... based will permit unprecedented levels of surveillance, creating in his terms, a 'virtual panopticon'; as William Burroughs pointed out "a functioning police state needs no police" (Burroughs, evcom.net). Foucault's Panopticon Foucault used a Victorian model for a possible prison design to describe the growing function of a police state without police. The panopticon was a prison design that used a system where the cells were always visible to the guard's post. But the inmates could see the guards, could not tell whether or not they were being watched. The theory was that, in a state of perpetual possible surveillance, they would always assume they were being watched and would obey all prison rules. Foucault thinks something that we inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the desire to control increasingly large numbers of people in a manner that monarchies were not able to accomplish: both by distributing self-regulating bodies regularly through ...

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