the panopticon's changing geography - national council for

The Geographical Review

VOLUME 97 July 2007 NUMBER 3

THE PANOPTICON’S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY

JEROME E. DOBSON and PETER F. FISHER

ABSTRACT. Over the past two centuries, surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham’s Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell’s Big Brother; today, an electronic human-tracking service. Functionally, each technology provided total surveillance within the confines of its designated geographical coverage, but costs, geographical coverage, and benefits have changed dramatically through time. In less than a decade, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human-tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and public resistence are minimized. The end result is a fertile new field of investigation for surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches-literal and metaphorical-are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public and scholarly debate-local, national, and global-on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought. Keywords: geofencing, geoslavery, G I S , G P S , human tracking, Panop ticon.

F o r 220 years the Panopticon has stood as the tangible symbol of total surveillance, discipline, and con;rol. Always it has been the-utopian dream of some and hellish nightmare of others. Its initial, architectural manifestation was promoted heavily in the late 1700s. Its pure form fizzled after a few decades but left an indelible mark on social practice and discourse. A second manifestation, “Big Brother,” was feared intensely in the mid-twentieth century but later accepted in many places. It left such a powerful mark on public discourse that now merely saying its name is viewed as shameless fearmongering. Today, a third manifestation is quietly making a vigorous comeback-with little public reaction.

Since the mid-ig7os, scholars of surveillance studies have insisted that the Panopticon should be taken not literally but as a metaphor for surveillance of all types, with emphasis on power relationships. In this article we revert to a literal

% DR. DOBSON is a professor of geography at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045- 7613. DR. FISHER is a research professor of geographical information at City University, London Eciv

OHB, England.

The Geographical Review 97 (3): 307-323, July 2007 Copyright 0 2007 by the American Geographical Society of New York

308 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

interpretation and find it revealing. We examine the Panopticon’s three physical manifestations, focusing on changing costs, geographical coverage, and benefits.

Empirically, we find that surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts, each of which triggered a new episode. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building; in the second, a tightly controlled television network; and today, an electronic tracking service. Each had its own dis- tinctive rationale: first the utopian perfection of society; second, enforcement of absolute tyranny; today, safety and security. Functionally, however, their root h n c - tion is the same-total surveillance-and they are indeed three successive generations of Panopticons. We call them Panopticon I, 11, and 111.

PANOPTICON I More than two centuries ago the architect Samuel Bentham designed a building that was actually a surveillance machine. Its optics were such that a single “inspector”cou1d observe every occupant simultaneously. The people being observed would be illuminated around the clock but could not see one another or their observer, not even his shadow. He called it the “Inspection House,”or sometimes the “Elabora- tory.” His brother, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, wrote twenty-one letters pro- moting Samuel’s invention as a technological fix for society: “Morals reformed- health preserved-industry invigorated[-]instruction diffused-public burthens lightened-Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock-the [ Glordian knot of the Poor- Laws . . . untied-all by a simple idea in Architecture!” ([1787] 1995, preface). He called it the “Panopticon” (all seeing). It was, he said, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example. . . . Such is the engine: such the work that may be done with it” ([1787] 1995, preface).

Thirty years ago the philosopher/historian Michel Foucault called it “a cruel, ingenious cage” (1995, 207). He viewed it as an instrument for enforcing discipline and punishment and a means of defining power relations in everyday lives.

In the public mind today, the Panopticon is inextricably linked with prisons, but the first and only true one was not a prison. It was a school of arts in Saint Peters- burg, Russia (constructed in 1806), designed by Samuel Bentham. Certain aspects of his design were incorporated into many prisons around the world, including England’s Millbank Penitentiary (1821) and the Virginia State Penitentiary (1800). In Pennsylvania the Western Penitentiary, near Pittsburgh (1826), adhered closely to Bentham’s circular design and failed so utterly that it was razed only seven years later. The Eastern State Penitentiary, near Philadelphia (1829-1836), one of many that adopted a radial rather than circular design, was touted as the model prison of its day (Teeters and Shearer 1957; Johnston 1994).

PANOPTICON I1 When television came along in the i94os, George Orwell imagined a new sort of electronic Panopticon that would be far less expensive to implement and would extend beyond buildings to streets and other public spaces ([1949] 1950). He called

PANOPTICON’S CHANGING GEOGRAPHY 309

it “Big Brother” and indelibly cast it as an enabling technology for totalitarian government. In popular culture it was associated almost exclusively with communism. Orwell’s vision incited fear, and the term itself became a rallying cry for those who opposed surveillance of any sort, but especially surveillance as an instrument of tyranny.

Today, alert citizens or visitors in certain countries quickly realize that Panopticon 11 is well advanced. The use of closed-circuit television (CCTV) to monitor public spaces is widespread, especially in Great Britain. Estimates of the number of times an individual is imaged within one day range from tens to hundreds of times. The density of these devices is huge in certain areas, and their installation is often welcomed by the local community because they are perceived as a deterrent to crime. For example, pedestrians in Middlesbrough, England, are watched continuously and scolded from loudspeakers for infractions as minor as dropping a piece of paper on the sidewalk. Other cities are following Middlesbrough‘s lead.

PANOPTICON I11 Recently, Bentham’s Panopticon has become a catchphrase for all sorts of electronic surveillance, from video coverage of city streets to “total information awareness” of library checkouts and credit-card transactions. This modern Panopticon is a ser- viceable umbrella for what John Pickles called “the surveillant society” (1991, 1995), what Daniel Sui dubs “the stolen geography” (2006), and what Harlan Onsrud la- beled “the tragedy of the information commons” (1998). Its closest kin, however, is “human-tracking systems,” a new category of surveillance technologies based on geographic information systems (GIS), the Global Positioning System (GPS), and two-way radio transmission (Weaver 2006).

Human tracking is a growing component of a larger industry called “location- based services” ( LBS). Most LBS applications involve goods in transit, as when FedEx packages are tracked every step of the way from sender to receiver. Locator “tags” are placed on each product, package, pallet, or vehicle-or, lately, on each person in transit. Goods normally do not arouse controversy, but sometimes it is difficult to distinguish goods from people, as when the product is clothing or when vehicles are tracked and their drivers and occupants are known.

Several technologies are available for human tracking. A GPS receiver can locate itself by triangulating from several satellites. It can be worn as a bracelet or installed in a cell phone. Coordinates are calculated by the device itself and sent via radio, cell phone, or other wireless transmitter to a service provider. Alternatively, the device can be a radio transmitter whose signal is located by triangulating from two or more receivers. These devices, usually called “radio-frequency identification tags” (RFIDS) , come in two types, one for small spaces such as rooms within buildings and the other for distances up to 40 miles. Short-range R F I D chips may be smaller than a grain of rice, but they can contain sizable amounts of personal information, such as credit or medical histories. They can be worn as a tag or implanted beneath the skin. Typically, they have no power source of their own, ,relying instead on en-


ergy actively sent by the detector, whose receiver waits for an answer. Location is determined not by triangulation but simply by proximity to the detector, whose location is already known.

Long-range RFIDS differ little from the radio transmitters ordinarily used in cell phones, and cell phones themselves can serve the same function. Presently, cell phones are the instrument of choice for human tracking. Reasonably accurate re- sults can be attained purely by triangulating a cell phone’s ordinary signals among nearby cell-phone towers. Greater accuracy can be attained by installing a GPS receiver inside each cell phone, so that configuration is preferred.

Similarly, any laptop computer logged into a wireless network necessarily sends a radio signal that can be triangulated among several wireless antennas. One ven- dor, Cisco, now sells software that enables wireless providers to track users. It is intended for detecting “rogue” users, but it gives wireless providers the ability to track legitimate users as well.

Regardless of how they are obtained, latitude, longitude, and (optionally) el- evation coordinates are then transmitted to a central monitor run by a service provider. Frequent updates are fed into a GIS containing location and descriptive data for geographical features (buildings, streets, administrative boundaries, terrain, and much more) plus software and models to enforce any spatial and tempo- ral rules the operator wishes to impose (Goss 1995; Monmonier 2002). Geofences, for instance, appear as polygons with rules specifying whether the person cannot enter or cannot leave each polygon. The service provider typically posts the person’s track, associated geographical features, and geofences as maps online, with access restricted to paying customers, each of whom is analogous to one of Bentham’s inspectors.

Jerome Dobson first glimpsed human-tracking systems in 1999 while working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. No commercial products were advertised for humans, other than prisoners, at that time, but the technology surely existed, and one zealous entrepreneur’s proposal led Dobson to envision a new form of human bondage based on location control. He called it “geoslavery” (Dobson 2002, 2003, 2006; Dobson and Fisher 2003; Fisher and Dobson 2003). Soon, reality caught up with his imagination. Today, even its sellers call it “geofencing,” a term that would seem accusatory if charged by anyone outside the industry.

To be clear, not all human tracking is geoslavery. Bloggers, newspaper reporters, and even scholars often use “geoslavery” as a covering term for all forms of human tracking. Shamus Toomey, a Chicago Sun-Times staff reporter, for instance, claims that “Jerome Dobson . . . coined the term ‘geoslavery’ with colleague Peter Fisher in 2003. He defines it as a master exerting control over a worker through human-tracking” (2005). To the contrary, we formally defined the term in our initial “Geoslavery” article, and our definition requires that it be either coercive or surreptitious (Dob- son and Fisher 2003). Workplace applications raise all sorts of social, ethical, and legal issues, but they do not qualify as geoslavery when workers knowingly and voluntarily consent to being tracked for pay. As a rule, any application that would


not be called “slavery” in its analog form should not be called “geoslavery” in its electronic form.

“Nevertheless,” William Herbert claims, regarding the United States, “a reasonably strong argument can be made that Congress does have the constitutional power under the remedial provision of the Thirteenth Amendment to ban the use of tracking devices to dominate and control the location of others. Imposing restrictions, control and monitoring over another’s location constitutes a vestige and incident of slavery” (2006, 429). Herbert is employed by the Civil Service Employees Associa- tion Local 1000 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Em- ployees, the largest union in the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he leaves no doubt that his statement applies to human tracking in the workplace as well as to other instances of human tracking. His position rests not on the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on slavery per se but, rather, on its ban on the vestiges of slavery. At the very least, Panopticon I11 constitutes, to use Jeremy Bentham’s words, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example” ([i787] 1995, preface).

F u N c T I o N

All three Panopticons are designed to maintain continuous surveillance, reduce the cost of surveillance, and improve the efficiency of surveillance. In the first two, absolute control over human actions was an express purpose of the proposed surveillance. Both were designed solely as instruments of government or commerce that required total submission to absolute authority. Yet Orwell’s stark warning about tyranny stands in marked contrast to Bentham’s assurance that his machine would be open “to the great open committee of the tribunal of the world” ([i787] 1995, letter VI). Foucault wrote, “There is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny,” because it would be “democratically controlled’’ (1995, 209). In this particular paragraph it is not clear whether Foucault is stating his own view or Bentham’s. In either case, the mere fact that Bentham’s machine “does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside” does not guarantee that authorities will welcome outsiders as fellow inspectors in the tower (p. 209). Indeed, the premise clearly does not hold today, when a fundamental provision of many surveillance systems, deemed essential to protect the watched, is that observations and data will be held secure for viewing only by inspectors who have a “need to know.” The panoptic conundrum, as with many of today’s privacy laws that address health and financial information about individuals, is that the principle of open government clashes with the right to privacy when- ever personal information is collected and held by government. The conundrum is even greater when personal information is held by corporations. In fact, govern- ments may not be the primary threat but, rather, corporations and individuals, not just one “Big Brother” but many overbearing “Little Brothers.”

Today Panopticons I1 and I11 are promoted mainly as a means of enhancing safety and security. Indeed, in some instances CCTV footage has been used effec-

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tively in detecting serious crimes, identifying the London bombers of 7 July 2005, for example. Yet major shortcomings have been found in the use and implementation of CCTV schemes. Some investigators have concluded that CCTV is unlikely to be effective in preventing or solving crime, or even in reducing the fear of crime (Gill and Spriggs 2005). Their position is bolstered anecdotally by the odd fact that some perpetrators have been caught and convicted because they took videos of themselves committing crimes.

Unlike the oppressive government of Orwell’s vision, the British government is not advancing the use of CCTV to control activities in private space. The installation of CCTV to monitor private space by individuals is on the increase, however, purportedly to protect their own property or to monitor their nannies, for instance.

Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant claimed that police surveillance of Paris was not a threat, because “the surveillance and policing networks simply graze the big Paris that totally eludes them” (1998,103). In their view, control is limited to certain mandated functions, such as preventing riots, and police ignore other matters. Latour and Hermant’s oligopticon is focused, whereas Bentham’s Panopticon is synoptic. “As their name indicates, the “pan-opticons” make it possible to see everything, provided we also consider them as “olig-opticons,” from the Greek oligo meaning little, and found in words such as oligarchy” (Latour and Hermant 1998,28). “It sees little but what it does see it sees well” (p. 48). Therein lies a subtle warning, because “oligarchy” means government by the few, precisely the fear that many latter-day Orwells have about handing knowledge of their every move over to a new class of commercial or government inspectors.

In the modern case of Panopticon 111, control may or may not be intended. Rare, however, is the “inspector” who can watch and know and yet resist the tempta- tion to influence the subjects’ actions to one degree or another.

COSTS

In Table I we summarize the characteristics of Bentham’s original Panopticon, Orwell’s Big Brother, and GIs-based human-tracking systems. We focus on geographical coverages, costs, and benefits, starting here with costs.

Foucault stressed the importance of obtaining “the exercise of power at the lowest possible [economic and political] cost” (1995,220). He repeated this cost theme for emphasis at least eight times. Bentham’s main selling point for Panopticon I was reduced labor costs. Not only could one inspector watch many people, but he could even take a break now and then, for no one inside ever knew when he was at his post and when he was not. Still, the buildings themselves were expensive, and only one true Panopticon was ever built.

Panopticon I1 is less expensive to construct than is Bentham’s building, but labor costs remain high. If countrywide implementation of Orwell’s vision were de- sired, it would be inhibited by the number of personnel required to monitor CCTV

full time. On the other hand, major strides are being made in automated recogni-


TABLE I-COMPARISON OF COSTS, GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGES, AND BENEFITS OF

PANOPTICONS I, If, A N D I11

COST TO T H E WATCHER BENEFITS

Initial Purchase or Operating

Construction Cost per MEANS OF cost Person GEOGRAPHICAL TO the TO the SURVEILLANCE per Person per Year COVERAGE Watcher Watched

Analog: $1,000-$5,000 $350,0003 Unlimited Many None Spies or private (retainer)” investigators

Jeremy Bentham’s special original building panopticon

George Orwell’s television Big Brother cables

Human-tracking cell-phone systems towers

” Fees range from $40 to $75 per hour; the minimum annual cost at $40 per hour is shown here. The same cost can obtained by estimating seven watchers at $50,000 each per year. Source: M L A N 2005.

Based on the cost ofconstruction per bed for a high-securityprison (level 4).Source: CTDOC 2001.

The average annual operating cost per State inmate in 2001 was $22,65o,or $62.05 per day. Among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was $22,632 per inmate, or $62.01 per day” (James 2004,i).

Initial installation of surveillance systems, including cameras, communications networks, and monitors, runs approximately $5oo-$i,ooo per camera. Assuming that facial featurescan be recognized to a maximum distance of 150 feet from each camera, the lower cost for wide-area coverage would amount to $197,200 per square mile of interior or exterior space,even without redundant views. At resi- dential densities of 25,000 per square mile, the cost of installation runs $7.88 per person. Sources: Cal- culated by the author from surveillance equipment costs and speciffications found online at numerous Web sites on 24 September 2007.

Panopticon I: $125,000b $22,6OOC Inside a Many None

Panopticon 11: $7.8@ $1 4,000e Extent of Many None

Panopticon 111: $200 $240 Extentof Many Many

c “I

Assumes seven watchers at $40,000 each per year monitoring twenty individuals.

tion of individuals in CCTV images using methods such as facial recognition and gait analysis. Once an identification is made, automated tracking can follow an individual, and a spatial dossier of the person’s movements can be composed in real time. Another problem unforeseen by Orwell is that monitoring is difficult to maintain when the watched moves from the range on one sensor (camera) into the range of a number of other possible sensors. GIs, of course, is capable of making such connections.

Panopticon 111 holds a tremendous comparative advantage over the other two and certainly over any other means available today. In the analog world, anyone who wants to control someone else has only a few ways of doing so. Incarceration in prisons is extremely expensive due to the cost of construction ($125,000 per bed)


and operation ($22,600 per inmate per year). If the subject is not imprisoned, then he or she must be watched; and constant surveillance of people on the move is even more expensive, amounting to substantial salaries for a minimum of seven watchers (say, $350,000 per year) (see Table I). Plus, surveillance on the move or even in fixed buildings other than prisons is highly fallible.

In comparison, Panopticon I11 is affordable, effective, and available to anyone who wants to use it. Initial purchase prices and monthly service fees are equivalent to cell-phone costs. In less than five years, the cost of continuous surveillance of a single individual has dropped from several hundred thousand dollars per year to less than $500 per year. Surveillance formerly justified solely for national security and high-stakes commerce is readily available to track a spouse, child, parent, employee, neighbor, or stranger.

GEOGRAPHICAL COVERAGE One serious limitation of Panopticon I was that it could only be deployed, as Bentham admitted, “within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings” ([1787] 1995, 207). In spite of his clear statement, later commentators have trans- posed Bentham’s building into a metaphor for surveillance of all forms. Lila Kalinich, for instance, wrote, “Foucault takes care to remind us not to take this model too concretely” (2000,157). Bentham’s optical system, designed to exercise power through the gaze, is finally a political schema, “a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men” (p. 157). In this broad sense, the power of the Panopticon extends wherever police may go or citizens are willing to tattle on friends. Such a broad, generic definition was useful when technology was limited, but now there are choices, each of which can be distinguished in measurable ways. We, therefore, adhere to Bentham’s original definition, and we hope other scholars will choose likewise in the future.

In retrospect, that pure architectural manifestation of Panopticon I failed because it was too expensive to build, its areal coverage was limited to buildings, and some of its most highly touted benefits turned out to be damaging in unexpected ways. Prison reformers eventually realized, for instance, that the mental effects of years spent in solitary confinement were as cruel as the physical abuses inherent in filthy, violent, crowded cells. Orwell’s Panopticon I1 overcame the construction limitation of Panopticon I by relying not on mirrors and walls but on television cameras that could be deployed wherever cables could be run.

A common limitation of Panopticons I and I1 is that they are fixed or stationary, though the latter far exceeds the former. Panopticon 111 is not confined to government, as the others usually were, and is mobile by definition. It is as if Bentham’s concrete walls could be moved about freely and used to incarcerate a person at home one day, at work the next, at school, at church, and so on. Its only limitation is the worldwide distribution of cell-phone towers and the irregular polygons of re- ception that surround them. Jeremy Bentham would applaud, though Samuel, the architect, might be out of a job.


BENEFITS VERSUS RISKS The Bentham brothers viewed their invention in a totally positive light and promoted it with religious zeal-and they were not alone. Panopticon I appealed to social reformers for half a century, although later generations found it repugnant.

Orwell viewed Panopticon I1 in a totally negative light and sternly warned the public through horrific visions portrayed in his novel 1984 ((19491 1950). Rarely has a work of fiction generated such widespread public fear. One recent list of the most influential fictional characters of all time ranks Big Brother number two (Lazar, Karlan, and Salter 2006). Panopticon I1 was repugnant from the start, because of its invasion of private space. But attitudes toward public space are different, and video surveillance there has been welcomed by many individuals who perceive it as ad- dressing their fear of crime (whether it actually addresses crime or not).

In contrast, Panopticon I11 is seductive. To latter-day Benthams it is less confining, less visible, and therefore less frightening than its predecessors. The overwhelm- ing seduction, however, is that Panopticon 111 offers far more benefits to those being watched than its predecessors ever did. It is difficult to conceive a single reason why anyone would willingly walk into Bentham’s cage and spend time there of his or her own accord. Similarly, it is difficult to conceive a single reason why anyone would choose to live under Big Brother’s watchful eye if any other lifestyle were possible. But there are ample reasons why people willingly choose to place themselves under the watchful eye of Panopticon 111. General Motors’ OnStar tracking system is a prime example of benefits that appeal to some people and repel others. To a still wider public, the monitoring device is embedded in the mobile phone, an interna- tionally ubiquitous fashion accessory at the start of the twenty-first century.

To latter-day Orwells, however, Panopticon I11 is even more frightening than its predecessors because the “inspector” can follow wherever cell-phone towers go, the devices are inexpensive enough for just about anyone to track just about anyone else, and the systems can invade private as well as public space. Indeed, the simplest devices are carried willingly and obsessively by the watched. Location information is being collected on the majority of the population of whole countries as part of the billing information recorded at the time of each mobile telephone call. More overt monitoring of workers is performed by digital human-tracking systems, and these are applied to more people than all the inmates who ever spent time in buildings modeled after Bentham’s original Panopticon. The Xora company alone claims to track 50,000 American workers in 4,500 companies. Latter-day Orwells found little comfort when Xora’s chief executive officer, Sanjay Shirole, publicly announced, “There’s no electro shock. . . yet” (quoted in Charney 2004).

Today’s advertisements for Panopticon I11 are eerily reminiscent of Bentham’s promotional hype. The title page of his collected letters proclaimed the invention as “Applicable to Any Sort of Establishment, in Which Persons of Any Description Are to Be Kept under Inspection; And in Particular to Penitentiary-houses, Prisons, Houses of Industry, Work-houses, Poor-houses, Lazarettos, Manufactories, Hospi- tals, Mad-houses, and Schools” ([1787] 1995). In his first letter, he elaborated re-


garding its purpose: “Whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, main- taining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education” and “whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial” (letter I).

All the same and more can be said of Panopticon 111. To be clear, LBS and human tracking offer so many benefits that they will be impossible to resist. Benefits, however, do not negate risks. It is wise to consider the risks on their own as, for instance, one might consider the danger of lung cancer independent of the pleasures of smok- ing. Clearly, Panopticon I11 has beneficial uses, such as caring for victims of Alzheimer’s disease. Just as clearly, the technology will be abused. Even “good” uses will change society in fundamental ways, some intended and predictable, others unintended and unpredictable. Abuses will undoubtedly occur, the greatest of them being geoslavery. Geoslavery per se has no redeeming qualities, just as slavery itself has none.

Even in the most advertised case-parents with the best of intentions watching over their own children-Panopticon I11 fundamentally changes the parent-child relationship. It will do the same for teachers and students, husbands and wives, employers and employees, and countless other social contracts. Imagine, for instance, a generation of children who cannot disobey and workers who cannot break a rule regarding location. Imagine high-school sweethearts exchanging human- track- ing devices along with class rings as tangible tokens of their commitments to one another. Imagine what may happen when one of them unilaterally decides the relationship is no longer exclusive.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” (1759 [ 18121, title page). President Dwight D. Eisenhower went even further: “If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking . . . is freedom” (engraved on a memorial wall of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Center in Abilene, Kansas).

A prime example of both sides-risks and benefits-appeared in a story that made national news on 17 February 2006. The baseball star Albert Belle was alleged to have hidden a tracking device in his former girlfriend’s car. A judge ordered Belle to wear a tracking device himself to ensure that he did not go near her again (AP 2006).

If there were no benefits, there would be far less risk. Today’s society would reject Panopticon 111, and human tracking would be outlawed altogether.

ORWELL’S WOLF

By any reasonable measure, Panopticon 111 is bound to have an impact on society that will be far greater in magnitude than the actual application of Bentham’s Panopticon and more predictably certain than Orwell’s Big Brother. Not long ago the very idea of tracking people horrified the nation. Now, human-tracking systems are sold openly by that name, with no ensuing public outcry or even much discus-


sion. No state or federal law has been modified to regulate their use. In 2001, Senator John Edwards (Democrat, North Carolina) introduced a Location Privacy Protec- tion Act, but it went nowhere in Congress and did not become an issue in his subse- quent campaigns. Recently, France passed a law that requires employers to notify employees when they are being tracked but does not outlaw the practice.

Why so little interest? It may be due in part to Orwell’s over-the-top success in “crying wolf.” He cried it so well, and the cry was repeated so fervently so often by so many, that most people eventually became inured. After a while, the cry of Big Brother lost its sting. Television became a familiar companion rather than an instrument of oppression.

Latter-day Benthams say, “What’s the big deal? Employers have a right to know where their employees are. Parents have an obligation to oversee where their kids go. Schools need to know where pupils are.” Latter-day Orwells say it’s the ultimate realization of Big Brother. Some Christians claim that Gps-based human tracking is the “Mark of the Beast” prophesied in the Bible (Revelation 11-18) (Albrecht and McIntyre 2005). Actually, the biblical text explicitly addresses branding for identification, an inevitable component of human tracking, but says nothing at all about location monitoring.

A SILENT REVOLUTION

GIS is changing the world. Already it has revolutionized warfare, science, naviga- tion, security, crime investigation, tax collection, transportation, and countless other aspects of ordinary life. Panopticon I11 is just one facet of a societal revolution that is profoundly changing just about everything that involves location, movement, or flow. It is, however, a strangely silent revolution. It would take some forethought to plan an evening of television without seeing GIS on one or more crime shows, but still the concept has not registered with most Americans. Cell-phone tracking is a staple of forensic crime shows, but few viewers understand how it will impact ordinary, law-abiding citizens. Most people do not even know the acronym “GIS,” much less the full term “geographic information system.” Still fewer understand that geography is the science behind it.

Now, many nations have entered a social revolution as momentous as any in their past and yet so insidious that hardly anyone seems to notice. Panopticon I11 is a grand social experiment undertaken without forethought. Where, for instance, are studies by child psychologists investigating how children will react, emotionally and behaviorally, to constant surveillance and control?

Technology always changes dynamically through complex relationships and in- teractions among culture and other technologies. Francis Harvey and Nicholas Chrisman describe the “rhizomatic network” of GIS development since the 1950s (2004); Timothy Foresman refers to the “geomander” of institutions and individuals who pioneered GIS and its precursors over a century and more (1998a). Technol- ogy, like culture itself, changes in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways, always interwoven with science and society. Introspective probes into the history and phi-


losophy of GIs-such as those by Timothy Foresman (1998b), Francis Harvey and Nicholas Chrisman (2004), Duane Marble (i990), and Daniel Sui and Matt Ball (2006)-are rare, and they are needed now more than ever, especially for understanding Panopticon 111.

Oddly, the community of scholars devoted to surveillance studies has been slow to recognize the technological descendants of Bentham’s Panopticon. Foucault, in his seminal work on surveillance, did not mention computers at all, even though he was writing in 1975 when computers were well established and GIS had existed for about a decade (Foucault 1995; see also Foresman 1998b; Dobson and Durfee 1998). Commenting on Foucault’s digital deficiency, David Murakami Wood still fails to recognize the special case of human-tracking systems (except for prisoners), even when commercial products have been publicly sold and prominently advertised for at least five years (2007). Our own articles have elicited a gratifying response from many quarters, but not from within the very community most closely aligned with the issues we have raised (Dobson and Fisher 2003, Fisher and Dobson 2003).

Such chronic inattention to technology, old or new, may result from the collective tendency, noted above, to view the Panopticon not as a concrete object but as a metaphor for surveillance and associated power relationships. In so doing, the very scholars most devoted to surveillance studies missed not only a new form of surveillance but also crucial categories of power relationships newly enabled by GIS,

GPS, and human-tracking products. Panopticons I and I1 were inherently vertical, top-down, hierarchical, internally connected networks. Panopticon I11 can be employed that way as well, but its true innovation is to enable power relationships of all sorts: spouse to spouse, employer to employee, parent to child, and untold others, some of which may even be lateral. That yields a fertile new field for surveillance studies that involve myriad power relationships, some of which may be equal or nearly equal and others that may be newly unequal due to the availability of low- cost, readily accessible, uncomplicated surveillance products. Now more than ever, it is possible for power relationships to work in reverse, as when the individuals being watched relinquish power to the people they themselves may have hired to watch them. Consider, for example, the case of an elderly person who hires a service provider to monitor his or her movements for health reasons and whose watcher ends up meddling in other aspects of his or her life. In the context of “imperfect panopticism” (Hannah i997), Panopticon I11 lurches toward perfection as it gains in its ability to observe, judge, and enforce more life paths, each of them more com- pletely, in time and space (Pred 1977; Hannah 1997).

A FRAMEWORK FOR LOCAL, NATIONAL, A N D GLOBAL DEBATES As in Alcoholics Anonymous and similar support groups, the first step is to recognize that we have a problem. Western societies are addicted to digital technology and far more prone to recognize its benefits than its risks. Surely, it will clarify the issues if we can agree that digital human tracking is indeed the third stage in a progression that includes Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s Big Brother. A straight-


forward comparison of benefits, risks, and comparative advantages among the three Panopticons should help resolve just how threatening this new technology really is.

Is Panopticon I11 really the greatest threat to personal freedom ever faced by humankind, as we have said? Or, is it just another neutral technology like the computer or cell phone or GIS per se, with irresistible virtues and chronic annoyances?

Is it first and foremost a civil rights issue? A women’s rights issue? A children’s rights issue? Will it really change the fundamental nature of social relationships in ways that even its proponents will come to find repugnant?

Next we must ask, how far down this path is the United States willing to go? How far are Great Britain and other nations willing to go? Always, the trade-off is between physical security and personal safety on one hand and privacy and personal freedom on the other (Dobson 1998). Surely some limit exists beyond which society will say, “No more.” Where is that limit? Will we wait and find it through bitter experience or anticipate risks and avoid pain through shared values, social conventions, laws, and regulations? (Herbert 2006).

On every front, philosophical quandaries of right and wrong will develop, fol- lowed by scores of specific questions:

Do parents have unlimited rights to monitor their children, brand them, and control their every movement? Under U.S., British, and international law, branding is allowed as long it is not implemented with a hot iron. Should a similar distinction exist between implants that require incisions and brace- lets that do not? Should service providers be required to conduct background checks of employees as day-care centers are required to do? How will service providers secure the data against hacking? Do employers have an unlimited right to track workers on the job? Off the job? Will the door to the room that houses the monitor be locked? Guarded? Or open to any coworker who happens to stroll by?

How can voters, legislators, public officials, and businessmen distinguish between right and wrong when the choices involve such complex technologies and diverse social circumstances? In every instance it will help to ask ourselves what we would have called its analog equivalent. What would it be if it were not electronic? Would it be incarceration? Tethering? Branding? Stalking? Slavery?

When judges mandate such devices, they routinely inform prisoners that they are being “incarcerated as surely as if they were confined within a cell block. Can the act be anything but incarceration when one individual does it to another? Who has the right to incarcerate? What legal proceeding or medical review would be required if it were not electronic?

Similarly, if an RFID is implanted beneath the skin, is that not “branding” as surely as if the same number had been tattooed on the skin? Who has the right to brand, and who does not?


Many applications clearly would fit the standard definition of “stalking.” Who has the right to stalk, and who does not? Are current antistalking laws sufficient to address electronic stalking?

“Geofencing” has been used to describe electronic systems that confine people, animals, or products within prescribed boundaries. Who has the right to fence a fellow human, and who does not?

Earlier, we used the term “geoslavery” to describe a new form of human bondage characterized by electronic location control imposed coercively or surreptitiously. International conventions on slavery, to which most countries are signatories, state that no one has the right to enslave another human being. Shouldn’t that principle govern all forms of slavery, electronic or not?

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE Consider two very different visions of Digital Earth. The first is from a 1998 essay attributed to Vice President Albert Gore:

Imagine a young child visiting a Digital Earth exhibit at a local museum. Donning a head-mounted display, she sees Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in to see continents, countries, cities, houses, then trees. She takes a “magic carpet ride” through the terrain. She requests information on land cover, plants, animals, weather, roads, boundaries, and population. She visits Yellowstone Park‘s geysers, bison, and bighorn sheep. She visits Paris, her time-line set for centuries to learn French history or eons to learn about dinosaurs. (Gore igg8,1-2)

It is a beautiful vision. We shared it then and still do now. But two years later Dobson became embroiled in a controversy over human tracking that forced him to consider the dark side as well. He wrote about that same girl’s walk home that afternoon:

Imagine a young girl walking home from school on a bright May day. She’s brim- ming with curiosity and energy and romance. Something in a nearby stream catches her eye. Impulsively, she charges across the field. Suddenly, her biceps twitches, then stings, then aches. She turns back, and her pain ceases at the sidewalk. Simultaneously, a commercial service provider reports to her parents. Her father meets her at the door and asks about the incident. He agrees the side trip would have been all right and promises to program a digression into tomorrow’s route, but the moment of discovery has passed. Even so, this girl is fortunate, for her parents, at least, have good intentions. One can easily imagine worse horrors in places where child slavery is common or ethnic cleansing is under way. How long would Anne Frank‘s diary be, if she had been wearing such a device? (Dobson 2000,24)

Today both visions are close to reality. Millions of ordinary people routinely view the spinning Earth through Google Earth or ArcExplorer. Simultaneously, geofencing has gone mainstream with corporate offerings by Sprint and Xora. Schoolchildren in Osaka, Japan, are required to carry tracking devices tucked into their belongings, and television advertisements for “kid trackers” air on U.S. televi-


sion. Surveillance technology has changed dramatically, and much of what is new derives specifically from advancements of geographical technology, including GIS

and GPS. The result, in turn, is a rapidly changing geography of surveillance and control. Simply put, the price of surveillance and control per person and per area has dropped precipitously, so that almost anyone can afford real-time applications to watch and control almost anyone else. A grand social experiment has begun, and no one knows how far it will go.

SURVEILLANCE FOR THE MASSES Surveillance technology has advanced in three major spurts, each of which triggered a new public episode. In the first instance the surveillance instrument was a specially designed building, Bentham’s Panopticon; in the second, a tightly controlled television network, Orwell’s Big Brother; today, an electronic human-tracking service. Functionally, each Panopticon was designed to provide total surveillance, and each succeeded within the confines of its designated geographical coverage. What have changed most dramatically through time are costs, geographical coverage, and benefits. With the advent of Panopticon 111, costs have plummeted from hundreds of thousands of dollars per watched person per year for analog surveillance or tens of thousands of dollars for incarceration to mere hundreds of dollars for electronic human-tracking systems. Simultaneously, benefits to those being watched have increased enormously, so that individual and collective resistence- Foucault’s “political costs”-are minimized. Hence, the public appeal of Panopticon 111 is greater than that of Panopticon I1 (even in its modern CCTV form) and far greater than that of Panopticon I.

The end result is a fertile new field of investigation €or surveillance studies involving an endless variety of power relationships. With their high cost and commu- nal nature, Panopticons I and I1 required government, corporate, or institutional investment and sanction. With its low cost and personal use, Panopticon I11 can operate with as few as one inspector and one person watched. Thus surveillance technology now supports myriad power relationships, some of them equal or nearly equal and others newly unequal.

Our literal, empirical approach to panopticism has yielded insights that might have been less obvious under the metaphorical approach that has dominated recent scholarly discourse. We conclude that both approaches-literal and metaphorical- are essential to understand what promises to be the greatest instrument of social change arising from the Information Revolution. We urge public discourse and scholarly debate-local, national, and global-on this grand social experiment that has already begun without forethought.

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