Who Watches the Watchers?
Every surveillance system creates two populations. The watched. And the watchers. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing the first. Bentham's Panopticon forces us to confront the second. Power at the Center The central inspector possesses something the prisoner does not. Information. The inspector can see outward. The prisoner cannot see inward. That imbalance is what makes the architecture work. But once that imbalance exists, another problem appears. What restrains the person at the center? Critics of Bentham eventually focused heavily on this problem. Historian Shirley Robin Letwin, writing in the twentieth century, attacked the Panopticon's relentless emphasis on administrative efficiency and warned about the danger created when human beings become objects of centralized management. The criticism extends far beyond Bentham. A surveillance system cannot be evaluated solely by asking whether it catches wrongdoing. We must also ask whether the system itself can be abused...