The Panopticon: A Mass Surveillance Prison For Humanity

Latest trends in Big Brother outstrip Orwell's worst nightmare

Prisonplanet.com | January 11 2006
By Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson

The Panopticon is defined as a prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen. This is an accurate description of the accelerating movement by western governments to erect giant, powerful, all-pervading mass surveillance, tracking and control grids that will keep all populations firmly under the baleful and watchful gaze of Big Brother.

We are still debating the NSA listening to foreign calls from the US when the NSA admitted twenty years ago that they were listening to domestic US calls under the Echelon program. This is de-classified and public but the media acts like they don't know about it.

Why is there even a debate about if they are tracking and tracing us when RFID transponders are going in cars nationwide to follow our every movement?

This system has already been partly implemented in Britain with barely a whimper of dissent.

You can call your cell phone company, ask them where you are and they will tell you down to a few feet. That is a federal operation that's hooked into the NSA right at this moment and about to be hooked into every major police department and squad car.

Your name, everything about you, what you're doing, where you're going and the cop can punch in a few keys and use your phone as an audio sensor.

Major cities such as Austin, Texas installed gunshot detection microphones. The government assured us that they respect our privacy but the very companies installing them bragged about how they can listen to a kid on the street talking to his friend two hundred yards away.

And now, from Rochester New York to Austin Texas to Chicago, the government has announced that they are being used as microphones and they will be used to listen to us.

Consider today's BBC report concerning CCTV surveillance systems in an area of London which is planned to be expanded to include, just on its first implementation, tens of thousands of other citizens in other areas.

The government funded program, called ASBO TV, invites residents to pay £3.50 and have access to a TV channel that enables them to monitor 400 different CCTV surveillance cameras and report on suspicious or anti-social behavior, comparing suspects to an on-screen rogues gallery.

This combined with the government's encouragement for Londoners to report their neighbors for suspicious activity, of which potential signs of terrorism include owning a vehicle, living in a house or getting a refund on a credit card, fuse the infrastructure of a classic total surveillance state, with civilian tattle-tale squads forming the modern say Stasi. Meanwhile, posters at bus terminals inform Londoners that they are 'secure beneath the watchful eyes' of Big Brother.

The exact same program was announced for the US years ago in the New York Times. The difference is that in the US they plan to force people to watch the system either over their computer or cable system. It will be classified as 'public service' to pay for speeding tickets and eventually as a mandatory function of your civil defense Homeland Security draft duties.

Starting at two hours a week and, if you wish to be paid, upwards of twenty hours a week, you will monitor the cameras for signs of terrorism and also, as admitted in the New York Times piece, for crime.

The latest artificial intelligence systems, for example DARPA's gait analysis program, which made headlines in 2003 for claiming to be able to identify terrorists by the way they walk, are not yet perfected and the involvement of the general population gives Big Brother the added advantage of pounding into people the feeling that their behavior is being monitored at all times and that if they step out of line in any way they will face the consequences. This in turn makes people self-regulate their actions to the point where exercising even basic freedoms becomes a potential precursor to being disappeared. In addition, using a method called the Delphi Technique, the general public are more likely to support the idea because they are hoodwinked into believing that they are involved in it and are part of the power structure. Therefore they feel their time is invested in the common security of everyone.

In effect, by an incessant demand that people report any suspicious behavior, they’re creating terrorist cadres that don’t exist to justify police state legislation under the guise of protecting the public.

And they’re shifting the surveillance grid into areas where its not mechanized, to become self-regulating.

Because if you pound it into people that everything they’re doing is constantly being monitored, which is part of the motivation behind the NSA spying furor, it has the effect of making the people regulate their own behavior and have absolutely no confidence to exercise their innate freedoms.

Last modified January 11, 2006