[Vision2020] Be Careful How You Have Your Fun

[AreaMan (DanC)]

My family and I took up Geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com/) last
summer.  I know there's a few cachers here on "The Vizz" who can attest
to how much fun this activity is.  We've thought about building our own
"cache" so we could keep track of it.  We've thought about where we
could put it so we could monitor it, but this story (which I think first
broke a few months ago) makes us think maybe we should think harder
about it.

>From today's Lewiston Tribune:
_____________________________________
Idaho man learns hard lesson about geocaching


By CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Of The Associated Press

BOISE -- Scot Tintsman says he never had any troubles with the law until
his girlfriend introduced him to what became his all-consuming passion:
the satellite-navigated treasure hunt called geocaching. 

"She got me hooked," said the 33-year-old Idaho man, who faces criminal
charges for hanging a green bucket beneath a concrete bridge on a major
state highway last September. 

His "cache" was placed for other players to find using handheld Global
Positioning System units. But before he could even finish adding the
requisite trinkets and log books to the cache and posting its GPS
coordinates on the Internet, it was indeed discovered -- by a state
bridge inspection crew. 

That triggered a seven-hour road closure and emergency response from
officials who feared a bomb had been rigged to the bridge. 

Unaware of the alarm, Tintsman was returning to finish rigging his cache
when he rounded a corner on his motorcycle and was confronted by a
barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain that
it was all a misunderstanding. 

"I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously,
hands on their holsters," he said. "I was trying to turn off my MP3
player and I think they were worried I was going for a detonator." 

Tintsman's case of cache confusion isn't isolated. In November, a
suspicious box placed outside the Provo, Utah, police station was
blasted by a bomb squad robot. It turned out to be a geocache containing
a toy gun, holster and nightstick. Geocachers usually take a trinket
from a cache and leave another behind. 

In June, a bomb squad in De Pere, Wis., used a robot-mounted shotgun to
blast the lid off a suspicious-looking military ammunition box found in
a park. It also turned out to be a geocache. 
And on the night before the 2004 presidential election, police and the
FBI spent hours questioning a man who was seen prowling along a
chain-link fence at Los Angeles International Airport with a GPS unit.
He was a geocacher from Vermont trying to stash a green-and-purple toy
snake into a cache placed five weeks earlier that had already been
visited by 463 people. 

Guidelines on www.geocaching.com -- the most popular Web clearinghouse
for registering geocache hides and finds -- advise players not to place
caches near critical infrastructure or public buildings that might be
terrorist targets. And with more than 1 million people worldwide
estimated to participate in the sport, geocaching.com co-founder Bryan
Roth of Seattle says the number of homeland security false-alarms is
comparatively low. 

"I dare say I have heard of no more than five or 10 incidents," said
Roth, whose Web site currently lists more than 225,000 caches in 219
countries. "Police can always contact us and we'll tell them whether
something is a registered geocache. And if they're still not comfortable
with that, we tell them to blow it up. We don't want to be legally or,
more importantly, morally liable if it indeed was a problem." 

Many in the online community of geocachers fear that the sport could be
banned from some areas because of the high-profile scares caused by
ill-advised cache placements. A "Geocacher's Creed" has been posted on
the Internet that asks participants to "avoid causing disruptions or
public alarm."
 
Even when geocachers cause public alarm, criminal repercussions appear
to be rare. In the case of Tintsman, whose geocache was attached high
above the whitewater of Idaho's Payette River on the span of Rainbow
Bridge, the local prosecutor filed a charge of placing debris on public
property, a misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of six months in jail
and a $300 fine. 

"It's like littering," said Valley County Attorney Matthew Williams.
"Any statute with intent wouldn't work, because he clearly didn't intend
it to be a bomb, and any statute with malicious injury to property
wouldn't work, because he didn't injure the bridge." 

Williams said he is not seeking jail time for Tintsman, who has yet to
appear before a judge. But he would like to get restitution for the
expense of the law enforcement and public safety response.
_______________________________________________

Be careful where you put that, Moscow.  And don't look so dang
suspicious!

DC