During those years in which I have been an active member of the human rights organisation Fampo, I have several times experienced not only syrveillance, but that those behind the surveillance have meant to show me that they are watching me.
The first time I visited Fampo’s leader, Dag Hiåsen, in his home was in December 2001. During the visit, Hiåsen’s fax machine gave som noises that one does not expect from a fax machine. This lasted for about half an hour. During 2004 I experienced twice demonstrative/treathening car driving at the main road passing near Hiåsen’s house.
What I am going to tell about here, is a kind of demonstrative behaviour that necessarily has got to involve a big amount of resources. For several years it has been a hobby of mine to calculate square roots by head and checking the result by a calculator afterwards. When out walking, I have sometimes calculated the square root of the car numbers on some parked cars which I have passed. In Norway, the car numbers consist of two letters followed by a five digit number.
One day more than one year ago, I saw that many of the cars that passed me, had car numbers whose square numbers were quite easy to calculate by head – compared with other five digit numbers. I wondered if someone from the surveillance had planned this just to tell me that they watched me. The following days my doubt disappeared. cars with numbers easy to calculate the square root of continued to pass me with frequencies that made it seem unlikely to me accidental.
That it is unlikely that it was accidental is however difficult to communicate. Meeting a large number of cars, I could of course overemphasise the number of cars with numbers easy to take the root of. But I found a way to see that it was extremely unlikely that what I saw was accidental.
I live in a rural area with little traffic. During summer there are many cottage owners from Oslo and other places in the area, and I see some new cars every day, but still there are relatively few new cars to be seen each day. I decided to see each day if the car numbers on cars which I had not seen before in an area within approximately one kilometer frommy home belonged to the 50 % of combinations of 5 digit numbers which are the most easy combinations of 5 digit numbers to calculate the square root of.
One problem was to determine when the new car numbers belonged to this category. One day I could see some numbers which were very easy to clculate the square root of. They could i.e. differ from a square number by one. Another day almost all new car numbers were relatively easy to calculate the square root of. I therefore decided to see each day if the new car numbers I had seen clearly belonged to the 50 %.of combinations of car numbers which is most easy to calculate the square number of.
Another problem is that I do not remember all car numbers I see. But the numbers which are easy to calculate the square root of, are also more easy to remember, as I assosiate something special with them – so memory does not constitute a methodological problem here.
I began these obeservations on June 1 this year. Each dayI observed that the new car numbers in the area combined clearly, not to say demonstratively, belonged to the easy one to calculate the square root of. On August 8 I could not say definitively that this was the case. But then more than 60 days had passed (excepting a few days in which I was not at home). The likelihood that this is accidental is less that 0,5 (50 %) multiplied with itself 60 times, which is less than one to one quintillion (0. 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001).
Those who do the surveillance in Norway do not seem to lack resources.
Tjøme, Norway, October 08 2012
Erik Strand
Fampo 