Keeping an eye on the wild

Nobody walks into a bank anymore without being filmed. And the video screens in the secured office of the average high school almost resemble a prison guard house.

But Big Brother isn't just indoors any more.

Surveillance cameras also are becoming more pervasive outdoors.

Six deep-sea fishing boats will take to the ocean off the Southeast this spring with video cameras mounted on the canopy of the pilot house. Federal and state wildlife officers mount cameras in parking areas, camping and hunting grounds to watch for dumpers, deer baiters, poachers, thieves, pot growers or impromptu meth lab entrepreneurs.

Step past the fence for a look at a historic chapel down a remote backroad in Berkeley County and you're on camera. Step unknowingly across a property line in rural Colleton County and a camera will switch on. Heck, cameras are mounted in Mount Pleasant's Waterfront Park.

In a story in The Post and Courier earlier this month about a surveillance camera discovered at a primitive Francis Marion National Forest campsite, U.S. Forest Service officials were reluctant to acknowledge setting out a camera. But it's not the only camera in the woods.

The S.C. Department of Natural Resources uses "groundhog" cameras in every region of the state, Lt. Robert McCullough said. First set out to catch illegal dumpers, the cameras are now used for nearly every type of investigation "where you just don't have the manpower to put out. It's always to catch somebody in an illegal activity.

When you have them on camera, it's kind of hard to argue with that."

"It's a huge cost savings," said Tom MacKenzie, media relations specialist for the Southeast region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that manages federal wildlife refuges. "They're used only where a person would not have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

When the idea of putting surveillance cameras on offshore commercial fishing boats was first floated in the Southeast a few years back, a lot of anglers angrily opposed it as "Big Brother" sticking its nose into their private business -- one more galling sign that federal regulators just didn't believe what they were saying about the relative abundance of fish offshore.

But a camera now can be required to monitor by-catch, or fish thrown back, on any commercial or recreation boat going after a snapper-grouper species in the Southeast, under a federal rule approved in 2009. Cameras and live observers already are required in other fisheries.

Four commercial boats in South Carolina will be equipped with the cameras for two years as a pilot project under the auspices of the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Sea Grant programs in South and North Carolina.

Nobody denies the camera is a sort of mechanical hall monitor, keeping watch on the catch of species that regulators say are depleted. Regulators say it's a way to validate the numbers in the boats' log books, numbers that haven't been able to be used in stock assessment because they haven't been independently validated.

"I'm not going to say it's 'over the shoulder.' It's like an audit of the data," said Scott Baker, a North Carolina Sea Grant fisheries specialist who is helping organize the project. But in the long run, having those validated numbers could support anglers' long-standing contention that the stock surveys are too spotty to gauge the stock overall in the four-state region, he said.

The commercial anglers who have agreed to take part in the project are looking at the lens that way. If having a video eye follow him around his boat bothers commercial fisherman Phil Conklin of Seven Seas Seafood in Murrells Inlet, he's not letting on.

"The 'best available science' hasn't been good enough," Conklin said. "You have live information. The camera doesn't lie. They'll see there's a lot more fish than they think there are."

There's a general feeling that the cost and the logistics of running the program will limit camera use to the commercial industry.

"Who's going to pay for it?" said Legare Smith, a local sport fishing captain. Other than that, if putting a camera on the boat let him keep going after snapper-grouper, "it wouldn't really bother me," he said.

The law allows it.

"The general take is that participating in a commercial fishery is a privilege and not a right from a legal perspective," said University of South Carolina assistant law professor Josh Eagle, who specializes in fisheries law. Cameras can be used as long as the use is reasonably related to conservation efforts. "It's a revocable license. You have a choice, you can either fish under the conditions (of the license) or you can not fish."

So smile. You may well be on camera. It doesn't matter if you're out on the Continental Shelf or flicking a line off a pier on the Cooper River. Mount Pleasant police, in fact, also looked in to mounting cameras on the Wando River bridge along Interstate 526 to catch speeders but couldn't find the grant money to do it.

Moncks Corner police considered mounting cameras at a local park, then mounted one at the intersection of U.S. Highway 17A and S.C. Highway 6. They did it to keep an eye out for wayward students at a nearby alternative school but found it a lot more useful than that.

"It's been worth its weight in gold for traffic accidents, so we know who's at fault, who was running the red light," Police Chief Chad Caldwell said.

As for those who oppose surveillance cameras in the wild ocean, "They're living in the Stone Age. I believe they are," Conklin said.