The idea behind Bentham's model prison, the panopticon was that every action of every prisoner could be constantly surveilled equally well from a central tower.  Moreover, no prisoner would ever know when s/he was being watched.

Bentham's Panopticon

The danger of the computer age is that it makes it much easier for anyone with sufficient resources to subject anyone who uses computers (directly or indirectly) to this kind of surveillance.  This kind of external surveillance was one of the main topics of the previous article.

As we observed in our last class, there is a tension regarding this kind of surveillance within the Hacker Ethic.

• On one hand, the hacker insistence upon the ubiquity of computers and the uninhibited flow of information encourages (however inadvertantly) this kind of external surveillance.
• On the other, hackers tend to stand up for preservation of privacy because of its threats to individual liberty.