State House Panopticon

Abdul at Indiana Barrister has a post up about the Jon Elrod flap entitled “So these are the new rules.” Elrod is a Republican state Representative who is currently running for Congress. At some point while he was at his seat on the floor of the House of Representatives during session, he was working on documents for his campaign and handing campaign literature to a House staffer. Democratic operatives caught wind of this, took a camera to the House balcony, and taped Mr. Elrod working on campaign matters on the floor of the House.

Abdul wrote:

But there is a bigger issue here. I was at the Statehouse today and from what I was able to gather, not a lot of people on either side of the aisle were too happy about how this all went down. As one lawmaker put it, “this changes the rules and we are going into new territory and opened a can of worms.”

What they meant was that anyone with a video camera can go into the House gallery and record what lawmakers are doing while sitting at their desks. This means they can get video of lawmakers playing solitaire, booking airline reservations, shopping on eBay and even visiting their campaign websites all with government computers on government time.

This put me in mind of a post I wrote back in July of 2005 of which I am inordinately proud entitled Internet Panopticon. Back in the day, Jeremy Bentham proposed a design for a prison with a tower in the middle of a donut shaped building. The prisoners would be in the donut in back lit cells. Guards would be in the tower. The point of this was that the prisoners would know that they were visible at all times. Furthermore, at any given time, they couldn’t tell when they were being watched. The idea is that the prisoners would self-regulate for fear that they were being watched.

Foucault’s description of the principle:

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.

Technology is potentially bringing this principle to bear in lots of areas of modern life. If the Elrod business really is changing the rules of the game as Abdul suggests, then perhaps the Panopticon is coming to the State House. I’m actually not that excited about the idea of putting our legislators in a fish bowl, viewable by the public at any given time. However, I would support that arrangement before I would support having the general citizenry in a fish bowl viewable by government authorities. Hopefully our legislators will be mindful of the Elrod matter when legislation comes across their desks that has the effect of putting citizens under unwarranted surveillance.