Christmas morning observations

A couple of observations of the day:

Ran across this little gem this morning.  It's cool, you should buy one.  http://www.canlessair.com/

These are brilliant.  http://www.tapking.com/  You should also buy one immediately.  Buy reloads.

I also see that CCHQ in Britain are wailing that they now can't track criminals as easily, because the Snowden leaks have revealed many of their readily used tricks, the poor dears.

I'm kind of conflicted on this one.  I'm all in favour of criminals being busted via any legal method possible, and I also think the legal system all too often protects criminals in the name of being "fair" to a degree where obviously bad people get away with obviously bad stuff because the burden of proof is set too high.

At the same time, I'm outraged at the degree of violation of privacy that the Snowden leaks revealed.  That's not on, because it's none of their goddamn business.  I have a reasonable expectation of privacy unless I'm further reasonably suspected of doing bad stuff, and there should be a court order to allow my activities to be monitored to prove it if so.

One of my favourite sayings is that usually we don't need new laws - we need the laws we have actually enforced.  Examples are crap like gun and drug crime - they're invariably in breach of existing laws, we don't need new ones, because I doubt that Doug the Scumbag Drug Dealer is going to pay any more attention to law MCMLXXXVIII than he does now to the one before it.

In the case of surveillance and criminal activity, what we need to do is use the political system to reset the limits, laws and guidelines that legal system works under.  There shouldn't be a need to prove to an an almost impossible degree of proof that Doug is a shitbag who needs to be locked up, if we all goddamn well know it then let's just get on with it.

99% of criminals are morons, so let's not spend time on them.  Let's lock the pricks up for a while, and spend our law enforcement resource on chasing the 1% who need the time and effort spent on proving they're bad people to a reasonable degree of certainty.