The Surveillance State

Yesterday, I went up to Round Rock to grab a cache (he said as if anyone not from the Austin or Georgetown areas knows where that is). I grabbed a Multi in a caching buddy’s series I’ve mentioned before, devoted to fictional Texas counties. As always, the redirector is a telephone pole with numbers to be substituted and manipulated in an equation to get you the final coordinates. Unfortunately, I didn’t have an easy place to park or stop right by it, so I parked in a garage across the street. When I got out of the car, I immediately noticed a camera looking directly at me. Not entirely surprising in a parking garage, so whatever. I walked down the stairs and saw a double camera mounted so that it could watch me coming and going. OK … When I stepped out of the garage, there was another mounted to catch me standing on the corner. I walked across the street to the pole and began to copy down numbers and make calculations. I don’t think I saw a camera pointed directly at me because I was next to a private (possibly shady) business, but I decided I wanted to get a warm beverage (it’s been chilly around here lately), so I walked up the block to get one. In that block, I saw five other cameras, four of which could see me as I progressed, one pointing into an alleyway. I picked up a chai latte (because I am so basic) and then went back to my car, rerunning the camera gauntlet and noticing another that I had missed before. The cache was about a quarter mile away in a parking lot that had cameras watching people enter and leave, but none that I could see (emphasis on see) watching the lot itself or the LPC that was my final goal. In thirty minutes, I had encountered no less than a dozen cameras. The reason they were even on my mind was that during the weekend’s caching out in the back roads of Medina, Frio, Atascosa, and Wilson counties, I learned that there were a handful of caches placed that had to be archived because they were in the camera views of houses along the trail.

How many cameras do we have to have in the world? Who watches them all? I understand the need for safety and the right to secure your area through reasonable means, cameras being among them, but does every inch of ground need to be observed? And, more important to our purposes, what effect is it having on our pastime? We cachers, especially the urban ones, require stealth to make a lot of our finds as it is. How much more complicated is it to have one or more Big Brothers keeping an eye on our every move? Luckily, Austin is big enough that cameras are fewer and far between, and smaller towns either can’t afford them or don’t want them. And Texas is a relatively paranoid state about such intrusions on privacy. But some other places aren’t, and one day, Texas might not be for a number of reasons. What kind of effect would a ramp-up have on what we do? It’s hard enough for me to go around unseen (though I’m often amazed at how self-absorbed other people are). I neither need nor want to be monitored by someone every step of the way. And what if the day comes when computational pattern recognition is responsible for the surveilling? It’s a good thing I’m not conspiratorial, fearing a descent into a cyberpunk dystopia while walking down the street or anything, but it’s all beginning to harsh my mellow over here.