Punishment has always been a method of showing the domination of the powerful over the weak. But the punishment is not complete without supervision. Then a question automatically arises: what is surveillance? Surveillance is like regulation, a constant power that operates over every person, watching their every move and trying to assert power over people. But Foucault will take a different approach, his idea of ​​surveillance takes perfect shape when he connects his idea with Jeremy Bentham's hypothetical prison: the Panopticon. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay But Foucault notes a very interesting shift in perception in the 20th century prison system, aside from the idea of ​​the Panopticon. “What is punished is no longer the crime but the criminal”, in other words, unlike pre-modern times, Foucault observes a new practice of direct categorization as a criminal, instead of investigating the crime, the person is classified according to the severity of the crime and is branded as criminal, Foucault defines it as a "normalizing judgement". And since the person is already considered a criminal, he or she will be under “pervasive control” by the authorities. But along with the concept of surveillance comes the Panopticon. Panopticon is an architectural concept created by Bentham, who proposed the idea of ​​a circular prison with a guard tower in the center of the prison. Now the problem is that the guards inside the tower could look into every single cell but the prisoners will not be able to see the guards. Now, this method is undoubtedly very economical but it is also very sadistic, in the sense that prisoners will have a constant anxiety of being observed, which according to Bentham will lead to self-surveillance. That is, since the prisoners will suffer a constant fear of being observed, they will take care of themselves as they will constantly feel the existence of the higher power, observing their actions. Foucault found it a perfect example of “pervasive control” and a perfect condition for the structural and psychological violence that will force the prisoner to undergo an “inner change.” In this twenty-first century, we see the addition of technology in this play. . As more and more information becomes free to the public via the Internet, much of the visibility of surveillance is also lost in this virtual world, consisting only of numbers and algorithms. The Panopticon is no longer confined to a circular prison and a watchtower in the centre, in fact it is now everywhere, on street lamps, on walls, on your laptops and even on your phone, acting as a surveillance device. The problem faced in this recent scenario is the inadequate emphasis on technology as the primary factor in this sinister plot of oppression. Foucault emphasizes more on the concept of oppression rather than taking into consideration the technology used at the time. “There is no doubt that digital surveillance has, at times, the same normalizing effects. But there can be no doubt that, in some ways, digital surveillance acts very differently to Foucault's original thinking on this topic." The problem is that surveillance is no longer confined to prison systems. In this recent scenario, it has spread across the world like an epidemic. Another problem with Foucault's understanding of the Panopticon style of surveillance is that, in a Panopticon, prisoners are at least aware that they are being watched, but in the modern Panopticon, people don't even have the slightest idea of ​​whether or not they are being watched. and therefore there is no notion of self-surveillance or in other words:“In Foucault's world, the visible presence of technology, and therefore, the constant awareness of potential surveillance, led to an internalization of perceived judgment and normalization of behavior. Prisoners and citizens became more docile because they never knew they were being watched. Digital spaces, on the other hand, actually encourage users to break away from normality, fixed identities and the ordinary. Meanwhile, this seemingly safe space for anonymous exploration and play is constantly surveilled. Our searches, texts, emails and web histories are stored on proprietary servers for long and potentially incriminating periods of time. Without the constant presence of surveillance technology, digital surveillance can function more like a trap; enticing subjects to behave freely and then capturing this free play, sometimes imaginative play, for inspection by others. This notion is actually true because the head of the NSA (National Security Agency), during a discussion, confirmed that they do not spy on “normal” people but observe “normal” people with “abnormal” behavior. Which leads to another important development in the world of criminology is the concept of “potential suspect”. It bears a resemblance to normalizing judgment, except that the targeted person does not necessarily even have to commit a crime of any kind, the person could be a distant relative who has no immediate connection to the real criminal but would still be a “potential suspect”, and the person will not even realize the conviction. In other words, the person is not judged or classified based on the parameters of the crime but is judged based on the parameters of probability of him/her committing a crime, which is actually calculated by the NSA's artificial intelligence, which is actually a step further , the concept of "normalizing judgment", if we have to see the worst, the intelligence services no longer track the person, but track his cell phone or his SIM card, terms that dehumanize the entire scenario, in other words: “The Foucault's concept of surveillance fails to directly engage contemporary developments in surveillance technology." Twentieth-century surveillance was indeed far-reaching, but twenty-first-century surveillance is not only far-reaching but, thanks to decades of data collection, is also deeply rooted, which forces us to see Foucault's concept underneath a different light. surveillance was introduced soon after the 9/11 attacks, as a security measure. Rather create a database of every person on Earth, living or dead. But to collect information NSA, CIA and FBI needed a warrant from the legal courts and therefore there was the emergence of the FISA court which is a foreign intelligence surveillance court, the problem is that it is not a court public so there was no way that anyone other than the president, intelligence officials and Congress, knew about this program, their argument was that they didn't want to alert their suspicions, but the question is: what if every person on earth was suspected? So how ethical is it? To understand how deep-rooted the problem of surveillance is, it is necessary to look at the details of surveillance methodologies and also understand how far it is from Foucualt's original ideas and to what extent are people's freedom and sovereignty being violated? After Snowden's exposé, the Guardian Newspapers came out with the Verizon news for the first time. Verizon is software that gives the NSA and GCHQ (British intelligence) full access to personal calls, messages, numbers and even detailsof the conversation, to the location, to the IP address of a person. Then there's PRISM. PRISM is a database that collects data from uplink transfers i.e. emails, social media sites, and even manufacturing companies like Apple. Privacy is just a mistake because most phone companies have installed a built-in "backdoor" that will allow intelligence services to collect unlimited amounts of data even without the user's knowledge. Then there is "XKEYSCORE" which is a kind of search engine. Now, Google is a search engine too, but it has limitations, 'XKEYSCORE' on the other hand gives you absolute control, where the person can examine anything like phone records, personal emails, Facebook etc. The effect of this is that the intelligence services and make 'hops', according to the Guardian, if the NSA is tracking a shady Iranian banker who has links to ISIS, they will look at his family and connections and again, they will look at others connections and within a very short time of collecting one person's data, they would be able to collect the data of 2.2 million people. As for India, we have seen the introduction of Aadhaar, which has allowed the government to increase its surveillance power using biometric scans, in other words, not only does the government now have our life details but also our biometric fingerprints, all stored in a single database. Another big problem is the sale of data to private companies, right now Aadhaar has become an important document for everything from SIM card to airline tickets, which is actually commoditizing our personal information and all that information and therefore the person can be tracked based on daily life activities and purchases. Aadhaar is considered a mistake as India does not have strong privacy or data protection laws, making surveillance easier. The Internet was created for anonymity and offers the user a certain level of anonymity with a sense of equality where one may not care about their race, skin color and religion. But with the updating of technology and the introduction of social media, the person started to become less and less anonymous as “family members, neighbors, colleagues and other offline acquaintances also communicate with each other on the Internet”. “Panopticism has found fertile ground on the Internet and in social media studies,” except that it is panopticism in reverse. In the original concept the guards in the tower could look into the cells for surveillance, but now "the monitored person is alone in the middle of the 'prison' and the monitors are all around him." in other words: “the controlled person – the user – is alone in the middle of the prison – the sociotechnical system – and the controllers – the other users – are all around him”. There is no doubt that governments engage in illegal surveillance, but in this cyberspace we often give out our personal information on social media sites, perhaps while creating a Facebook account. Preliminarily name, age, gender, phone number and email ID of a person. Then, after creating the account, Facebook's AI tells us to "personalize" our account and then we post pictures, qualifications, religious opinions, political opinions, our likes and dislikes, all on a social networking site . We barely understand that we have simply fallen for voluntary servitude, in other words we are just as guilty of losing our privacy as the companies that take advantage of our ignorance. Indeed, “in this sense, data centralization, materialized by the construction of huge data centers, corresponds to concrete technical decisions, public policies and commercial regulations. Not just most.