How Panopticon Effects Change When Surveillance Is Mutual and Transparent

Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon in "Surveiller et Punir" (1975) was not primarily about prisons. It was about the structure of modern power — how the disciplinary mechanisms developed in prisons, schools, hospitals, and barracks were generalized across the social body to produce compliant, self-regulating subjects. The Panopticon was a metaphor for a power that operated not through direct coercion but through the internalized gaze: the awareness of being potentially watched that produces self-policing behavior.

The critical feature of the Foucauldian Panopticon was directionality and asymmetry. The watcher was shielded and invisible. The watched was exposed and could not retaliate or observe in return. This asymmetry was not incidental — it was the mechanism. Power operated through the watched party's uncertainty about the timing of surveillance combined with certainty about the fact of surveillance. The uncertainty produced constant behavioral discipline; the certainty prevented resistance.

Foucault wrote this analysis in a technological moment when the asymmetry was structurally robust. The instruments of surveillance — wiretaps, informant networks, police observation, employer monitoring — required institutional resources that individuals and civil society organizations could not match. The state and the corporation could watch; the individual could not watch back with comparable effectiveness.

Foucault's framework has been enormously influential, but it was always a model of a historically specific power arrangement, not a timeless description of the relationship between surveillance and power. The technological developments of the past three decades have begun to alter some of the structural conditions on which the model rested. Not all of them — the asymmetry of surveillance resources between institutions and individuals remains massive. But the directionality has become more complex, and the analysis must follow the change.

Several technological developments have materially changed the directionality of surveillance in ways that require updating the Foucauldian framework.

Mobile video. The ubiquity of smartphone cameras has made it possible for any individual in proximity to a public event to create a photographic or video record of that event. The significance of this for the surveillance power relationship was demonstrated dramatically in May 2020, when the murder of George Floyd was recorded on a bystander's smartphone and the recording became evidence that contradicted the initial police account. This is not the first time bystander video changed a legal or political outcome — the Rodney King beating in 1991 was recorded on a consumer video camera — but the pervasiveness of smartphone cameras has made such recordings far more likely to occur and far more widely distributed.

The structural effect is that law enforcement, corporate, and government actors who operate in public or semi-public spaces now operate under conditions of potential recording at all times. This does not eliminate abuse — many abuses occur where cameras cannot reach, in private settings, or in jurisdictions where recordings are suppressed. But it changes the behavioral calculation for actors who previously operated with confidence that their conduct would not be documented.

Body cameras and institutional accountability technology. Body-worn cameras for law enforcement represent a deliberate institutional design choice to create a surveillance record of police-citizen encounters. The design intent is genuinely ambiguous: advocates for police accountability hoped body cameras would document misconduct; police organizations hoped they would document citizen aggression and protect officers from false accusations. The empirical record is roughly consistent with both expectations: body cameras produce evidence useful for both purposes. The key feature is that the record is created automatically, regardless of the preferences of either party, and is in principle accessible to both parties in subsequent proceedings.

Research on the behavioral effects of body cameras is mixed. Some studies find significant reductions in use-of-force incidents and complaints against officers when cameras are active. Others find smaller effects, concentrated in particular departments or circumstances. The methodological challenges are substantial: behavioral effects may reflect displacement (problematic behavior moving to camera-off situations rather than being eliminated), Hawthorne effects (people behaving differently when they know they are being observed, which returns to baseline when observation ends), and selection (departments that adopt cameras may already have different cultures than those that do not).

What body cameras do more reliably than changing behavior is change the evidence record — the base of documented fact available for accountability proceedings. This is the revision function: not necessarily preventing misconduct in the moment, but creating a more accurate record from which accountability can operate.

Open-source intelligence. The aggregation of publicly available data — satellite imagery, social media posts, public records, commercial data, leaked documents — into actionable intelligence has become accessible to civil society organizations, journalists, and researchers without the institutional infrastructure previously required for such analysis. Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence collective, has used this methodology to document the identity of Russian military intelligence officers involved in the Salisbury poisonings, to track Russian military deployments in Ukraine, and to reconstruct the flight paths of aircraft involved in political violence. These investigations used data that was technically public — social media posts, commercial flight tracking, publicly available satellite imagery — but required significant analytical synthesis to make meaningful.

This capability represents a genuine inversion of the traditional intelligence asymmetry. States have always collected intelligence on civil society. Civil society is now collecting intelligence on states, with increasing sophistication and analytical power. The constraint on this capability is not technical but political: civil society investigators do not have the legal authorities to compel data production that intelligence agencies have, and they can be silenced, threatened, or sued by the actors they investigate in ways that states cannot easily be.

Satellite imagery democratization. Commercial satellite imagery has become sufficiently cheap and high-resolution that organizations outside the intelligence community can access and analyze it. In the years following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, commercial satellite companies provided imagery that documented Russian military movements, documented apparent war crime sites, and allowed independent verification of claims made by both parties. The satellite capacity that was once the exclusive province of a handful of national intelligence agencies is now accessible, at lower resolution but still meaningful quality, to news organizations, research institutions, and civil society groups.

The effect on state behavior is still being worked out. The theory is that states will behave more carefully in contexts where their actions are likely to be documented by commercial satellite imagery — the equivalent of the police officer's behavioral change in camera-on situations. The empirical record suggests partial support for this theory: atrocities do not appear to have been prevented by satellite documentation, but the availability of independent imagery has materially complicated the ability of states to deny actions that the imagery documents.

Two theoretical frameworks have emerged to capture the directional change in surveillance that Foucault's model did not anticipate.

Synopticism (Thomas Mathiesen, 1997) describes the inverse of the Panopticon: the many watching the few. Mathiesen's specific context was mass media — the way broadcast television enabled enormous numbers of people to watch a small number of public figures simultaneously. The political class, the celebrity, the corporate executive become objects of mass observation in a way that was not possible before broadcast media. The synopticon and the panopticon operate simultaneously in modern societies: the state watches the population (panopticon) while the population watches the state through media and accountability institutions (synopticon).

Sousveillance (Steve Mann, 2002) is the practice of watching from below — citizens recording law enforcement, employees documenting workplace conditions, activists recording corporate or government activities. Mann, who spent decades wearing camera equipment as an artistic and political practice, distinguished sousveillance from surveillance on grounds of direction and power relationship: surveillance is watching from above, institutionally enabled and legally protected; sousveillance is watching from below, individually practiced and often legally contested. Mann argued that sousveillance is the appropriate democratic counterbalance to surveillance: if institutions can monitor citizens for accountability purposes, citizens should be able to monitor institutions for the same purposes.

The legal status of sousveillance remains contested across jurisdictions. Recording police officers in public is legally protected in the United States under the First Amendment, but this protection was not clearly established until a series of federal circuit court decisions in the 2010s, and it remains subject to practical interference: officers who confiscate phones or charge individuals with interference for recording them are less constrained by law than by the risk that such interference will itself be recorded. In some jurisdictions — particularly authoritarian contexts — recording public officials is criminalized or practically suppressed.

The behavioral effects of surveillance that operates in both directions depend critically on whether the surveillance is transparent — known and acknowledged — or covert.

Covert surveillance does not produce accountability; it produces intelligence. An organization that conducts covert surveillance on its critics knows more about them but is not accountable for what it knows or does with that knowledge. The critic cannot use the fact of surveillance for any protective purpose because they do not know it is occurring. The intelligence asymmetry is exploitable in proportion to the information gap.

Transparent surveillance — surveillance that is known to occur, that operates under publicly available rules, and whose results are accessible to the party being surveilled — has a different character. A police body camera system with clear policies about when cameras must be active, how footage is stored, and how it can be accessed by subjects of encounters is genuinely different from covert police monitoring. The transparency creates the conditions for accountability: the party being surveilled knows the record exists, knows how to access it, and can use it in proceedings.

The design of mutual transparent surveillance systems is therefore the critical variable — not whether surveillance is mutual (technology is making this inevitable), but whether it operates under conditions of transparency that enable the accountability effects to flow in both directions.

The failure mode is mutual surveillance that is asymmetrically transparent: states and corporations conduct extensive surveillance under classified or proprietary rules while citizen surveillance of states and corporations is constrained by law or practical barriers. This is the current reality in most jurisdictions: the conditions under which governments conduct mass surveillance are classified; the conditions under which corporations collect and use personal data are disclosed in privacy policies that are practically unreadable and legally unforceable; while citizen recording of public officials is protected in principle but contested in practice.

The most important caveat to any analysis of mutual surveillance is that mutuality does not eliminate power asymmetry. The fact that surveillance now flows in multiple directions does not mean it flows with equal power in all directions.

States still have vastly more surveillance infrastructure than civil society: legal authorities to compel data production, technical infrastructure built over decades of investment, human intelligence networks, classification systems that protect their surveillance activities from reciprocal exposure. The NSA's metadata collection program, revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013, demonstrated that state surveillance had achieved a scale and sophistication that no civil society organization could begin to match. The citizen's smartphone camera is genuinely useful in documenting specific encounters; it is not a meaningful counterbalance to the capacity to collect and analyze the metadata of every phone call made in the United States.

Corporations are similarly asymmetrically positioned. The data aggregation problem — the ability to combine location data, purchase history, browsing behavior, social connections, and inferred characteristics into intimate individual profiles — requires computational infrastructure and data access that is unavailable to individuals. The theoretical right to access your personal data under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation or California's CCPA is real but practically constrained: the data that corporations hold is technically accessible on request but practically difficult to interpret or act on.

This asymmetry means that the revision of the Panopticon model — from one-directional to mutual — is real but incomplete. The direction of surveillance has become more complex; the power differential between watcher and watched has not been eliminated. The accountability effects of mutual surveillance are real but constrained by the residual asymmetry.

The civilizational design challenge is to build surveillance governance frameworks that amplify the accountability benefits of mutual transparent surveillance while limiting the oppression risks of asymmetric covert surveillance.

This requires several things that are technically feasible but politically contested.

Surveillance transparency requirements. Legal frameworks that require disclosure of the existence and scope of surveillance programs — not just in classified assessments available to legislative oversight committees but in forms accessible to the public — are necessary for transparent mutual surveillance to function. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the United States is a formal oversight mechanism for surveillance authorities, but its proceedings are classified and its decisions are not publicly available. Meaningful transparency would require either declassification of significant legal interpretations or the creation of public advocates with access to classified information who can represent public interests in court proceedings.

Data symmetry for individuals. Privacy frameworks that give individuals genuine, operational access to data held about them — not just legal rights that are practically unenforceable — would create the infrastructure for citizen surveillance of institutional data practices. This requires technical standards for data portability, not just legal rights to access.

Protected recording rights. Legal protection for citizen recording of public officials and public activities, enforced against practical interference as well as legal prohibition, is the minimum necessary for sousveillance to function as a counterbalance to institutional surveillance. The current US legal framework protects this right in principle; its practical protection requires consistent enforcement against interference that is itself frequently not recorded.

Accountability institutions for surveillance oversight. Independent bodies with access to both classified surveillance activities and civil society complaints — with genuine authority to investigate, sanction, and require revision — are necessary for the accountability effects of mutual surveillance to be institutionalized rather than ad hoc. The current configuration of oversight institutions in most democracies is inadequate to this task.

None of these governance requirements is novel; all have been proposed and partially implemented in various jurisdictions. Their consistent underdevelopment reflects the political economy of surveillance: those with the most surveillance capability have the most to lose from genuine transparency, and they have the political influence to resist it.

The Panopticon, in its Foucauldian form, described a world in which power watched from above, invisibly, and subjects regulated themselves through internalized uncertainty about the timing of observation. That world has not disappeared. It has become more complex.

The watched now sometimes watch back. The watcher is sometimes visible. The record of encounters is sometimes mutual. The asymmetry of surveillance remains, but it is contested rather than structurally secure.

The revision this imposes on civilizational power is real: states and corporations that operate knowing their actions may be documented — by smartphones, by commercial satellites, by open-source investigators, by body cameras — cannot operate with the impunity available when the surveillance arrow ran only downward. The impunity has not been eliminated; it has been reduced and conditionalized.

The behavioral effect of the new architecture is not the simple inverse of the Panopticon effect. It is not that the watched now regulate the watchers through the internalized gaze — the power differential is too great for that. It is rather that accountability has become more available as a practical possibility than it was in the era of purely one-directional surveillance. When that accountability is taken up — when a recording produces a prosecution, when an open-source investigation produces a diplomatic consequence, when a body camera produces a conviction — the Panopticon effect reverses: it is now the institutional actor who revises behavior in light of potential documentation.

Law 5 in this context is about the design of civilizational infrastructure for mutual accountability. The technology has made mutual surveillance possible. Governance frameworks determine whether it becomes mutual accountability. That determination is not made by technology; it is made by the institutional choices, legal frameworks, and political will of the civilization that deploys the technology.

The Panopticon is being revised. Whether the revision serves the many or the few depends on who designs the new architecture.