The Prisoner beckons ...

Photograph: Getty Images

When thinking about ICE, one senses brown shirts as the caliber of people being hired is marginal at best. When this entity is connected to the building of a voter database funded by the government amounts to building a panopticon of biblical proportions.

ICE Plans to Pay $5 Million to Create National Voting Database

As part of a broader DHS surge to investigate alleged voter fraud, ICE has announced it plans to pay up to $5 million to create what amounts to a federal voter database.

In a bid to tackle alleged voter fraud, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters.

ICE first detailed what the contract would entail in a document published last week. “The purpose of this acquisition is for the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities,” the document reads.

In the document, ICE says that the agency will initially provide a list of specific states it wants to acquire public voter registration files from, though the successful contractor will need to have the capability to obtain data from all 50 states. ICE is also seeking voting history data “for each federal election specified by the government, including general, primary, runoff, and special federal elections.” ICE is seeking publicly available information from each state, which each have their own rules around how it is obtained. This would include voter registration, and in many cases, voting history. Either could potentially include party affiliation—a move that experts believe will violate a right to privacy for US voters.

Back in 2010, yours truly talked about surveillance in Panopticon. & yes, The Prisoner beckons.

This plan of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison was drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791.

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation.