The British Home Secretary's lust for the panopticon

Good god, the UK Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has really been saying the quiet part out loud:

AI and technology can be transformative to the whole of the law and order space.

When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.

Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.

The panopticon, for the unfamiliar, is a thought experiment by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham regarding how a prison - a prison - could work.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched

The concept has been immortalised in several stories over the years. The issue is that they have almost invariably been stories of horror and dystopia. Perhaps the most famous of which is Orwell’s 1984 which is not, after all, a story of happy societal utopia.

Of the telescreens in the landmark surveillance narrative Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949), George Orwell said: “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment … you had to live … in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised”

One difference between the 18th century vision of such thing which assumed the premise that it was only the possibility of being watched that would control their behaviour:

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation.

In the modern era, in the present day world that our Home Secretary lives in, technology of course exists that could in theory actually watch us all the time.

The most obvious example of which might be seen in the the constant urge of our leaders to funnel our data to the notorious company Palantir:

A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens' political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.

Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.

Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed

It’s the torment nexus all over again.

Our leaders talking like this doing things like this is unconscionable. Particularly by a supposedly progressive-leaning party. Particularly in an era where it seems quite possible that Labour will be handing over the governance of the UK to a self-serving private company masquerading as a far right political party with distinct fascist tendencies.