Commission for the Panopticon

Panopticon Department
Official March: The Secret Deployment
Active:	1631 AN - present
Allegiance:	Benacian Union
Personnel:	classified
Type:	Union law enforcement and intelligence services
Nickname:	"The Watchful Eye"
Current Commissioner:	Brugen Aldef
Conflicts & Deployments	River War Angularis Sxiro-Jingdaoese Confrontation The Year of the Four Kaisers Auspicious Occasion Kalirion Fracture

The Commission for the Panopticon (also referd to as the Panopticon Department or simply the Panopticon) is the intelligence service of the Benacian Union. It reports directly to the Commissioner of the Panopticon. The name of "Panopticon" derives from the principles explored by Babkhan penal reformers whereby a small group of prison guards would be able to watch all prisoners in the circular prison.

Structure

The Commission for the Panopticon is overseen by the Main Office, which has the responsibility for the coordination of all departments of the security apparatus within the Department. The Main Office, chaired by the Commissioner, is authorised to undertake whatever actions deemed appropriate for the security of the Union-State and shall be granted immunity from prosecution for any actions undertaken in accordance with their role, subject to the discretion of the High Presidium of the Benacian Union. Under the Main Office are five lower offices, each with their own Director.

• i. Office A: Internal Security
• ii. Office B: Criminal Activities
• iii. Office C: Counter Intelligence
• iv. Office D: Identity, Moral Rearmament & Enlightenment
• v. Office E: Mass-Observation (added 1709 AN)

Aside from these standing offices, the Commissioner's Panopticon Department (Main Office) may raise any ad hoc units and formations as Legatine Colleges. The reforms of 1711 consolidated these into two new investigative bodies within the Corps of the Gentlemen-at-Cudgels (CGC), the Legatine College for Domestic Investigation and the Legatine College for the Inspection of Guilds.

The "Panopticon System"

Elwynnese information poster celebrating the introduction of the first Panopticon system on the Horus Blimp.

An advertisement in the first 1712 issue of "Gentlemen Weekly" for the new "Panopticon Small-Systems Technology" touting new miniaturized blimp-drones.

Originating from Babkhano-Elwynnese surveillance technology employed by their department of the CGC, the Panopticon System (PS) was conceived as a hybrid-network designed to capture and process information in a manner that greatly enhances the battlefield commander's situational awareness, removes ambiguity - the notorious fog of war - and reduces the time taken for each step in the decision making cycle.

In it's modern form, the PS is integrated into nearly every major city in the Benacian Union and across the majority of its coast. Cooperation between the Commission and the Honorable Company served to vastly expand PS coverage beginning in 1709 during the administration Brugen Aldef as both de facto Commissioner and Benacian Director of the two agencies, respectively.

The "Digital Yoke"

After the Second Elwynnese Civil War, and the great displacement that occurred in its aftermath, it was considered necessary to encode the biometric data of all subjects, along with any stateless or displaced persons found within the realm, so as to avoid a repetition of the catastrophic data loss that occurred in the wake of the Scouring. All would receive the digital yoke, a data chip and processing unit embedded into the spinal column at the neck and fused into the central nervous system, connecting the digital yoke to the cerebellum of the recorded person. All homes and residential apartments would thereafter, in addition to their BDN terminal and panopticon view screen, receive a remote syncing station, to which the key metadata related to the recorded person's daytime activities would be uploaded. This data would then be interrogated remotely during the night-flights of the Panopticon Department's Reaper Drones and transferred to the Panopticon Nodes of each locale for entry into the data vaults of the bailiwick, available for review at all higher levels of authority.

There were subsequent issues of practicality and resourcing which hindered the roll-out of this programme across the Union-State, obliging the continuation of more traditional methods of mass-surveillance to counter ongoing resistance in the Benacian Union.

Leadership

Commissioner

№	Portrait	Officeholder	Took office	Left office
1		Regina Verion	1671	1675
2		Baldur Zyrion	1675	1676
n/a	n/a	Directly administered by the Corps of the Gentlemen-at-Cudgels	1676	1679
3	-	Ivar Ragnarsson	1679	1687
4		Nizam al-Mulk	1687	1695
5		Augustus Krenk	1695	1704
6		Brugen Aldef (as Representative-Commissioner on behalf of the Miþuï)	1704