uninformed is to take yourself out of the equation. News comes from everywhere. Not only traditional outlets, but Twitter, websites, e-mail… Pre-internet most people were ignorant, you just didn’t know it. Today many more people are clued-in. And he who harnesses data wins.