Good Afternoon,
My name is DMFreemont and I'm writing my graduate thesis on Bitcoin (completed in August). I met some of you in San Jose last month and would like to thank the Bitcoin Foundation again for giving me a grant to attend.
I am deeply troubled by the NSA leak revelations; the Internet is now a panopticon. I am wary of any technological surveillance (whether it be NSA spying, an Orwellian vision of CCTV cameras on every street corner, or an ankle-GPS on every parolee) that purports to remedy our social ills. What is seen in these technologies is a way to “…amplify the voice of conscience relative to the other [selfish desires].” (Quote from Graeme Wood’s Sep 2010 article Prison Without Walls, published in The Atlantic and advocating for the greater use of ankle-GPS on parolees.) In fact there is little or no voice of conscience; the more encompassing surveillance is, the more an individual will act out of a calculated self-interest. It is this very logic that makes Bentham’s prison a success; panoptic surveillance does not create ethical prisoners patiently waiting out their sentences, only trapped and docile animals fearful of a beating.
What is commonly misunderstood with these technological fixes is the differentiation of morals from ethics. Morals are the external rules and laws, the linguistic products of social consensus. Ethics are the more personal inculcation of morals; the formulation is an ongoing lifelong process. A citizen only derives a sense of ethics from situations where s/he has the freedom to make a moral choice. For example, if I don’t steal from a store only because of the cameras, I may be moral in the act but not in the flesh. It takes an opportunity to steal, in order to ethically choose not to steal. Thus the highest function of humanity can never be outsourced to some technological fix, but the voice of conscience can still be extinguished if society itself is a prison.
If you would like to read further, I'm uploading my previous thesis on surveillance societies from my undergraduate work at Reed College. The Internet is now a panopticon, and Bitcoin is the cipher between the inmates.
Thesis download here:
http://ge.tt/66CArkj/v/0 
