If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens.
The federal government is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases: The IRS gathers comprehensive financial and employment information from every taxpayer; the Department of Labor maintains the National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP) system, which collects the personal information of many workers; the Department of Homeland Security amasses data about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially or crosses the nation’s borders; the Drug Enforcement Administration tracks license plates scanned on American roads. And that’s only a minuscule sampling. More obscure agencies, such as the recently gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, keep records of corporate trade secrets, credit reports, mortgage information, and other sensitive data, including lists of people who have fallen on financial hardship.
A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing. Despite DOGE’s stated mission, little efficiency seems to have been achieved. Now a new phase of Trump’s project is under way: Not only are individual agencies being breached, but the information they hold is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?
I’ve heard this one before
Ive heard it before, but never seen it uselessly and incorrectly described as a “panopticon”.
Like even the first sentence of this article kind of implies to me that the author has a very loose grasp on what panopticon means.
The panopticon is the basis for prison designs in France, where you have a circle of cells facing a guard tower in the center. The prisoners cant see inside the guard tower, so they dont know if they are being watched or not at any given time. As such, they regulate their behavior as if being watched, regardless of whether they are actually being watched or not by a real guard.
Once you understand that concept, it becomes difficult to see how its remotely analogous to mass data collection. Mass data collection is literally just us actually being watched 24/7, and we know we are. The article spends a lot of time showing that we know exactly how they are collecting data and what they are collecting.
Is panopticon just some hot buzzword? What do people think it means?
I think they’re referring to panopticon in the Orwellian 1984 manner.
Chat bots posing as like minded people opposing the regime is what happens next. The old FBI terrorist entrapment scheme is going AI and domestic.
Get ready for Nicole 2.0
America has been pooling data on Americans and everyone else for decades.
Now the mainstream media cares about egregious government overreach and invasive surveillance?! Fuck them
I mean, this is the first time I’ve ever truly worried about it being used in deja vu of the third Reich. Regardless of what your opinions were on government surveillance it was unlikely that the average person had any tangible consequences to fear. Now they do
This was always a possibility, though.
Of course. But once upon a time the average American could still feel safe because so far the government of checks and balances more or less worked well enough that anything egregiously unconstitutional wouldn’t happen here. Alas here we are.
More so since the Trump administration will go after reporters to find the identities of leakers. The fourth estate is in trouble and so are the rest of us.
