Panopticism

This week I've been amazed at the way my two main courses have fit together. In the Theory class, we've been reading Foucault (drat him), specifically selections from his book Discipline and Punish which is all about prisons and types of power and the changes in the exercise of power over time.

The Policy class readings are about Trusted Computing. Trusted Computing is the overarching name applied to chips attached to motherboards in new computers that allow for increased "authentication" of software and content on any given machine. So when you boot up your machine on any given morning, the chip (called the "Fritz Chip" after Sen. Fritz Hollings who worked doggedly to get legislation passed to make these chips a legal requirement in new computers) would check with Microsoft and other software vendors to make sure you weren't running any pirated versions of their software. If you were, or if for some reason the authentication failed, the chip would disable the software, and more menacingly, all of the documents created with it. The chip can also check watermarks and other Digital Rights Management (DRM) marks to make sure that you've got the right to use the content you've got on your machine. The chip would allow content providers to specify how content could be used (You can watch that movie three times, and once more on your birthday, but after that it won't work.), or how email could be forwarded/stored/handled. It would also allow these companies to delete or disable content on your machine, particularly if it didn't have a watermark. Even better, they could delete all content (say a bunch of unwatermarked MP3's gleaned from a p2p network) that had been gathered via the same conduit.

Speculation about the future of the technology suggests that it could even delete content in response to a court order. Which would be lovely if they were deleting child porn image files, but where does the slope slide to? What about unpopular political speech?

The intersection of these two comes over the idea of the Panopticon, originally proposed by Jeremey Benthem as a new design for a prison, in which the subject is always surveilled by an unseen watcher/warden. The subject never knows exactly if and when they are being surveilled, but knows that they are being watched, and eventually internalizes that knowledge so that they reproduce in themselves the behaviors desired by the watcher, regardless of whether the watcher is watching or not. Foucault puts it better when he writes:

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself." (Discipline and Punish, pg. 202) A prisoner in Bentham's system becomes a "principle of his own subjection." (ibid)

Trusted computing (which is really only "trusted" for the companies in control of it, rather than the end-user) is about the transfer of the power of surveillance to major companies like Intel and Microsoft, who would manufacture and then make software and operating systems that would use and control these Fritz chips. If these become required in desktop computers (and apparently the chip's communications with the "motherships" will be encrypted, making a hacker's job quite difficult), all they'd really need to do is slap a sticker on the outside of each box, ala "Intel Inside!" saying "Trusted Computing!" and we'd all be constantly reminded of our state of surveillence, whether or not the chip was actually watching at that particular moment.

And from what I can tell, outcry amongst privacy and other advocates has slowed, but not halted the rollout of these chips. I'm guessing this is mostly because the content industry is slavering over the thought of the content protections this chip could provide. The goverment and other corps stand to benefit from the ability to secure documents created in this computing environment, by being able to specify classified status to all documents created by military personnel over a certain rank, reducing spying, or by certain departments in a company, to reduce corporate espionage. But they'll also reducing whistleblowing and the ability of investigators and journalists to monitor the actions of companies, or the Mafia.

So it looks like a Panoptic computing world is at our doorstep, good and bad, whether we like it or not.