Category: Oddities

EXT.  UPSTATE NY APARTMENT COMPLEX — EARLY AFTERNOON

A STRANGER emerges from an apartment and walks through the adjacent parking lot to the complex’s central roadway. A late-middle-age white male, he is dressed casually in black trousers, red t-shirt with STAFF in large white letters on the back, well-worn blue-and-white pinstriped locomotive driver (“engineer”) cap, and dark sunglasses. His graying beard is trimmed short, but he is obviously overdue for his quarterly haircut. He carries a bulky black prosumer digital camera.

The bright blue sky is filled with large clouds from an approaching storm front and, opposite the sun, a cumulonimbus bank looms over the far horizon above a row of apartment buildings.

The Stranger studies the clouds, moves to various vantage points, examines the rest of the sky. He braces the camera against a road sign pole and fiddles extensively with the knobs & buttons while taking several pictures.

WOMAN #1 emerges from a building, enters a car, and drives along the central roadway. She slows, stops next to the Stranger, and rolls down her window.

WOMAN #1

What are you taking pictures of?

STRANGER

Those great clouds over there! Looks like we’re in for a real storm later today!

WOMAN #1

Oh. Have a nice day. (She rolls up the window and drives off)

The Stranger is joined an elderly COUPLE, WOMAN #2 who is probably his wife, and a teenage GIRL who vaguely resembles all of them. The Girl is wrapped in a large towel. They walk slowly through the apartment complex to the pool, appear baffled by the childproof latch on the gate, and are finally admitted by WOMAN #3 who shows them how to operate it.

INT.  IN-GROUND POOL PATIO

They sit around a table in the corner, jockeying the uncomfortable plastic chairs for position in the shade cast by the table’s umbrella, while the Girl removes a towel to reveal a red swimsuit, enters the pool, and begins swimming laps.

Various other PEOPLE occupy the area near the pool, including older couples, males of various ages, several curvaceous mid-twenty-ish females clad in revealing swim / sunbathing attire, and a group of middle-age couples.

The Stranger takes several pictures of the Girl in the pool.

Time passes.

The Stranger, realizing that he’s about to spend the next three hours sitting on his well-flattened butt in the van while driving home, stands up, stretches, and walks to the gate. He intently studies the labels on the childproof latch, which is misinterpreted as being baffled, and leaves the pool area.

EXT.  APARTMENT COMPLEX ROADS

The Stranger strolls around the apartment complex to the side entrance road, and returns along a different route. He seems to take a particular interest in drain grates, manhole covers, garage doors, and infrastructure in general. He scuffs the dirt from one manhole cover and takes a picture of it. He continues walking around the complex and returns to the pool.

His companions gather themselves together and emerge from the pool gate.

EXT.  POOL AREA

A New York State Police car drives slowly into the complex through the side entrance. The TROOPER scans the area, spots the Stranger, and pulls up beside him.

TROOPER

Good day. How are you doing?

STRANGER

(Smiling) So far, so good.

TROOPER

What brings you here today?

STRANGER

We’re visiting my wife’s parents. (Gestures to indicate the Couple among his companions)

TROOPER

(Eyes the group) We’ve had a report of someone in the area taking pictures of buildings and possibly people.

STRANGER

Well, I’ve been taking pictures of clouds, a manhole cover, and my daughter. (Smiles) I think it’s still permitted for me to take her picture.

TROOPER

(Getting down to business) Your name?

STRANGER

(gives name, helpfully spells last name)

TROOPER

What’s your birth date?

STRANGER

(Gives a date long in the past)

TROOPER

(Typing on laptop PC) And your address?

STRANGER

(Gives city and state)

TROOPER

(With emphasis) Your street address.

STRANGER

(Gives street address)

TROOPER

Phone number?

STRANGER

(Gives phone number, repeats when trooper misses last four digits)

TROOPER

(Types, pauses, types, reads screen) Enjoy your stay.

Trooper drives off, leaving apartment complex through main entrance.

STRANGER

(To his companions) Well, I now have a police record tagged “suspicious behavior”.

The group walks back to the apartment while discussing recent events and their plans for the remainder of the Independence Day weekend.

EXT.  APARTMENT COMPLEX

P.O.V. pulls back and ascends in Google-Earth fashion to show entire Adirondacks region. The Stranger assumes the role of voice-over INTERLOCUTOR. Fade to black during narration.

INTERLOCUTOR

Despite my pique, the Trooper performed his job properly and with decorum. While the opinions of my companions differ, I contend that once a 911 call has been received, the police must follow established procedures to resolve the complaint. The response depends on the initial report and what the Trooper finds during his approach.

The fault, if any is to be found, thus resides with people who have been recently trained to suspect once-normal behavior: anything they wouldn’t do is considered threatening, if not hostile, when done by someone they don’t recognize.

Photography, in particular, is now treated as reconnaissance for an assault. Unless it’s done by surveillance cameras, in which case it’s perfectly benign.

–THE END–

Perhaps you can tell a similar story.

Extra Credit
Explore these 27 parametric variations on the theme of Stranger:

• Appearance: whitebread / black / Levantine
• Dress: casual / ripped baggies / ersatz-military-wanker-camo
• Conduct: friendly / avoids-meeting-of-eyes / arrogant

Describe the Trooper’s likely approach to and interaction with these Strangers, assuming sufficient training to avoid racial profiling:

• [white + military + friendly]
• [black + military + arrogant]
• [Levantine + ripped baggies + avoids-meeting-of-eyes]

Double Bonus
Consider the behaviour variation where a [white + casual + friendly] Stranger politely but firmly refuses to cooperate with the Trooper’s inquiries. Explore the range of perfectly legal and extremely unpleasant outcomes. Possible working title: “How to ruin the rest of your holiday weekend in five minutes flat”.

Background information, all highly recommended:

• Bruce Schneier first named The War on the Unexpected
• The BBC shows the logical endpoint: The Last Enemy
• Cory Doctorow speaks the truth: Little Brother
• LL Cool J provides the soundtrack: Illegal Search
• Bruce Schneier explains Why You Should Never Talk To The Police
• Patent 5911537: Parabolic cover for manhole

Update: Many internal links on Schneier’s blog are broken. As nearly as I can tell, all inter-word hyphens should now be underscores: the-war-on-the.html becomes the_war_on_the.html. Perhaps they switched the back-end database?

We biked along the Poughkeepsie waterfront and spotted this stately gas storage tank. The shape tells you it’s a pressure vessel, not a simple fluid tank. I think Central Hudson has an underwater gas pipeline across the Hudson right about there; the waterfront is rife with oil storage tanks and suchlike, although less than in days of yore.

As you might expect, I took the picture from a public area, pretty much in front of a house across the street. It’s not like this was a risky high-security red-flag penetration operation; we rode to the end of Dutchess Avenue (the better part of 600 feet), soaked up some of the decaying industrial-age vibe, turned around, and rode back up the hill.

I made a ten-cent bet with myself that the Google-Eye view of the area would be blurred out “for security reasons” and, yup, won that sucker. This isn’t a case of JPG compression: notice how (relatively) crisp the railroad tracks are?

The 1955 topographic map hanging on our wall (I’m a map junkie) was revised in 1981 and leaves very little to the imagination. It not only shows oil storage tanks standing on those now-empty concrete pads, but it also labels the area. Admittedly, it doesn’t show the gas tank, so the tank hasn’t been there for more than, oh, a quarter-century.

I submit to you that the best way for an evildoer to pick a high-value target is to browse the maps and look for low-res areas. Here in mid-state New York, that’s an infallible way to find things like big petroleum storage facilities (or just look along the waterfront), airports with military-grade runways (the Dutchess County Airport evidently doesn’t count), oil / coal / nuke power plants, and good stuff like that. Then the bad guy gets in his car, drives over, gets some ground truth, and away they go.

A lazy bad guy could even write a Google Maps app that quietly and slowly scanned a given area for low-res points of interest.

That’s what Bruce Schneier calls a Movie Plot Threat. Ruining the resolution doesn’t change anything; you don’t need high-res imagery to blow something up.

Sheesh & similar remarks.