Geocachers Mistaken for Terrorists

According to the Associated Press, Geocaching, the premier outdoor game for geeks, has caused some stirs among law enforcement. Geocaching is just a simple treasure hunt game gone hi-tech. But where you hide the ‘cache’ can raise the ire of law enforcement and panic the public in a post 9-11 world.

A geocacher named Scot Tintsman learned that lesson the hard way after stashing a bucket under an Idaho highway bridge high above the whitewater of the Payette River in September, intending to fill it with goodies for players to find using Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Before he even had a chance to post the GPS co-ordinates for the cache on the internet,0 a bridge inspection crew found it. When he returned to the cache spot to finish stocking it, he was greeted by the police and the bomb squad.

Tintsman, was charged with placing debris on public property, a misdemeanour punishable by six months in jail and a $300 fine. The county prosecutor is not seeking jail time but does want restitution for the expense of the police response. Tintsman said he is still avidly geocaching, but with a better awareness of how it might look in the post-September 11 landscape. “I was thinking about making the most extreme cache possible. I just got carried away.”

A couple of other incidents have made the news. In November 2005, a container found near a Utah police station was demolished by a bomb squad robot. It was a police theme geocache containing a toy gun, holster and nightstick. Earlier in the year, a Wisconsin bomb squad used a robot-mounted shotgun to blast the lid off a military ammunition box found in a park. Ammo boxes are the considered to be the best cache containers because they are watertight and can withstand the elements much better than tupperware.

Police and the FBI spent hours questioning a man seen prowling near a fence at Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the 2004 US presidential election. He was from Vermont and was hunting for a cache placed five weeks earlier. In those five weeks the cache had already been visited by 463 people.

Source: Australian IT