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Geoterrorism


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Sure, it's been thought of plenty, and discussed at length.

Keep in mind that Geocaching began only a short period of time prior to 9/11. After that, placing ammo cans near railroad tracks, airports, government buildings, etc. became pretty much a no-no, and folks hiding and finding caches were under a great deal more scrutiny due to everyone's heightened/elevated sense of security/paranoia. Many of the guidelines for placing and hunting caches were ironed out during that period.

 

From my personal perspective, non-GCers always bring up the negative when they first hear of Geocaching. I've heard everything from what you've described to dope dealers using the cache to make drug trades (which is patently ridiculous... just think about it). Being discovered by muggles while caching has even lead to accusations of just that - using the cache to make a drug trade.

 

Human nature, being what it is, though... I don't discount anything. With the recent CBS news report on GCing, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see an increase in vandalized caches - the type of person who would take a GPS (or go buy one for just that purpose), build a bomb, put it in a Geocache and post the cache for others to find just seems like a stretch to me. But hey... I've known of adolescents who have done just that and made the coordinates take the seeker to a very dangerous abandoned mine in the middle of nowhere. Being a FTF Ho almost got me in a world of trouble that time...

 

But heck, I just pray that I won't be tasting shoe leather after making opinionated statements like those above... prove me wrong General Population!

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Yup, it's been discussed a few times, and a few ill-placed caches have even been blown up disabled by the bomb squad. Try to put things in perspective for your overimaginative family & friends; how attractive a terrorist target is the occasional hiker out in the woods by himself or with several other outdoor enthusiasts? Wouldn't the average terrorist be looking for something that would make a bigger statement? That's why so many sensitive areas are off limits for geocaching, and why most of the urban hides are micros.

 

Many of us have even had encounters with Law Enforcement, (I've had two help me find the cache) and there are even quite a few players who LEOs. If that community isn't all panicked and stressed about our sport, your family shouldn't be either. Sure it could happen, but the odds are pretty slim.

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You're not the first one. Figure that over a 300,000 caches have been placed since this sport began. Conservatively figure 10 finds per cache, that is 3 million finds (the real number is probably more than double that) without a single instance of this happening. You're far, far more likely to be killed or injured driving to the cache than hurt by anything inside.

 

I won't say it can't happen, or never will happen, but I'll take those odds. Besides, what terrorist is going to put a bomb in a cache and wait as as many as a month or two to blow up one or two people? If you are a terrorist there are certainly more effective places to put bombs.

Edited by briansnat
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This seems to be another attempt to discuss website xxxxxxxxxxx (self policed deletion).......... :ph34r:

Ya know based on further anaylsis of the OP's data, I concur. :ph34r:

I believe that 2:00-4:00 AM PDT is physical excercise and musical entertainment time at Gitmo, so there is no way this message could have been sent from there at the OP's posted timestamp. Kinda like Rockin' with the Oldies, for terrorists. :huh:

I confess to feeding the troll, mea culpa.... :lol:

Edited by wimseyguy
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Think about the positive aspect of geocaching in that we are all out there walking around and observing our community instead of inside watching TV. Crime does not as easily happen on the street where everyone is outside sitting on their front porches and playing in the yards. Parks are safest when a lot of activity is going on. If you see something suspicious you only have to make a cell phone call to get help. :ph34r: ImpalaBob

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This seems to be another attempt to discuss website xxxxxxxxxxx (self policed deletion).......... :ph34r:

Ya know based on further anaylsis of the OP's data, I concur. :lol:

I believe that 2:00-4:00 AM PDT is physical excercise and musical entertainment time at Gitmo, so there is no way this message could have been sent from there at the OP's posted timestamp. Kinda like Rockin' with the Oldies, for terrorists. :huh:

I confess to feeding the troll, mea culpa.... B)

::: Seeing the Secret Sock Signal over the horizon, like a twin sun rising in the morning sky, Captain Clorox rushes to the scene :::

 

:ph34r: But everything checks out here. I have no work to do. It is time for me to return to the Lair of the Purple Dryer of Doom, and finish my mocha latte.

 

In cases where my superpowers are not needed, citizens should focus on providing helpful answers to the legitimate question asked by the topic starter. B)

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ssshhhh! the black helicopters are flying over. terrorism can strike anywhere. the true purpose is to cause fear in the population, and a resulting mistrust in the government.

 

Reality check- Cachers are not you usual agoraphobics or xenophobics. Most are outgoing, or going out at least. There's more to worry about in the woods. if you restrict your fun of the game, guess what, they win.

 

I have been in countries with active terrorism and personally have seen the results. I never even considered it and geocaching together. Cachers possess or should have that attention to details. nuff said.

 

I'm going caching today and many more days and terroism is not anywhere on my list of concerns

 

And I'm not sticking my head in the sand. The IRA told the British, "we have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky everyday"

 

I'm more concerned during the drive to the cache. Now that's terrorism :D

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Geocaching would not fit a typical terrorist's ideal location. Are they going to go through all the work of making their pipe bomb, dirty bomb, biological or chemical agent spraying bomb just to injure or kill one person who happens to open the box in the middle of the woods?

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Geocaching would not fit a typical terrorist's ideal location. Are they going to go through all the work of making their pipe bomb, dirty bomb, biological or chemical agent spraying bomb just to injure or kill one person who happens to open the box in the middle of the woods?

 

Yeah, but man could it terrify the squirrels!!! <_<<_<:ph34r:

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You're not the first one. Figure that over a 300,000 caches have been placed since this sport began. Conservatively figure 10 finds per cache, that is 3 million finds (the real number is probably more than double that) without a single instance of this happening. You're far, far more likely to be killed or injured driving to the cache than hurt by anything inside.

 

I won't say it can't happen, or never will happen, but I'll take those odds. Besides, what terrorist is going to put a bomb in a cache and wait as as many as a month or two to blow up one or two people? If you are a terrorist there are certainly more effective places to put bombs.

 

Actually, as most of you who have been able to read between the lines of many posts on this forum and elsewhere have long suspected (and as was briefly reported in the Underground Geocaching News and Gossip website), such a terrorist-bomb-in-a-cache thing did happen at least once, and so the OP's friends and relatives are vindicated in voicing their fears. So, it happened at least one time, but the CIA and the KGB and MI5 worked together to sqaush any news media coverage, as caches are seen by spies across the world as convenient places to drop messages to other spies, and so those agencies work together in concert to protect all geocaches (even lame urban micros) from any "bad press", i.e., negative news media reports.

 

Here is the truly terrible tale of the terrorist-bomb-hidden-in-a-cache: the second cache (or was it the third?) I ever found had, unbeknownst to me, been booby-trapped two days earlier with a small portable nuclear explosive device (SPNED) by members of a renegade outlaw USA branch of an ultra-left wing uber-right-wing Abyssinian Transylvanian transvestite gypsy terrorist organization called "Branch 34B-G, Second Synod, Third Convocation of the Abyssinian Transylvanian Transvestite Gypsy Terrorist Expatriate University Student Youth Organization for Liberation of Unhappy Captive Mollusks, Mustelids and Colecanths". Apparently, according to the law enforcement first responders from CIA, KGB and MI5, the terrorist group (named above) was trying to draw attention to their cause by placing the bomb. Anyway, who do you think was the next finder of the cache after the bomb had been placed therein by these evil bad nasty terrorists? Me! sigh <_< Yes, I found the cache container two days later. :huh:

 

sigh. :P It was a large ammo can, and I did think it a tad suspicious that there were strange wires coming out of the ammo can, and a discarded empty red box lying near the ammo can marked Red Mercury Fuse Detonator for Small Portable Nuclear Devices", and I did think it was a tiny bit odd that there were some flyers for the above-named organization lying on the ground nearby, with the front covers of the flyers bearing gory color images of baby mollusks and baby mustelids being tortured, but I really did not put two and two together, so to speak. And so, I innocently opened the cache container. Of course, opening the container triggered the small nuclear portable explosive device (SPNED) which had been cleverly hdden by the terrorists inside the ammo can, and so (sigh) :( my body was immediately vaporized. Well, that is not quite accurate. I actually remember that first my arms and legs were blown off, and then my head, and then my body and all those extra spare parts (head and limbs) were vaporized in the 4,000,000 degrees C flash of the blast. Luckily, my wife Sue and our dog Toby were standing behind me and at least ten feet away, so they were hardly harmed at all by the blast.

 

Next thing I knew, I woke up two days later in a secret dark ops skunkworks CIA/military hospital located deep underground, 77 stories below a florist's shop on Jonathan Street in the Asian section of Arlington, Virginia; the CIA/skunk ops medical specialists and physicists had reassembled my body using one of the new Atomic and Molecular Life-Form Reassembly and Rejuvenation Device Model RGBOI-90G devices which they had just gotten from the space aliens (the alien greens from Alpha Centaur, of course) as part of the earth-alien technology transfer program. They explained to me what had happened and how I had been vaporized and then rejuvenated, and advised me that the news media had been totally muted on the topic of the blast (which had only destroyed one small neighborhood and one small forest in Frederick County , Maryland) and aked me to remain rather mum about the incident for a while. They also gave me the logbook and two travel bugs from the cache. The cache container and all the items in it had, of course, been vaporized by the blast, but they had wisely had the foresight to use their Atomic and Molecular Inanimate Object Reassembly and Rejuvenation Device Model RGGHOT-91B (again received from the space aliens as part of the earth-alien technology transfer program) to re-materialize the logbook and the travel bugs. I was quite grateful that I had been rescued, but I was most grateful that they had rescued the logbook, which I immediately signed. I then beged them to allow me to briefly use a desktop PC oon their top-secret network in their secret underground facility so that I could surf out to the Internet and log onto the gc.com website and log the find for the now-vaporized cache, which read:

 

" :( Found cache. Signed log. Took two TBs. By the way, the cache had been booby-trapped with a small portable nuclear explosive device (SPNED) by members of a renegade outlaw USA branch of an ultra-left wing right-wing Abyssinian Transylvanian transvestite gypsy terrorist organization called "Branch 34B-G, Second Synod, Third Convocation of the Abyssinian Transylvanian Transvestite Gypsy Terrorist Expatriate University Student Youth Organization for Liberation of Unhappy Captive Mollusks, Mustelids and Colecanths". The device was triggered when I opened the ammo can. Thus, the cache container no longer exists, and the nieghborhood and small forest in which the cache had been located has been vaporized, leaving a small crater and a large expanse of barren radioactive glowing ground with a burned mirrored glassy surface. My vaporized body was later reassembled and rejuvenated by skunk ops physicists and medical specialists at a top secret CIA/KGB underground medical facility. Other than that, all is well. I have mailed the signed logbook back to the cache owner. Thanks for the cache! It was a blast! Vinny of Vinny & Sue Team. PS, please do not tell the news media. This could look bad for geocaching."

 

Bottom line: The OP's friends and relatives were right! sigh! <_<:ph34r::ph34r::(:ph34r:

Edited by Vinny & Sue Team
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Terrorist...no. Disaffected former geocacher or mentally disturbed muggle or property owner...yes. In my mind it is almost inevitable given the rapid expansion of the activity. It is sorta like the mentality that allows people to put dangerous things inside mail boxes, lockers, shoes and such. Think terminated former postal service worker. For example, how large a stretch would it be to imagine the property owner described in this log entry, going over the edge?: "DANGER! DANGER! Owner of rock not amused by cachers. We were there about 2 minutes when he came barrelling down the drive agressively accusing us of stealing. Made up story that rock and wall was neat and were admiring how put together. Not sure if cache is still there, but not going back to find out."

Edited by Team Cotati
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