The Panopticon Comes to Mainstreet
Lately, I’ve been looking differently at all the small pieces of technology accumulating around us. Cameras at intersections. Cameras outside businesses. Cameras attached to houses. Doorbell cameras. License-plate readers. Phones quietly recording our locations. Databases remembering where we’ve been long after we ourselves have forgotten.
Individually, each of these gadgets seems relatively innocuous. Collectively, they describe something else entirely. And that’s what’s got me worried.
We’ve been told that surveillance technologies such as Flock Safety’s automated license-plate readers are simply tools: another way to find stolen cars, locate missing persons, apprehend criminals, and keep neighborhoods safe. And, there’s no reason to dismiss those benefits. Police departments can and do use automated license-plate readers to investigate serious crimes. But concentrating exclusively on what surveillance technology can accomplish today misses the much larger political question: What kind of society are we constructing for tomorrow?
French philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault warned us about this eventuality half a century ago. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault resurrected Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century architectural invention, the Panopticon. Bentham imagined a circular prison organized around a central observation tower. Prisoners occupied cells around its perimeter. From the tower, a guard could observe any prisoner at any moment. The ingenious — and equally terrifying — feature was that the prisoner could never know whether anyone was actually watching.
Eventually, the guard hardly mattered. The possibility of surveillance became surveillance. People began policing themselves.
For Foucault, the Panopticon was much more than an unusual prison design. It was a model for understanding modern power. Modern societies, he argued, increasingly exercise authority not merely through spectacular violence — the scaffold, the dungeon, the execution — but through observation, classification, documentation, examination and normalization. Schools, hospitals, prisons, factories and military institutions have become spaces in which human beings are recorded, compared, evaluated and disciplined.
The most efficient power is the power we internalize. Nearly fifty years after Discipline and Punish, Bentham’s tower no longer needs to stand in the center of the prison. We carry it with us. And increasingly, we drive through it. Automated license-plate readers photograph passing vehicles and associate plates with times and locations. Contemporary systems can also classify characteristics such as vehicle make, model and color. When thousands upon thousands of such observations become searchable across jurisdictions, something qualitatively different emerges: not simply a camera but an infrastructure capable of reconstructing movement.
The American Civil Liberties Union has warned for years that ALPR networks can produce enormous databases containing the movements of overwhelmingly innocent motorists. More recently, the ACLU has specifically characterized the expansion of Flock’s network as a movement toward nationwide mass surveillance. (American Civil Liberties Union)
A police officer investigating a stolen automobile is one thing. A society constructing the technological capacity to reconstruct where millions of people have traveled is another. The question isn’t simply, “Do we trust our police department?” Perhaps we do. But I would argue rather, the question is whether we should construct a surveillance architecture that will remain long after today’s police chief, mayor, governor, attorney general and president are long gone.
Experience suggests that we should be extraordinarily cautious. Surveillance systems rarely remain confined to their original purposes. Once information exists, institutions discover new reasons to use it. Recent investigations by the Electronic Frontier Foundation into millions of searches of Flock data found uses extending beyond serious criminal investigations, while its broader examination of the network documented searches associated with political demonstrations and other sensitive activities. (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
There is a name for this phenomenon: mission creep. The camera installed to find stolen cars becomes useful for finding people. The database created to investigate violent crime becomes useful for investigating minor offenses. The system introduced to identify suspects becomes useful for identifying protesters. And eventually we arrive at an uncomfortable question: Who gets to decide who is suspicious?
Giorgio Agamben had useful insights on this question. Building upon thinkers including Foucault, Agamben has written extensively about the state of exception: the moment when governments suspend or circumvent ordinary limitations on power because some emergency supposedly requires it. The emergency is always persuasive. War, terrorism, crime, immigration, civil disorder, public safety, or simply the call to do something.
And because something must be done, extraordinary powers are introduced as temporary necessities. But the exception has a disturbing tendency to become ordinary. Infrastructure created for exceptional circumstances remains standing after the circumstances have changed.
Get W. R. Stark’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
September 11 should have taught Americans this lesson permanently. The surveillance apparatus constructed during the War on Terror didn’t disappear when the immediate trauma receded. Technologies, databases, bureaucracies and legal doctrines developed during moments of fear have become incorporated into our everyday ordinary governance.
This is the point at which Foucault and Agamben converge alarmingly well. Foucault tells us what happens when surveillance becomes ordinary. Agamben tells us what happens when exceptional power becomes ordinary. Digital technology allows the two to become one. And Flock cameras — along with facial recognition, cellphone-location tracking, predictive policing, drones and enormous interconnected databases — should be understood within that larger transformation.
This isn’t an argument that America has already become a totalitarian state. Such hyperbole weakens the argument. The danger is more subtle. We’re assembling the infrastructure that would make authoritarianism extraordinarily easy. That should terrify us.
An authoritarian government of the twentieth century needed informants, secret police, intercepted letters, enormous filing systems and armies of bureaucrats to discover where people went and with whom they associated.
Now, we’re automating much of that work. Imagine a government ten or twenty years from now deciding that a particular political organization represents a threat to national security. Who attended its meetings? Search the vehicles surrounding the buildings. Who regularly visits a particular mosque, synagogue, church or political headquarters? Search the database. Who attended an abortion clinic? Who visited an immigration attorney? Who drove to a protest? Who met repeatedly with a journalist? Who crossed state lines on a particular weekend? Who visited whom?
The surveillance state doesn’t require us to ask these questions today. It only requires us to build a system capable of answering them tomorrow. That’s why the familiar response — “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” — misses the point all together when considering our civil liberties.
Freedom has never meant merely the freedom of innocent people to prove their innocence. Freedom includes the ability to move through society without continuously producing a government-accessible record of one’s movements and associations.
There’s another thinker worth bringing into this conversation: Gilles Deleuze. In his short but prescient 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze suggested that the disciplinary institutions described by Foucault were themselves evolving. Power no longer needed to keep us inside clearly defined institutions — the prison, factory, school or hospital. Digital systems could exercise continuous control across open space.
That insight now seems prophetic. The Panopticon has jumped the walls of the prison. There’s no tower anymore because the tower is everywhere. A camera at one intersection knows almost nothing about me. A camera network knows considerably more. Connect that network to other databases, extend it across jurisdictions, preserve its records, make those records searchable, and surveillance ceases to be an isolated observation. It becomes memory. And institutional memory is power.
This debate is no longer hypothetical. Communities around the country are questioning or terminating ALPR programs, while others are considering giving voters a direct say over whether such systems should continue. (Chron) Even allegations of improper searches by officers using Flock systems have surfaced in multiple jurisdictions, producing disciplinary investigations and renewed scrutiny of access controls. (WIRED)
In Rhode Island, the issue deserves particular attention. Rhode Island State Police have pursued deployment of Flock cameras through a federal grant that included funding for dozens of readers, with the technology proposed to communities around the state. (YouTube)
Before accepting such systems, communities should ask questions considerably larger than whether the cameras help recover stolen cars. Who owns the data? Who can search it? Which agencies can access it? Can federal agencies obtain it? How long is it retained? Can access expand without another public vote? Can searches be audited? Will residents know when policies change? Can future governments repurpose the network? And perhaps most importantly: Can we dismantle the system once we have built it?
We should remember that democratic societies generally don’t wake up one morning transformed into surveillance states. They accumulate them. One camera, one database, one emergency, one perfectly reasonable exception at a time. Each decision seems small enough. Each technology promises convenience or security. Each expansion can be justified independently. Until one day the infrastructure connects. Then the question is no longer whether someone is watching.
The question now is whether it’s still possible to live without being watched. Foucault understood the political consequences of that possibility centuries after Bentham designed his prison. Agamben warned about governments normalizing exceptional powers. Deleuze anticipated systems of continuous technological control. George Orwell’s Big Brother was prophetic.
We have the peculiar historical privilege today of being warned in advance. Perhaps we should listen. Because the most dangerous surveillance state is not necessarily the one imposed upon an unwilling population overnight. It may be the one a frightened population purchases for itself, camera by camera, while assuring itself each time that the latest one is only there to keep everyone safe.
