Author's note: This essay was originally commissioned
by Alex Steffen for the projected 111st issue of Whole Earth Review,
which was to focus on the Singularity.
Sadly, WER effectively ceased publication with issue 110,
and (the shorter, WER-edited version of) this article is not
among the content you can find on their web site. I'm
therefore releasing this draft.

I originally wrote this in early 2002. I
have not updated the content significantly -- I think it provides a
useful historical context -- but have checked and, where
necessary, modified the URLs. Where I have made additions to
the text, they are noted. The original article on my site is here.

The 18th century utopian philosopher Jeremy Bentham's panopticon was a
prison; a circle of cells with windows facing inwards, towards a tower,
wherein jailers could look out and inspect the prisoners at any time, unseen
by their subjects.

Though originally proposed as a humane experiment in penal reform in 1785,
Bentham's idea has eerie resonances today. One of the risks of the
technologies that may give rise to a singularity is that they may also permit
the construction of a Panopticon society -- a police state characterised by
omniscient surveillance and mechanical law enforcement.

Moore's Law states that the price of integrated circuitry falls exponentially
over time. The tools of surveillance today are based on integrated circuits:
unlike the grim secret policemen of the 20th century's totalitarian regimes
they're getting cheaper, so that an intelligence agency with a fixed budget
can hope to expand the breadth of its surveillance rapidly. In the wake of
the events of September 11th, 2001, the inevitable calls for something to be
done have segued into criticism of the west's intelligence apparatus: and
like all bureaucratic agencies, their response to a failure is to redouble
their efforts in the same direction as before. (If at first you don't
succeed, try harder.)

It is worth noting that while the effectiveness of
human-based surveillance organizations is dependent on the
number of people involved -- and indeed may grow more slowly
than the work force, due to the overheads of coordinating
and administering the organization -- systems of mechanised
surveillance may well increase in efficiency as a power
function of the number of deployed monitoring points. (For
example: if you
attempt to monitor a single email server, you can only
sample the traffic from those users whose correspondence
flows through it, but if you can monitor the
mail servers of the largest ISPs you can monitor virtually everything
without needing to monitor all the email client systems.
Almost all traffic flows between two mail servers, and most
traffic flows through just a few major ISPs at some point.)
Moreover, it may be possible to expand an automated surveillance
network indefinitely by simply adding machines, whereas it is difficult
to expand a human organization beyond a certain point
without having knock-on effects on the macroeconomic scale
(e.g. by sucking up a significant proportion of the labour
force).

Here's a shopping-list of ten technologies for the police state of the next
decade, and estimates of when they'll be available. Of necessity, the
emphasis is on the UK -- but it could happen where you live, too: and the
prognosis for the next twenty years is much scarier.

Smart cameras

Availability: today.

The UK leads the world in closed circuit surveillance of public places, with
over two [2004: four]
million cameras watching sixty million people. Cameras are cheaper
than cops, and act as a force multiplier, letting one officer watch dozens of
locations. They can see in the dark, too. But today's cameras are limited.
The panopticon state will want cheaper cameras: powered by solar panels and
networked using high-bandwidth wireless technology so that they can be
installed easily, small so that they're unobtrusive, and equipped with
on-board image analysis software. A pilot study in the London borough of
Lambeth is already using face recognition software running on computers
monitoring the camera network to alert officers when known troublemakers
appear on the streets. Tomorrow's smart cameras will ignore boring scenes and
focus on locations where suspicious activities are occuring.

(Experience suggests that cameras don't reduce crime -- they just move it to
places where there's no surveillance, or displace it into types of crime that
aren't readily visible. So the logical response of the crime-fighting
bureaucracy is to install more cameras ...)

Peer to peer surveillance networks

Availability: 1-5 years.

Today's camera networks are hard-wired and static. But cameras and wireless
technology are already converging in the shape of smartphones. Soon,
surveillance cameras will take on much of the monitoring tasks that today
require Police control centres: using gait analysis and face recognition to
pick up suspects, handing off surveillance between cameras as suspects move
around, using other cameras as wireless routers to avoid network congestion
and dead zones. The ability to tap into home webcams, private security
cameras, and Neighbourhood Watch schemes will extend coverage out of public
spaces and into the private realm. Many British cities already require retail
establishments to install CCTV: the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
(2001) gives the Police the right to demand access to electronic data --
including camera feeds. Ultimately the panopticon society needs cameras to be
as common as street lights.

(Looking on the bright side: London Transport is experimenting with
smart
cameras that can identify potential suicides on underground train platforms
by their movement patterns, which differ from those of commuters. So p2p
surveillance cameras will help the trains run on time ...)

Gait analysis

Availability: now to 5 years.

Ever since the first slow-motion film footage, it's been clear that people
and animals move their limbs in unique ways -- ways that depend on the
relative dimensions of the underlying bone structure. Computer recognition of
human faces has proven to be difficult and unreliable, and it's prone to
disguise: it's much harder to change the length of your legs or the way you
walk.

Researchers at Imperial College, London, and elsewhere have been working on
using gait analysis as a tool for remote biometric identification of
individuals, by deriving a unique gait signature from video footage of their
movement.

(When gait analysis collides with ubiquitous peer-to-peer smart cameras,
expect bank robbers to start wearing long skirts.)

Terahertz radar

Availability: 2-8 years.

Very
short wavelength radio waves can be tuned to penetrate some solid and
semi-solid surfaces (such as clothing or drywall), and return much higher
resolution images than conventional radar. A lot of work is going into
domesticating this frequency range, with funding by NIST focussing in
particular on developing lightweight short-range radar systems. Terahertz
radar can pick up concealed hard objects -- such as a gun or a knife worn
under outer clothing -- at a range of several metres; when it arrives, it'll
provide the panopticon society's enforcers with something close to Superman's
X-ray vision.

(If they can see through walls, why bother with a search warrant?)

Celldar

Availability: 3-10 years.

Cellphones emit microwave radiation at similar wavelengths to radar systems.
Celldar is a passive radar system that listens to the signals reflected by
cellphone emitters. When a solid object passes between a transmitter and a
cellphone it reduces the signal strength at a receiver.

Celldar was originally designed as a military system that would use reflected
cellphone emissions to locate aircraft passing above the protected area.
However, by correlating signal strength across a wide number of cellular
transceivers (both base stations and phone handsets) in real time it should
be possible to build up a picture of what objects are in the vicinity.
Subtract the known locations of buildings, and you've got a system that can
place
any inhabited area under radar surveillance -- by telephone.
(As Rodney King demonstrated, we can already be tracked by cellphone. Now the
panopticon society can place us under radar surveillance by phone. And as
phones exchange data at ever higher bandwidth, the frequencies will shorten
towards the terahertz range. Nude phone calling will take on an entirely
different meaning ...)

Ubiquitous RFID 'dust'

Availability: 1-5 years.

Radio Frequency ID chips are used for tagging commercial produce. Unlike
today's simple anti-shoplifting tags in books and CD's, the next generation
will be cheap (costing one or two cents each), tiny (sand-grain sized), and
smart enough to uniquely identify any individual manufactured product,
by serial number as well as type and vendor. They can be embedded in plastic,
wood, food, or fabric, and by remotely interrogating the RFID chips in your
clothing or posessions the panopticon society's agencies can tell a lot about
you -- like, what you're reading, what you just ate, and maybe where you've
been if they get cheap enough to scatter like dust. More insidiously, because
each copy of a manufactured item will be uniquely identifiable, they'll
be able to tell not only what you're reading, but where you bought it.
RFID chips are injectable, too, so you won't be able to misplace your
identity by accident.

(And if the panopticon police don't like the books you're reading or the DVDs
you're watching, maybe they can use your tag fingerprint to order up a new
you?)

Trusted computing and Digital Rights Management

Availability: now-5 years.

Trusted Computing doesn't mean computers you can trust: it means computers
that intellectual property corporations can trust. Microsoft's Palladium
software (due in a future Windows release [2004: due in
Windows Longhorn, renamed to NGSCB]) and Intel's TPCA architecture are
both components of a trusted computing platform. The purpose of trusted
computing is to enforce Digital Rights
Management -- that is, to allow
information providers to control what you do with the information, not to
protect your rights.

Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a Palladium
platform, but which you won't be able to copy. Microsoft will be able to
lease you software that stops working if you forget to pay the rental. Want
to cut and paste a paragraph from your physics text book into that essay
you're writing? DRM enforced by TCPA will prevent you (and snitch to the
publisher's copyright lawyers). Essentially, TPCA will install a secret
policeman into every microprocessor. PCs stop being general purpose machines
and turn into Windows on the panopticon state. It's not about mere legal
copyright protection; as Professor Lawrence Lessig points out, the rights
that software and media companies want to reserve go far beyond their
legal rights under copyright law.

If the trusted computing folks get their way, to ensure control they'll need
to pass legislation to outlaw alternative media.
Jaron
Lanier predicts that
today's microphones, speakers and camcorders could become contraband; and in
case this sounds outlandish and paranoid, the US senate has
seen more than one bill,
(most prominent among them, the Consumer Broadband and
Digital Television Promotion Act) that
would require DRM interlocks in all analog-to-digital
conversion electronics in order to prevent illicit copying.

(Presumably he wasn't thinking of aircraft instrumentation, cardiac monitors,
or machine tools at the time, but under the proposed law they would need
copy-prevention interlocks as well ... )

Cognitive radio

Availability: now-10 years.

Radio waves can travel through one another without interacting. Radio
'interference' happens when radio transceivers use dumb encoding schemes that
don't let multiple channels share the same wavelength: interference is a
side-effect of poor design, not a fundamental limit on wireless
communications.

With fast microprocessors it's possible to decode any radio-frequency signal
on the fly in software, by performing Fourier analysis on the raw signal
rather than by using hard-wired circuitry.
Software radios can be
reconfigured on the fly to use new encoding schemes or frequencies. Some such
encoding schemes work to avoid interference; so-called cognitive radio
transcievers take account of other transmitters in the neighbourhood and
negotiate with them to allocate each system a free frequency. (The 802.11
wireless networking protocols are one early example of this in action.)
SR doesn't sound like a tool of the panopticon society until you put them
together with celldar and TCPA. Cellphones and computers are on a collision
course. If the PC becomes a phone, and every computer comes with a built-in
secret policeman _and_ can be configured in software, the panopticon's power
becomes enormous: remote interrogation of RFID dust in your vicinity will let
the authorities know who you're associating with, reconfiguration of phones
into celldar receivers will let them see what you're doing, and plain
old-fashioned bugging will let them listen in. If they can be bothered.

(Invest in tinfoil hat manufacturers; it's the future of headgear!)

Lab-on-a-chip chemical analysers

Availability: now-5 years.

Microtechnology, unlike nanotechnology, is here today.
By building motors, gears, pumps, and instruments onto silicon wafers using
the same lithographic techniques that are used for making microcircuitry,
engineers are making it possible to build extremely small -- and cheap --
analytical laboratories. Devices under
development include gas chromatography
analysers, mass spectroscopes, flow cytometers, and a portable DNA analyser
small enough to fit in a briefcase. The panopticon society is lavish with its
technologies: what today would occupy a Police department's forensic lab,
will tomorrow fit into a box the size of a palmtop computer.

(And they won't
have to send that urine sample to a lab in order to work out that you were in
the same room as somebody who smoked a joint two weeks ago.)

Data mining

Availability: -5 years to +10 years

Total
Information Awareness. Department of Homeland
Security. NSA.
ECHELON. This article was emailed to Whole Earth Review's staff; by including
these keywords it almost certainly caught the attention of ECHELON, the data
mining operation run by the NSA and its associated intelligence agencies.
ECHELON has monitored all internet, telephone, fax, telex, and radio traffic
for years, hoovering up the data. But analysing electronic intelligence is
like trying to drink water from a firehose; the problem is identifying
relevant information, because for every Al Qaida operative discussing the
next bomb plot, a million internet denizens are speculating and gossiping
about the same topic. And if the infoglut seems bad now, wait until your
every walk down the high street generates megabytes of tracking data.
The Department of Homeland Security is just one of the most obvious agencies
trying to tackle the information surplus generated by the embryonic
panopticon society. The techniques they propose to use entail linking up
access to a variety of public and private databases, from credit rating
agencies and the INS to library lending records, ISP email and web server
logs, and anything else they can get their hands on. The idea is to spot
terrorists and wrongdoers pre-emptively by detecting patterns of suspicious
behaviour.

The trouble is, data mining by cross-linking databases can generate false
inferences. Imagine your HMO with access to your web browsing records. Your
sister asks you to find her some books about living with AIDS, to pass on to
a friend; you go look on Amazon.com, researching the topic, and all the HMO
knows is that you're looking for help on living with AIDS. And how does the
Department of Homeland Society know whether I'm planning a terrorist act ...
or doing my research before writing a novel about a terrorist incident? To
make matters worse, many databases contain corrupt information, either by
accident or malice. The more combinations of possible corrupt data you scan,
the more errors creep into your analysis. But to combat these problems, the
Office of Information Awareness is proposing to develop new analytical
techniques that track connections between people -- where they shop, how they
travel, who they know -- in the hope that if they throw enough data at the
problem the errors will go away.

(Guess they think they need the panopticon surveillance system, then. After
all, if data mining never worked in the past, obviously you can make it work
by throwing more data at it ...)

The pressure to adopt these technologies springs from our existing political
discourse as we struggle to confront ill-defined threats. We live in a
dangerous world: widespread use of high technology means that individuals can
take actions that are disruptive out of all proportion to their numbers.
Human nature being what it is, we want to be safe: the promise of a high-tech
surveillance "fix" that will identify terrorists or malefactors before they
hurt us is a great lure.

But acts of mass terror exist at one end of a scale that begins with the
parking ticket, the taping of a CD for personal use in a Walkman, a
possibly-defamatory statement about a colleague sent in private email to a
friend, a mistakenly ommitted cash receipt when compiling the annual tax
return ... the list is endless, and to a police authority with absolute
knowledge and a robotic compulsion to Enforce The Law, we would all,
ultimately, be found guilty of something.

This brings up a first major point: legislators do not pass laws in the
expectation that everybody who violates them will
automatically be caught and punished.
Rather, they often pass new laws in order to send a message -- to their
voters (that they're doing something about their concerns) and to the
criminals (that if caught they will be dealt with harshly).
There is a
well-known presumption that criminals are acting
rationally (in the economic sense) and their behaviour is
influenced by the perceived reward for a successful crime,
and both the risk and severity of punishment. This theory is
implicitly taken into account by legislators when they draft
legislation, because in our current state of affairs most
crimes go undetected and unreported. A panopticon
singularity would completely invalidate these assumptions.

Furthermore: many old laws are retained despite widespread unpopularity,
because a vocal minority support them. An estimated 30 percent of
the British population have smoked cannabis, currently an offense
carrying a maximum penalty of 6 months' imprisonment (despite rumours
of its decriminalization), and an absolute majority of under-50's
supports decriminalization, but advocating a "soft on drugs" line
was perceived as political suicide until very recently because
roughly 25% of the population were strongly opposed.

Some old laws, which may not match current social norms, are retained
because it is easier to ignore them than to repeal them. In Massachusetts,
the crime of fornication -- any sex act with someone you're not married to --
carries a 3 month prison sentence. Many towns, states, and
countries have archaic laws still on the books that dictate what people must
wear, how they must behave, and things they must do -- laws which have fallen
into disuse, and which are inappropriate to enforce. (There's one town in
Texas where since the 19th century it has been illegal for women to wear
patent leather shoes, lest a male see something unmentionable reflected in
them; and in London, until 1998 all taxis were required to carry a bale of
hay in case their horse needed a quick bite to eat. Diesel
and petrol powered cabs included.)

These laws, and others like them, highlight the fact that with a few
exceptions (mostly major felonies) our legal systems were not designed with
universal enforcement in mind. But universal enforcement is exactly what
we'll get if these surveillance technologies come together to produce a
panopticon singularity.

A second important side-effect of panopticon surveillance is the chilling
effect it exerts on otherwise lawful activities. If you believe your
activities on the net are being monitored for signs of terrorist intent,
would you dare do the research to write that thriller?
Nobody (with
any common sense) cracks a joke
in the waiting line at airport security -- we're all afraid of attracting the
unwelcome attention of people in uniform with no sense of humour whatsoever.
Now imagine the straitjacket policing of aviation security extended into
every aspect of daily life, with unblinking and remorseless surveillance of
everything you do and say. Worse: imagine that the enforcers are machines,
tireless and efficient and incapable of turning a blind eye.

Surveillance need not even stop at our skin; the ability to monitor our
speech and track our biological signs (for example: pulse, pupillary
dilation, or possibly hormone and neurotransmitter levels) may lead to
attempts to monitor thoughts as well as deeds. What starts with attempts to
identify paedophile predators before they strike may end with discrimination
against people believed to be at risk of "addictive behaviour" -- howsoever
that might be defined -- or of harbouring anti-social attitudes.

We are all criminals, if you dig far enough: we've broken the speed limit,
forgotten to file official papers in time, made false statements (often
because we misremembered some fact), failed to pay for services, and so on.
These are minor offenses -- relatively few of us are deliberate criminals.
But even if we aren't active felons we are all potential criminals, and a
case can be -- and is being -- made for keeping us all under surveillance,
all the time.

A Panopticon Singularity is the logical outcome if the burgeoning technologies
of the singularity are funneled into automating law enforcement. Previous
police states were limited by manpower, but the panopticon singularity
substitutes technology, and ultimately replaces human conscience with a
brilliant but merciless prosthesis.

If a panopticon singularity emerges, you'd be well advised to stay away from
Massachusetts if you and your partner aren't married. Don't think about
smoking a joint unless you want to see the inside of one of the labour camps
where over 50% of the population sooner or later go. Don't jaywalk, chew gum
in public, smoke, exceed the speed limit, stand in front of fire exit routes,
or wear clothing that violates the city dress code (passed on the nod in
1892, and never repealed because everybody knew nobody would
enforce it and it would take up valuable legislative time). You won't
be able to watch those old DVD's
of 'Friends' you copied during the naughty oughties because if you stick them
in your player it'll call the copyright police on you. You'd better not spend
too much time at the bar, or your insurance premiums will rocket and your
boss might ask you to undergo therapy. You might be able to read a library
book or play a round of a computer game, but your computer will be counting
the words you read and monitoring your pulse so that it can bill you for the
excitement it has delivered.

And don't think you can escape by going and living in a log cabin in the
middle of nowhere. It is in the nature of every police state that the most
heinous offense of all is attempting to escape from it. And after all, if
you're innocent, why are you trying to hide?