The Panopticon

Third segment of SMART: Coming to a city near you. Is it possible for a society to be free if the movements and interactions of individuals are monitored and tracked without their consent?

The panopticon is a design for a physical prison that is intended to provide the greatest amount of control for the least amount of effort. If one investigates the characteristics of this prison, one can see that it looks a great deal like the surveillance state that is currently being erected.

For those who would argue that we have no expectation of privacy in public, we are entering uncharted territory. Never before in history has there been the capacity to spy and surveille to this degree. This is not only concerning in our present state of affairs, we must look beyond our present time to the future. As Frank Church warned, “if a dictator ever took charge in this country” such a surveillance state would be truly dangerous and inescapable.

How do you define freedom? Can we say that we live in a free country if all of our comings and goings are being monitored and tracked? Freedom cannot exist without privacy. Freedom cannot exist in a surveillance state.

It is time to reexamine what “expectation of privacy” means.