The God's Eye View

The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.

— Michel Foucault

Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era… governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of every one of us.

— Julian Assange

Comrades, I must tell you again: we must collect everything! Nothing can be missed!

— Erich Mielke, leader of East Germany’s Stasi