I was amused yesterday when I saw a woman filming at my local K-Citymarket with a small digital camera. She was just filming all the shelfs as she went along until she was stopped by store personnel. “Oh, I’m sorry, it’s for my blog. I’m from Canada!” she explained. I didn’t bother to express my strong views at that time, but now I regret that I didn’t. I find it ironic that shop owners want to prevent customers from filming their stores and products, while they themselves monitor all customers with hundreds of surveillance cameras hanging all over the ceiling. They are recording your every move, but don’t want you to take a single picture of them. Next time you enter a store just look up. All those little black globes are cameras that can rotate full 360 degrees and zoom incredibly close. Try this: walk around a department store and count all the security cameras. Now look behind you. Yep, the security guards are following you. If you didn’t lift anything you don’t need to worry about a single thing. These guys are just doing their job, busting shoplifters.

What most security personnel don’t know is that in Finland you are allowed to take pictures at all public places, such as subway stations, shopping malls and – even local supermarkets. The only thing you are not allowed to do is invade one’s privacy. Taking pictures at a supermarket doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy, it doesn’t do any damage to the store or the products and it does not threaten national security. Despite this security guards in Finland are constantly telling photographers not to take pictures at public places. Take pictures of your local supermarket all you want, you have every right to do so. If you get dragged out of the store and beaten by security guards – make sure you catch all of it, post your video on YouTube and enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame.

The funny thing is, I’m one of these people. I am Big Brother. I’m guilty of sitting behind the monitors and spying on thousands of innocent people, trying to spot shoplifters at a giant department store. It’s thrilling, you can feel the adrenaline rushing through your vains when you see a shoplifter pocketing a bottle of expensive perfume. You watch his every move. When he moves to the end of the aisle you know exactly which camera will best show him from there on. You follow him with two cameras simultaneously, making sure you never lose him out of your sight, because if you do, he could drop his stash undetected. At the same time you give instructions to the guys who are on the floor. You tell them where the subject is moving and what he’s doing, so that they don’t have to get too close to him. When the subject exits the building you do a “surprise catch”. Imagine the shoplifter exiting the building. Most of them look behind to see if they are being followed. Then they look in both directions of the street. The shoplifter doesn’t see anyone and feels reliefed, imagining he is going to get away with it. He slowly starts to pick up pace as he heads away from the store. Meanwhile the guys are waiting. When you inform them which way the subject is heading, they’ll walk up to the shoplifter from behind the corner, as cool and calm as possible. This is done just for your own amusement, to feel superior, and partly just to piss off the shoplifter. You then take him in and call the cops. Most shoplifters will tell you straight away that they didn’t steal anything. They’ll repeat it over and over again. But it doesn’t matter one bit what they say, as long as you have the evidence. Most are angry at themselves for failing and will just sware a lot and curse their bad luck, whereas teenage kids who are caught the first time usually shit in their pants and start to tremble.

Do I feel guilty about prying on people? Not one bit, because I was just doing my job. A lot of shoplifters are caught because of good surveillance systems, so their use is justified and they are valuable to the shop owner. As long as nobody is pointing his camera at my window, I just don’t care how many all seeing eyes there are in the sky. Having said that, I still feel that a shop owner who monitors his customers but doesn’t allow them to monitor him, is a hypocrite. However you feel about Big Brother, you have to admit that surveillance systems are cool and fun to set up. In my next post, I’ll look at how to set up a surveillance system with Linux for monitoring pets. For that experiment I’ll be using my guinea pig Pörri as er… a guinea pig Wow, I finally get a chance to blog about guinea pigs. And you though “Linux, caffeine and guinea pigs” was just a tagline… Here’s a little sneak preview: