Observations for no reason:

While waiting for Melina & family outside the Aleksanterinkatu exit of Stockmanns I noticed a stylishly dressed man taking picture with a digital camera. But instead of taking pictures most of us would want, his were of security cameras and various pieces of window displays. (I'm not talking about the whole display here, but just a purple board in the background, etc...) If not for the display shots, I'd say I've seen my first practicing member of the sousveillance resistance.

Maybe he was...

His body screamed contradictory messages, both coolly aware of his "persona", but almost nervously snapping the pictures. He never paused to frame it, or think about the shot, just snap, look around, move on, repeat.

Maybe he was just casing the joint...

In general, I'm for anything that fights back against society's overlords. Maybe, once I get a digital camera, I will join the resistance myself. (I've been fleshing out an idea for a multi-purpose Last Gasp site on its own domain where I can include bits and pieces of ideas I've had, or stolen over the last few years. A page of "Surveillance Near You" might be fun.
The bottom line, though, is surveillance isn't going to go away. Every action we take is going to better recorded and better sorted than ever before. It scares me, since I harbor a lot of tin-hat instincts, but it's only truly frightening when it goes one way. Big Brother was awful because the power of knowledge was concentrated with power.

Already we've seen citizens challenge authority by recording their actions, such as the Rodney King incident and the subsequent videos showing improper (to say the least) behavior from those that ought to enforce it. Pictures do lie, of course, but the more pictures you can bring to bear on an action only clarifies the situation. The King video was unclear because it only showed the cops wailing on a pathetic man. What happened before the tape started rolling? What else was going on? More tapes, more information.
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Just before the mad-snapper a familiar lunatic, who provides a surprising amount of conservational fodder for Melina and me, walked past. As usual he was screaming at the top of his lungs that former-Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen and former-Finance Minister Sauli Niinisto are terrorists, Mafia members, and just generally corrupt. Melina noticed him first over a year ago and we've often seen him since, shouting up and down Aleksanterinkatu. Once, Melina saw him near Sokos, but whether this means he targets department stores, or just that we frequent them, I cannot say.

But nuts are a dime-a-dozen, what makes the Shouter stand out is his utterly normal appearance. He's no down-and-out bum whose booze-addled mind makes him do stupid things. If not for the shouting, I'd never look twice at him. He appear Mediterranean, he's not Finnish, though his cries are. I can't say whether he's a man on a mission, a nut with an obsession, or just bored. He's definitely behind the times, since the SDP/Kokoomus coalition government Lipponen and Niinisto were leaders of was voted out of power last March. (It's now a Keskusta/SDP coalition.)

I don't even know if I want him to be sane. If he's sane then his commitment to this issue is astonishing. As a amateur critic whose unwilling/unable to go professional, I often feel my opinions, rates, praises, and so forth are just whispers in a ferocious wind. If I truly cared about an issue, where could I go to be heard? Blogging is a crowded, spotty world, as arbitrary (more so, I guess) in its elevation of mere mortal to prophet as the journalistic world. (Though this is a blog, it's private. I've toyed with going public for the hell of it, but I wonder if I'd still want to post stupid verses that would otherwise never see the light of day, but do illustrate my thoughts, etc...) But the ideal of protesting about an issue close to your heart in a public venue has been diluted in my understanding. I think instead of scripted marches, organized events, all sanctioned and arranged by quasi-official organization. I don't think of a man with his lungs alone yelling his way into the public consciousness. But this is how a lone man is being heard, though no one listens.