“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision… was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon.”
UK Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, the person nominally in charge of the UK Police, justice system and MI5, sat down for an in conversation event with the former Prime Minister (and current Labour government’s eminence grise) Tony Blair, organised by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. In that conversation, made a chilling admission about the government’s ultimate goal of AI surveillance.
From the Daily Telegraph, the only mainstream newspaper (besides Scotland’s The National) to cover the story:
“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.”
Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.[1]
Mahmood’s admission is shocking, not so much in terms of its actual message but rather the candidness with which it was conveyed. Seasoned NC readers will not be surprised that the British government, like many other governments, is trying to build an AI-enabled panopticon. Over the years we’ve covered in some depth the totalitarian thinking behind Bentham’s Panopticon, as well as the myriad threats posed by the construction of a digital panopticon. [2]
That said, this is probably the first time that a senior government official of a major Western nation has come out and openly admitted that they are building a digital panopticon in order to maintain total, constant surveillance of criminals. Such a system could be quickly expanded to the broader population — indeed, in the case of the UK it already is, through the nationwide rollout of live facial recognition systems, reports The Telegraph:
As justice secretary, Ms Mahmood proposed a major expansion of GPS tagging of criminals to create “virtual prisons” for offenders punished in the community. Since moving to the Home Office, she has announced a planned nationwide rollout of police-operated live facial recognition cameras.
Most senior government officials tend not to boast, in public at least, about building a digital panopticon (even if that’s exactly what they’re doing) for an obvious reason: it’s totally dystopian, the Stasi on steroids. But as we’ve been warning, the Starmer government has turbocharged the UK’s slide into dystopia, including by scaling back trial by jury, escalating its attacks on lawful speech and rolling out digital identity despite massive public opposition.
Like most governments in the West, the Starmer administration is also pushing for online age verification, which is essentially a Trojan Horse for digital identity. As the member of the House of Lords Claire Fox warns in the clip below, “this is a threat, potentially at least, to adult civil liberties and the right to privacy, and effectively means we’ll have to digitally verify to participate in the public square.”
Yet there is scant reporting in the legacy media on these sweeping changes. As Jonathan Cook notes in the tweet below, Mahmood is effectively telling the British public that they are prisoners and that the government quite literally plans to become Big Brother using AI. Yet there is barely a word about it in the media (with the notable exceptions of The Telegraph and The National). This, of course, is also a feature, not a bug.
The panopticon, in its original conception, is so controversial that it has barely been properly tried (though elements of it have been incorporated into the design of some prisons). The closest thing, the Presidio Modelo complex in Cuba, built in 1920, was so plagued by corruption and cruelty that it was abandoned. As Collingwood explains in the above tweet, the psychological effects of such living were considered too cruel for even prisoners to endure:
Many indeed consider the entire concept of the Panopticon the foundation of the theory of totalitarian regimes in operation: if it could seek to arrange society so [that] every citizen may be watched at any time but cannot know whether they are being watched or not (e.g. the telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Oceania) a regime could force all citizens to act as though they were being watched at any given time.
And this is what our Home Secretary—the office in charge of the police and MI5 and the justice system—wants to impose on us. This is her dream society. Not even joking or embellishing.
It is as if people like Mahmood read Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Phillip K Dick’s Minority Report and a host of other dystopian novels and came away with an instruction manual. Meanwhile, their big tech paymasters came away with new business models…
Nick Corbishley 