Chapter 2

Big Brother is watching you…for your own good

Further confirmation of the 1984 tendencies of this barren land.  NSB (the National State Railway) has installed 250 video cameras to oversee the public at Oslo central station.  To some this might seem like a bit of overkill.  Admittedly Oslo central has come a long way since I first visited in 1975 and found a grand total of 2 platforms serving the capital, but even with the twenty or so now in place (some of which incidentally, have trains arriving at them occasionally), that still works out at over 10 cameras per platform, with plenty to spare for the concourses.

However, to the Police State of Norway it is not enough, for last night a couple of gangs of hooligans decided they were so bored with the smothering bureaucracy, that they indulged in a full scale riot in the station.  The first the station security seem to have heard of it was when the ambulances (no doubt called by the hooligans’ mummies) started turning up to collect the dead and wounded.  When interviewed on the radio this morning, the NSB security boss said that it was very difficult to know exactly what was happening and what the scale of the disturbance was because, yes you guessed, they couldn’t see well enough with so few cameras.

Later in the programme they interviewed the security chief of Gardermoen, the Norwegian white elephant airport in the middle of absolutely nowhere, about the possibilities of fire.  This arising from the discovery that they had put up emergency fire exit signs leading to service access panels, unfinished lift shafts, dead ends, bottomless pits and the like.  The paranoid press having discovered something to take peoples minds of the hideous tedium of their homeland, did not pause to consider that the airport was months from opening and that it was not inconceivable that someone might get things sorted out by the opening date.

“Everybody will be quite safe in the event of fire.”

“But how long will it take you to respond to an incident?”

“Definitely less than 90 seconds from the alarm until we are tackling it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“We have all the latest technology.”

Let’s hope they have enough video cameras.

A few weeks later (Sunday 1^st November 1998) the headlines tell us of an impending intrusion of video surveillance onto the streets of central Oslo “on a temporary, experimental basis”.  The thin end of the wedge, particularly when you remember that income tax was introduced to raise funds for the Napoleonic Wars “on a temporary basis”.  As the police do not have a budget for video surveillance as it would be tantamount to admitting that a police state was officially in operation, they are circumventing the problem by borrowing the cameras…from NSB!

THREE DAYS later (Wednesday 4^th November 1998) and, following a spate of robberies from convenience stores and filling stations, the police suggest that the in-house video cameras should all be linked to a central surveillance unit so they can “follow the movements of potential criminals”.   As far as I know, everybody is a “potential criminal” especially when you look at the plethora of innocuous activities that are classified as criminal in Norway.  And no longer any mention of surveillance “on an experimental basis”.  It has taken a bit longer than 1984 but we will get there in the end.

A little later (14^th February 1999) the headlines in Aftenposten tell us that there are now 426 video cameras at the Central Station...

© Jeremy Harrison 1997-2008; all text and images copyright of the author.

Contact: jeremy@nomadintent.com