  The Panopticon (which means "watcher of everything") is a well-known
structure of continuous surveillance and discipline proposed by Bentham in
1785. This device was, later, used by Foucault and other philosophers as a
paradigm and metaphor for the study of constitutional power and knowledge as
well as a model of individuals' deprivation of freedom. Nowadays, technological
achievements have given rise to new, non-physical (unlike prisons), means of
constant surveillance that transcend physical boundaries. This, combined with
the confession of some governmental institutions that they actually collaborate
with these Internet giants to collect or deduce information about people,
creates a worrisome situation of several co-existing Panopticons that can act
separately or in close collaboration. Thus, they can only be detected and
identified through the expense of (perhaps considerable) effort. In this paper
we provide a theoretical framework for studying the detectability status of
Panopticons that fall under two theoretical, but not unrealistic, definitions.
We show, using Oracle Turing Machines, that detecting modern day, ICT-based,
Panopticons is an undecidable problem. Furthermore, we show that for each
sufficiently expressive formal system, we can effectively construct a Turing
Machine for which it is impossible to prove, within the formal system, either
that it is a Panopticon or it is not a Panopticon.
