Thoughts on Reverse Phone Lookup and Dostoyevsky

I am rereading Dostoyevsky. All that lovely nostalgia and hysteria; I tell you, the macabre, yet thought-provoking stuff causes one to laugh and cry at once. Although, the crime-solving process of yesteryear drives me up the wall! It is unfathomable: they convicted the wrong man for murder because his clothes were bloody, but without a DNA test he couldn't prove it wasn't his dead father's blood, and the poor wretch was done for. I am thankful not to have lived in those days. Not that I would have been tried for murder (hopefully).

I'll tell you what they wouldn't have had any use for back then: reverse phone lookups. Not only because they didn't have any phones, but because in those small provincial towns everybody knew everybody else and where they lived.

Not so in our day. Can you imagine life without computers and cell phones? Nowadays, it seems every other crime scene involves a cell phone. It gets forgotten, stolen or used to shoot a video, and one way or another, provides evidence. More often than not it leads to the criminal and helps convict him. Once a reverse phone lookup digs up all the goods on the guilty party, it then helps to pinpoint his or her address and location based on the cell phone activity, and the next thing they know, the police are at their door. Piece of cake!

Otherwise, forget it. In our concrete jungles, criminals would disappear without a trace all the time, and crimes would rarely get solved. Nowadays, one sees a strange phone number on the Caller ID and as a matter of course, runs a reverse phone lookup to find out the name of the phone owner and where he or she lives. Criminals thinking themselves invincible are finding out otherwise all the time. Dostoyevsky would have been impressed.