Martin Elson
The Limits of Democracy ended on a condition. Elections let people call their rulers back, but only for what voters can see. Sen’s famines were prevented by a free press as much as by the vote, and the coups Levin left out of his count were never on any ballot. Recall needs sight. So does consent: no one can agree to terms that are hidden from them. So does exit: a person can’t leave what she doesn’t know is being done to her.
This site’s first purpose, as the Introduction says, is to reverse the panopticon: watch power the way it watches us, and block the chains of authority and vanguardism before they close. Jeremy Bentham published his design for the panopticon in 1791. It was a prison built in a ring, the cells around the rim and an inspector’s lodge at the center, lit so the inspector could see every prisoner and no prisoner could see the inspector. Since the prisoners never know when they are being watched, they behave as if they always are. Michel Foucault took it in Discipline and Punish (1975) as the diagram of modern power: schools, barracks, hospitals and offices that see without being seen. Emma Goldman had named the stakes long before: “The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.” Reversing it doesn’t mean putting everyone in the lodge. It means turning the glass around. When this site first said so, in 2014, it drew the idea as a symbol: the tower as a triangle with an eye at its peak, ringed by a circle of outsiders whose arrows strike each side of it, questioning the rules, the policy, the economy, the media and the history that keep the watchers in place. Counter-counterintelligence, it called that: answering the eye’s information with information and networks of our own.
This chapter argues that being watchable is not a fourth test beside the three from Consent of the Governed. It is the condition of all three. Did the people it acts on agree? They can’t agree to what is hidden. Can they call it back? Only what they can see. Can they leave? Only what they know is happening. The rule that follows is lopsided on purpose: privacy for persons, publicity for power. The more power an arrangement holds over people who can’t leave it, the more of what it does must be open to them. A monopoly on force holds the most power there is, and it also claims the widest right to secrecy. That is backward.
The case for secrecy
The case for official secrecy is older than the state’s critics and better than its abuses. Some secrets save lives. A convoy’s sailing date in wartime, the name of an informant inside a cartel, the design of a bomb: publish any of them and people die who had no part in the decision. Sissela Bok, in Secrets (1982), defended a zone of concealment for persons and institutions alike. Without some control over what others know, she argued, no one can plan, bargain or protect what they care about, and an institution is people acting together who need some of the same room.
Deliberation needs it too. The Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 behind closed doors, with sentries at the entrance and the members pledged not to repeat what was said, and Madison’s notes weren’t published until 1840, after every delegate had died. Madison is reported to have said later that no constitution would ever have been adopted had the debates been public. Officials who know every word will be printed speak for the record, not to the problem. Lawrence Lessig, no friend of hidden power, warned in “Against Transparency” (2009) that data released without context can mislead more than it informs. Put a list of donors next to a list of votes and readers will see a bribe in every coincidence.
And there is a case from privacy itself. Officials are people. A rule that everything about power must be open can reach their homes, families and medical files, and once the habit of exposure is built it rarely stops at the powerful. The best version of the case, then, is not that the ruled have no right to know. It is that knowing has costs, that some secrets protect the weak, and that someone has to decide which. The state answers that it should be the one to decide.
Where it goes wrong
The judge of its own secrets. Max Weber saw the pattern a century ago. Every bureaucracy, he wrote, tries to raise the advantage of the professionally informed by keeping what it knows and what it intends secret, and the “official secret” is its own invention. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after chairing a commission on government secrecy in 1997, concluded that secrecy is a form of regulation, rules that the regulated are not allowed to read. In the state’s case for secrecy, the party that would be embarrassed by a disclosure decides what is classified. That is Locke’s inconvenience from Who Watches the Night Watchman?, the judge in his own case, applied to knowledge. Immanuel Kant gave the test that sorts good secrets from bad in Perpetual Peace (1795): an action that affects the rights of others is wrong if it could not succeed once its aim was made public. Bok’s convoy passes. The public can agree, in the open, that sailing dates in wartime be kept from the enemy. A plan to deceive the public about the war itself fails, because it works only if the people paying for the war don’t know. Even Julian Assange, whom governments treated as the enemy of every secret, didn’t argue for none. Secrecy matters for many things, he said; the real question is who decides, and who has the duty to bring a matter to the public.
The Pentagon Papers. In 1967 Robert McNamara ordered a secret history of American decisions in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine and RAND analyst who had worked on it, read the whole study and saw that four administrations had widened a war they privately doubted could be won while telling the public otherwise. He copied some 7,000 pages, and in June 1971 the New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers began printing them. The Nixon administration won an injunction, the first time the federal government had stopped an American newspaper from publishing on grounds of national security, and the Supreme Court lifted it within weeks. Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act and faced up to 115 years. The case collapsed in 1973 when it came out that the White House “plumbers” had broken into his psychiatrist’s office looking for material to smear him, and the judge dismissed the charges for government misconduct. Erwin Griswold, the solicitor general who had argued for the injunction, wrote years later that he had never seen any trace of a threat to national security from the publication. The papers named no troop movements. What the classification protected was officials from the people they answered to. Ellsberg paid to show it, as the Introduction says. Nearly fifty years later the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers (2019), built from the government’s own interviews, showed the same pattern in a newer war: officials who said in private that the war was not being won, and said in public that it was.
The messenger and the message. In 1996 Gary Webb reported in the San Jose Mercury News that a cocaine ring selling into Los Angeles had sent money to the CIA-backed Contras. The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times spent more effort on his errors than on his story. His paper backed away from it, and he never worked at a major daily again; he died in 2004. In 1998 the CIA’s own inspector general, Frederick Hitz, reported that the agency had kept working with people it knew were alleged drug traffickers and had not promptly cut them off. The School of the Americas, the Army school at Fort Benning that trained Latin American officers, taught from manuals that advised torture, blackmail and executions. The Pentagon admitted it in 1996 after years of denial, and in 2001 the school was renamed rather than closed. In each case the hidden thing came out, eventually, through people the state treated as the problem. A system that depends on whistleblowers for its visibility has none built in.
The Trump administration in 2026 shows which way the system points. In October it announced a $25 million program, run by the Justice Department, that pays tipsters up to $30,000 for reports of fraud against federal programs. A week later the president offered $1 million to anyone whose report of voter fraud led to a conviction, without saying where the money would come from. Both pay people to report on the governed to the government. Neither protects an insider who reports on the government. That same month CNN reported a complaint by Jill Fields, a former FBI intelligence analyst, alleging that the White House had pressed the FBI to investigate anti-ICE protesters. The allegation surfaced the way the others did, from an insider willing to come forward. A state that pays for tips about the governed while it prosecutes those who expose its own conduct has the panopticon pointed the usual way.
The quiet version. John Perkins describes a kind of power that doesn’t need to hide because no one is placed to look. Loans sized to fail, forecasts inflated to justify them, contracts that send the money back to firms in the lending country: nothing in his account is classified. It happens in banks and ministries whose papers the people who repay the debts never see and never voted on. Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist of the World Bank in the late 1990s, described the same pattern from inside in Globalization and Its Discontents (2002). IMF loans came with conditions, austerity, privatization and open capital markets, set in Washington and negotiated behind closed doors, and the citizens of the borrowing countries had no part in them and often never saw them. Stiglitz faulted the secrecy as much as the policies. Being watchable is not only a matter of declassifying files. It means the people an arrangement acts on can read its terms. This is the site’s unifying thread again: public power and private privilege working the same lever, out of view.
Turnkey tyranny. In June 2013 Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, gave journalists documents showing that the agency was collecting records of nearly every phone call made in the United States. Three months earlier Senator Ron Wyden had asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, in an open hearing, whether the NSA collected any type of data at all on millions of Americans. “No, sir,” Clapper answered. “Not wittingly.” The program had been approved by a secret court under a secret reading of the law and briefed to a few members of Congress who were forbidden to discuss it. Every check existed, courts, legislature and oversight, and every check was out of sight. In 2015 a federal appeals court held that the program went beyond what the law allowed, and Congress ended the agency’s bulk collection that year. Snowden called the machinery “turnkey tyranny”: it is built, and whoever comes to power next has only to turn the key. He lives in Russia. Chelsea Manning, who gave WikiLeaks the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the diplomatic cables, served seven years before her sentence was commuted. Julian Assange, who published them, pleaded guilty in 2024 to one count under the Espionage Act and went home to Australia after five years in a British prison. The disclosures brought reforms. The people who made them were punished. Heidi Boghosian, then executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, documented the other half in Spying on Democracy (2013): government agencies and corporations watching activists, journalists and lawful dissent together, each sharing what it gathered with the other.
The automated panopticon. Bentham needed an inspector in the lodge. Software doesn’t. Flock Safety, a private company in Atlanta, runs about 120,000 license plate readers across every state but Alaska. Each logs every passing car, and police can search sightings far outside their own towns. A Washington Post investigation begun in August 2026 had, by late September, counted at least 100 police department employees charged with or accused of misusing Flock or other license plate readers, many to track former partners, and researchers at the University of Washington found local departments that had given the Border Patrol access to their networks. No federal law governs any of it. This is the panopticon with the lodge sold as a subscription: a private firm collects, the state searches, and the driver sees neither. Once people did see it, they pushed back. Dozens of cities have canceled or refused contracts, and a bipartisan bill in Congress would tie federal highway money to limits on the cameras. Visibility did what this chapter says it does. It just came from outside the system, after the fact.
The strongest case against
The strongest case against this chapter comes from the thinker it borrowed its image from. For Foucault the panopticon’s power lies in visibility itself. “Visibility is a trap,” he wrote. Being seen is what disciplines, and the prisoner who knows he may be watched watches himself. If that is right, a demand that power be watchable may only spread the gaze. Byung-Chul Han pressed the point in The Transparency Society (2012). Transparency, he argued, has become a compulsion: everything must be shown, measured and compared, and whatever can’t be shown is suspect. A person who must always account for herself is not set free because her rulers must account for themselves too. Both live in the same glass house, and the glass is the control. Lessig’s warning fits here as well. Disclosure without the power to act on it is spectacle, in Guy Debord’s sense: a show of accountability that changes nothing, watched by people who can do nothing about what they see.
The objection lands. A world in which everyone is visible to everyone is the panopticon finished, not reversed, and the cameras on every pole are already halfway there. Watching back can turn into a hobby of outrage, a feed of scandals that leaves every office where it was. PJ Rey put the doubt to WikiLeaks itself in 2011: does knowing that an institution is corrupt give anyone the power to end the corruption? After the 2008 crash much of the wrongdoing was public, and almost no one was prosecuted. And the habit of exposure that starts with officials will be turned on dissenters first, because they are the easiest to find.
David Brin gave the opposite answer in The Transparent Society (1998). Cameras will spread whatever anyone does, he argued, so the only real choice is whether the watched can watch back. Steve Mann named that sousveillance, watching from below. Brin’s reply to Han is the practical one. Secrecy will not be abolished by the weak. The strong will keep their secrets and take ours, unless the seeing runs both ways. An anonymous essay from the early 2000s, which this site has carried since 2014 without ever finding its author, gave the activist’s version. Turn the panopticon inside out, it proposed, and the institutions become the prisoners, held not by walls but by their brands. Anyone can look into their cells from outside, and each stands smiling at the front, arms open, its body blocking the corners it would rather not show. The public image is never the whole story. To see the whole cell you have to get into the tower behind it, and the essay’s ways in were the ones this chapter has traced: a leak, a hack, a records request, a worker who knows which factory made the shoes. Its point was Brin’s with a strategy attached. The gaze carries weight once it is aimed.
This site takes Han’s warning and Brin’s answer and adds the asymmetry both leave out. What has to be watchable is not persons but power: the acts of any office that can do things to people who can’t leave it. The cypherpunks put the rule in a watchword that Julian Assange and his co-authors later used as a chapter title: “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.” A private life stays private. A public act that falls on others, a search, an arrest, a war, a loan to a country, a trade rule, is public by nature, because the people it falls on are parties to it. And watching is never enough by itself. Disclosure without recall is Debord’s spectacle, and disclosure without exit is a window in a cell. That is why being watchable belongs with the three tests rather than in place of them.
Where this lands
Being watchable is the condition of the other tests. Consent needs the terms to be known. Recall needs something to see. Exit needs people to know what is being done to them. A monopoly on force fails here in its own way: it is the judge of its own secrets. Even a good state is watchable only on its terms. It decides what is classified, prosecutes those who disclose it, and keeps courts whose rulings are secret. The record above is not a list of failures in a sound system. It is the system working as built, with visibility forced in from outside by people who paid for it.
Take the monopoly away and the incentives turn around. An agency whose customers can leave, as in Who Watches the Night Watchman?, has to show them what it does, the way an insurer or an auditor must, or lose them to one that will. A federation of recallable delegates, as in The Limits of Democracy, can’t recall what it can’t see, so its mandates and votes have to be public. A cooperative’s books are open to its members because the members own them. Some secrets survive: a person’s private life, the name of someone who needs protecting, a bargaining position, a defense plan agreed to in the open. Kant’s test sorts them. A secret is fine if the people it affects could agree in public that it be kept. A secret kept from the very people it acts on, because they would object, is the mark of rule.
The same holds for money, and that is where watching power touches daily life. In 1827 Josiah Warren opened his Time Store in Cincinnati. The wholesale cost of every item was posted where customers could see it, and they paid that cost, a small charge for overhead, and the storekeeper’s time by the clock on the wall, in labor notes promising an equal time in return. Nothing was hidden, so nothing could be marked up in the dark. Cost the Limit of Price takes up the economics. The point here is that open books are a kind of watchability. Following the money is how anyone learns whether they are being charged above cost, taxed for wars they would refuse, or billed for privileges someone else enjoys. Assange made the market version of the point in 2010. A market runs on information, he argued, and leaks make it easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad one. “I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets,” he said, and he added that a free market ends in monopoly unless something keeps it free. This site’s answer to what keeps it free is the end of privilege, not a regulator, but the first step is the same either way: books anyone can read. Taking without consent is theft whether what is taken is money or knowledge. A firm that harvests where people drive, what they buy and what they read, and sells it on, takes something they never agreed to give, and a state that buys it from the firm takes it twice. Privacy is not a luxury for people with something to hide. It is the part of a life that is no one else’s to price.
Watchability is also solidarity. No one can watch all the power that bears on them alone. People watch for each other: a union opens the books to its members, a neighbor reads the zoning notice, a reporter reads the budget, a clerk speaks up. What that calls for is not a slogan or window dressing but means that ordinary people can use while getting through the week: open books where they work and shop, records they can request, delegates they can recall, and protection for whoever tells the truth.
When Malcolm X said in 1964 that freedom, justice and equality would be won by any means necessary, he was speaking from the experience of people for whom every lawful door had been shut, and the record bears him out. Most of the justice and accountability anyone has gotten from power had to be fought for. It is sad that they had to be won at all. The floor ought to be the fellow feeling people show each other every day, and most of life does run on it. Where it doesn’t, the result is Hobbes’s war of all against all, chaos for some or for all, and it comes less from human nature than from power no one can see into or leave. The humanist rule from the Introduction asks only that the means treat no one as an input and can be checked and reversed if they go wrong. Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers called that revolutionary humanism, and it is the right name for it. Watchability is one of those means, perhaps the first. People have come a long way from caves, kings and the customs that went with them. Much of what still makes life more toil than it needs to be comes from the same place, and the cheapest reform there is, is to open the books.
The Introduction names two lines and one rule under both, and its lines assume what this chapter argues for: a test settled by looking needs something to look at. That is why being watchable is not a third line but the condition beneath them. Power has to be watchable, by the people it falls on, on their terms rather than its own.
Here is how the arrangements in this chapter sort.
| Arrangement | Can the people it acts on see what it does? | Who decides what stays hidden? | Can they watch back? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monarchy or dictatorship | No | The ruler | Only at the risk of prison or worse |
| Representative democracy | In part: what is published, declassified or leaked | The executive, with secret courts and closed briefings | Through a press and whistleblowers, who are often punished |
| Private surveillance sold to the state (Flock) | No | The firm and the agencies that buy from it | Only through records requests, lawsuits and city councils |
| An association with open books (a cooperative, a union) | Yes, as members | The members, by rules they made | Yes |
| A federation of mandated, recallable delegates | Yes; mandates and votes are public | The associations that send the delegates | Yes |
| Competing agencies whose customers can leave | As far as customers demand it | Each agency, checked by customers who can switch | Yes, by switching |
Democracy watches power from outside, through leaks. Association builds the window into the wall.
That closes Part IV. The state has now met the three tests and the condition beneath them, and it fails in a pattern: it can’t be left, it can be called back only for what it shows, and it decides what it shows. Part V asks what holds people to each other without it, starting with what a right is. That is the question of What Rights Are.
Sources
- Introduction: Am I Wrong? (libertarianous.com). Reverse the panopticon; the open strain “not knowing.”
- The Pentagon Papers: Secrets, Lies and Leaks (libertarianous.com, 2020). Links to the Reveal episode with Ellsberg and Robert Rosenthal, the Afghanistan Papers and Snowden’s Permanent Record interview. This chapter’s own working notes. Reveal episode
- Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House (1791). Public domain.
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975; English, Pantheon, 1977), part 3, ch. 3. Panopticism.
- Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Pantheon, 1982).
- Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Yale University Press, 1911). The secrecy rule; Madison’s reported remark.
- Lawrence Lessig, “Against Transparency” (The New Republic, 9 October 2009).
- Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922), ch. 11, “Bureaucracy.” The official secret.
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (Yale University Press, 1998). Secrecy as regulation.
- Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795), appendix 2. The formula of publicity. Public domain.
- Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Viking, 2002).
- New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
- Erwin N. Griswold, “Secrets Not Worth Keeping: The Courts and Classified Information” (Washington Post, 15 February 1989).
- Craig Whitlock, “The Afghanistan Papers” (Washington Post, December 2019), and The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Simon & Schuster, 2021). original
- Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (Seven Stories Press, 1998). Began as his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series.
- CIA Office of Inspector General (Frederick P. Hitz), Allegations of Connections Between CIA and the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States, vol. 2 (1998).
- Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2004). The 1996 manuals.
- Darlene Superville, “Trump and Vance announce a $25M whistleblower program for alleged fraud” (Associated Press, 20 October 2026). The Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. report
- “Trump offers $1 million reward for voter fraud tips that lead to convictions” (NBC News, 26 October 2026), and “Trump Offers $1 Million for Tipoffs That Lead to Voter Fraud Convictions” (Reuters, 26 October 2026). NBC · Reuters
- “Whistleblower says Trump demanded FBI probe into protesters over a TikTok he saw” (CNN, 6 October 2026). Jill Fields’s complaint. original
- John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2004). Debt and contracts as tools of empire.
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (W. W. Norton, 2002). IMF conditions and the secrecy around them, from inside the World Bank.
- Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Metropolitan, 2014), and Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (Metropolitan, 2019).
- ACLU v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2d Cir. 2015). Bulk collection beyond what the law allowed; the USA Freedom Act (2015) followed.
- Washington Post investigation of license plate reader misuse (August 2026); University of Washington analysis of Border Patrol access to local networks (2025); Reuters count of Flock readers (2026). As reported in “Bipartisan Bill Would Force States to Restrict Flock Cameras or Risk Federal Highway Funds” (Law Commentary, 16 September 2026). report
- “Prosecutors charge 5 Indianapolis police officers accused of misusing access to Flock license plate reader cameras” (Washington Post, 23 September 2026). The count of at least 100. reprint
- Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (2012; English, Stanford University Press, 2015).
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
- David Brin, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?(Addison-Wesley, 1998).
- Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance” (Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3, 2003).
- Julian Assange, with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (OR Books, 2012). The cypherpunk watchword.
- Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1846). The Cincinnati Time Store (1827–1830); cost the limit of price. Public domain.
- Malcolm X, speech at the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (New York, 28 June 1964). “By any means necessary.”
- Spying on Democracy and Reversing the Panopticon (reallibertarianism.com, 16 March 2014). The panopticon reversal symbol; counter-counterintelligence. This chapter’s own earlier version; private copy at /stateless-pages/spying-on-democracy-and-reversing-the-panopticon/.
- Anonymous, “The Inverted Panopticon: Reclaiming Surveillance” (online essay, c. 2003; author not found). Institutions as prisoners of their brands; the activist in the tower. Quoted at length in the 2014 page.
- Heidi Boghosian, Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance(City Lights, 2013).
- Emma Goldman, “The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.” Widely attributed; source to confirm.
- PJ Rey, “Julian Assange: Cyber-Libertarian or Cyber-Anarchist?” (Cyborgology, The Society Pages, 8 November 2011). Assange as anti-institutional; the doubt that knowing is enough. Reposted on reallibertarianism.com (2016); copy here at /stateless-pages/julian-assange-cyber-libertarian-or-cyber-anarchist/ (link it once the copy is public).
- Andy Greenberg, “An Interview With WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange” (Forbes, November 2010). Markets, monopoly and leaks.