Surveillance technologies and the electronic panopticon

Jeremy Bentham developed a prison design he called the “Panopticon”. It had a central tower for the jailers, with a circular building around it divided into cells. The guards could see the cells without being seen. The inmates could not know when, or whether, they were being watched. There’s a metaphor there somewhere.

Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791.

Although the Panopticon was never built, Bentham spent a great deal of time perfecting its design to achieve the greatest possible visibility of the inmates, and complete concealment for the guards. He argued that the prison could employ very few guards, since the prisoners could not know when they were being watched. The project’s key concept, however, wasn’t about architecture or economics; it was about the psychology of control:

“A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

J. Bentham, The Panopticon Writings ^[1]

The French philospher Michel Foucault took up this theme in his 1975 work “Discipline and Punish” ^[2] [3], where he pursued the link between surveillance and social control. The original French title uses the word “surveiller”, which can mean “to discipline” but also means “to watch over”. He developed the comparison with the Panopticon:

CCTV cameras on a street in Britain.

“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.”

M. Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison ^[2] [3]

Today’s Surveillance Society

By 2006, the U.K. had 4.2 million CCTV cameras, and a person could be captured on over 300 cameras per day ^[4]. A report for the Information Commissioner concluded that Britain was already a “surveillance society” ^[4]. Although CCTV was the most visible form of surveillance, the report highlighted “dataveillance” as the more effective activity:

Table 1.  Surveillance technologies

• 4.2m CCTV cameras

• Reg plate recognition

• Shop RFID tags

• Mobile phone triangulation

• Store loyalty cards

• Credit card transactions

• London Oyster cards

• Satellites

• Electoral roll

• NHS patient records

• Personal video recorders

• Phone-tapping

• Hidden cameras/bugs

• Worker call monitoring

• Worker clocking-in

• Mobile phone cameras

• Internet cookies

• Keystroke programmes

List from BBC report [5].

“The personal details in question may be of many kinds, including CCTV images, biometrics such as fingerprints or iris scans, communication records or the actual content of calls, or most commonly, numerical or categorical data. Because so many data are of the last type referring to transactions, exchanges, statuses, accounts and so on, Roger Clarke has called this ‘dataveillance.’ Dataveillance monitors or checks people’s activities or communications in automated ways, using information technologies. It is far cheaper than direct or specific electronic surveillance and thus offers benefits that may sometimes act as incentives to extend the system even though the data are not strictly required for the original purpose.”

A Report on the Surveillance Society ^[4]

Foucault’s writing predates the emergence of today’s surveillance technologies. The idea was brought up to date in the early nineties with the “electronic panopticon”. Here D. Lyon ^[6] [7] takes a rather nuanced view of the Panopticon’s value as a metaphor for the surveillance society:

But now another model, another image, is gaining ground in the analysis of surveillance; Bentham’s Panopticon prison plan. Much impetus for this comes from the fashionable flurry of Foucault studies that began in the 1980s, but now sufficient empirical work has been done to show the relevance of at least some aspects of the Panopticon to electronic surveillance. [...] I shall suggest that while it is undeniably illuminating, analysis based upon the Panopticon image also retains some serious disadvantages. [...]

Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ and Foucault’s understanding of the Panopticon should be in no sense be thought of as the only, let alone the best, images for yielding clues about surveillance. Powerful metaphors lie relatively unexamined in various films as well as in novels such as Franz Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ or Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.

D. Lyon, From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon ^[4]

One More Thing

That’s the Panopticon as metaphor, but Bentham’s ideas about design and architecture are alive in a more concrete sense as well. Architecture and design can be used to shape behaviour. See this blog: Architectures of Control: Design with Intent ^[8].

References

1. Panopticon; or the Inspection-House: Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction, excerpt from “The Panopticon Writings”, Jeremy Bentham, Ed. Miran Bozovic, pp. 29–95 (London: Verso, 1995)
2. Panopticism, excerpt from “From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, M. Foucault, pp. 195–228 (NY: Vintage Books 1995)
3. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault, Vintage Books (1995)  (English edition, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977)
4. A Report on the Surveillance Society, For the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network, D. Murakami Wood (ed.) (2006)  (WebCite cache)
5. Britain is ‘surveillance society’, BBC News, November 2, 2006
6. From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon, excerpt from “The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society”, D. Lyon, pp. 57–80 (1994)
7. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society, D. Lyon, University of Minnesota Press (March 1994)
8. Architectures of Control: Design with Intent, D. Lockton, blog