[gps-talkusers] WTOP-NEWS, Idaho Treasure Hunt Goes High-Tech

From: "Kim Lookingbill" <seadolphink@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <gps-talkusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 17:53:05 -0500
Idaho Treasure Hunt Goes High-Tech
Jan 17th - 1:16am
By CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Associated Press Writer

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - In a game of global positioning called geocaching, the
lowly treasure hunt has gone high-tech _ but it can also be a game of risk
when terrorism-sensitive authorities find the goods first.

Scot Tintsman found that out when he stashed a green bucket under an Idaho
highway bridge last September, intending to fill it with goodies for other
players to find using Global Positioning System units. But before he could
finish adding the requisite trinkets and log books and posting its GPS
coordinates on the Internet, a bridge inspection crew found it.

Rounding a corner on his motorcycle to finish rigging his cache, he was
greeted by a barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to
explain the 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 and other geocachers play the game this way: Participants stash a
vessel of some sort containing goods as a reward for the person who finds
the "cache," as it's known. The person or group hiding the cache posts the
hiding place's GPS coordinates on the Internet. People who find the cache
are expected to take something from it and replace it with something else.

In November, a geocache outside a police station in Provo, Utah, met a bomb
squad robot as its fate. It contained a toy gun, holster and nightstick.  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 seen
prowling along a fence at Los Angeles International
Airport with a GPS unit. He was a geocacher from Vermont trying to stash a
toy snake into a cache, placed five weeks earlier, that had already been
visited by 463 people.

Guidelines on 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, 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 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 geocachers fear the pastime could be banned in some areas because of
the scares caused by ill-advised cache placements. A "Geocacher's Creed"
posted on the Internet asks participants to "avoid causing disruptions or
public alarm."  Even when geocachers cause public alarm, severe criminal
repercussions appear to be rare.

Tintsman, whose geocache sat high above the whitewater of Idaho's Payette
River, was charged with placing debris on public property, a misdemeanor
punishable by six months in jail and a $300 fine.  County prosecutor Matthew
Williams said that he is not seeking jail time but that he would like
restitution for the expense of the law enforcement response.  Tintsman said
he is still avidly geocaching _ but with a better awareness of how it might
look in a post-Sept. 11 landscape.

"I wasn't thinking about terrorism when I placed it under the bridge. I was
thinking about making the most extreme cache possible," he said. "I just got
carried away."

___

On the Net:

http://www.geocaching.com
http://www.geocreed.com
[gps-talkusers] WTOP-NEWS, Idaho Treasure Hunt Goes High-Tech

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