Panoptic Age: Entering the Pupil of the All-Seeing Eye

Conspiracy Archive | Apr 2, 2007

George Orwell’s 1984 captured the totalitarian vision of a surveillance society with frighteningly vivid precision. Years later, deceased philosopher Michel Foucault would expound upon the Orwellian model and provide some conceptual understanding of the emergent carceral culture. In so doing, he would trace the ideational origins of panopticism to the Enlightenment. The ultimate objective of the Enlightenment was the enshrinement of a Technocracy equipped with panoptic machinations to monitor and squelch any potential dissidents. Today, the ideological heirs to the Enlightenment tradition are still endeavoring to realize that vision. This is painfully evidenced by the various panoptic machinations being established by the neoconservative-dominated Bush Administration. The purpose of this article is to trace the ideational continuum that underpins the present neoconservative panoptic initiatives. Through careful examination of this continuum, these researchers hope to provide a succinct analysis of panopticism’s ideological heritage and its developmental history.

The Post-September 11th Surveillance Society

If a recent Justice Department audit is correct, the worst nightmares of constitutionalists and privacy advocates may have been realized. The audit found that the FBI had misused power given to the Bureau by the Patriot Act to conduct surveillance. The controversy circles around the FBI’s use of national security letters. A CNN report elaborates:

The FBI is guilty of “serious misuse” of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act, a government audit said Friday.

The Justice Department’s inspector general looked at the FBI’s use of national security letters, in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals — such as financial, phone, and Internet records — without court orders. The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren’t supposed to.

As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said.

“We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI’s national security letter authorities,” Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report.

The findings of the government audit hearken back to an earlier era in FBI history, namely the reign of J. Edgar Hoover. The audit discovered that the FBI has made “as many as 56,000 requests a year for information using the letters since the Patriot Act was passed in October 2001″ (no pagination). What is even more disturbing is the fact that between 2004 and 2005 “more than half of the targets of the national security letters were U.S. citizens” (no pagination). Even Arlen Specter, the Senator who is famous for his role in the farcical Warren Commission, had to admit that “the Patriot Act may have to be changed and the FBI’s power curtailed because ‘they appear not to be able to know how to use it’”.

Commensurate to the enshrinement of the Patriot Act, the Bush Administration began to erect several other draconian machinations. In January 2002, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency established the Information Awareness Office (“Information Awareness Office, no pagination). This department was designed to “imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness” (no pagination). To achieve such an end, the Information Awareness Office would begin to finance the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program in FY2003.