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The Panopticon was an ingenious 18-century prison design in which, as the name implies, prison management could keep an eye on every square inch of the facilities, without the prisoners knowing if they’re actually being watched at any given time.

Does that sound like the world we’re living in now — except that most of us haven’t been convicted of anything, and aren’t supposed to be treated like prisoners?

The Panopticon photo pool on Flickr is a collection of citizen photographs of the omnipresent security cameras, those instruments of our modern Panopticonic society, where the government wants to keep track of all of our activities, but God forbid it we should want to take a picture of a building or a public statue. (See my previous post, “The End of Photography?”.)

This Flickr pool, then, is the public’s chance to document some of those eyes that are pointed our way.

Other Flickr groups with similar ideas are the 1984 and Big Brother is Watching You pools.

So check them out, and by all means participate.

I’ve already got my eye on a couple of cams that I’ll personally put into the scrapbook.

(Link via Boing Boing.)

“Willie Nelson takes Reggae turn, mon.” And Walmart pressures his record company to take the cannabis leaves off the album cover.

I just got a copy of the album at a really fair price, so I’ll let you know how it sounds.

In other psychoactive news:

Company pulls pot-flavored suckers off the market.

(Via Look at This.)

“Hemp dog treat high in nutrition.” Get it? It’s high in nutrition — get it??

Teens more likely to try marijuana in the summer.

Idle hands, meet devil’s workshop.

North Dakotans back hemp as industrial crop for state.

And what post of mine would be complete with the Obligatory Iceland Reference?: A Stoner’s Guide to Reykjavik.

Our Dutch friend The Presurfer has posted an excellent tribute to our Independence Day: a wide array of links, from fireworks safety tips, to a gallery of 4th of July postcards, and holiday recipes.

Thanks for thinking of us, Gerard!

As for the state of the nation on this day, it’s been better. I, for one, miss Ronald Reagan.

Heck, I’m starting to miss Nixon.

Take just our Judicial Branch (please!) for example: In just the past month, they had ruled that outmoded prejudices are more important that pain relief for the terminally ill, that the greed of the entertainment industries should suck the life out of America’s technological innovations, and that developers’ rights to build yet another tacky strip mall outweighs your right to keep your home.

There are occasional glimmers of hope, of course. Freestar Media is forcing Justice Souter to put his home where his mouth is: They’ve filed an application to build a hotel, to be humorously called the Hotel Lost Liberty, on the judge’s property.

After all, Souter says it’s okay for the local government to sieze your property for development, so he should be okay with this, right?

The CEO of Freestar reports that venture capital offers have been flooding in, and the conservative group RightMarch.com has started a petition to support this application in Souter’s hometown.

If this plan proves successful, there could be a chain of Lost Liberty Hotels, with one flattening the home of each of the four other Justices that voted for the measure.

Which would be really, really cool.

And would make this country’s outlook not so bad after all.

Digital photography is everywhere these days, with new models coming out all the time, and camera-phones becoming as common as regular cell phones.

At the same time, the government is making it harder and harder to take photos legally. The Christian Science Monitor reports that, four years after the Trade Center bombings, terrorism is being used as an excuse to ban photography from more and more public places — even when the connection with terrorist activities is non-existent:

[The vice president of the National Press Photographers Association] offers the example of a small-town photojournalist in Victoria, Texas, who was taking shots of potholes for a newspaper story last year when a police officer drove by several times. Finally, the officer stopped and questioned him and, even after running an ID check, bluntly declared the photographer’s actions suspicious and intimated he’d be keeping an eye on him, the photographer recalls.

And even when legislatures can’t pass laws to prohibit taking pictures, the Patriot Act has a wide enough definition of “suspicious activity” to allow law enforcement officials to harrass just about anyone with a camera.

Is that what this is coming to? Are we so terror-skittish that we’re willing to give up our rights to take vacation photos?

Because I’ve got news for you: That wouldn’t stop terrorists. They could take pictures of anything if they wanted to, and they could also find a way to blow up anything without scouting shots.

The government knows this perfectly well; they just want to take one more form of power out of our hands.

Add to this the recent flap in Chicago about the banning of photographs of a “copyrighted work” in a public park, and the recent copyrighting of the lights on the Eiffel Tower (so that taking a picture of it at night without a permit is illegal!), and you can start to see where we’re headed.

Cameras might not become illegal, you just won’t be able to use them.

And this is especially scary because you know that the bastards will have cameras on YOU.

And I’m not saying this as a rant against Republicans, even though they’re the ones that seem to be pushing the laws. The Clintons, for all their rhetoric, have never been champions of your privacy, and John Kerry’s stump speeches were about everything but your eroding freedoms. If they’re in government as a career, in any country in the world, they want to keep their power, and taking yours is their surest way of cementing their job security.

You just watch.