The radical anarcho-libertarian monitoring organisation Statewatch has, with the social activist Transnational Institute, come up with an extensive report on what it calls the 'neoconopticon'.

In essence, the report claims to expose the emergent European security-industrial complex that mirrors those of the United States and other security-minded 'empires'. This is its own summary of what it tries to do:

Despite the often benign intent behind collaborative European ‘research’ into integrated land, air, maritime, space and cyber-surveillance systems, the EU’s security and R&D policy is coalescing around a high-tech blueprint for a new kind of security. It envisages a future world of red zones and green zones; external borders controlled by military force and internally by a sprawling network of physical and virtual security checkpoints; public spaces, micro-states and ‘mega events’ policed by high-tech surveillance systems and rapid reaction forces; ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘crisis management’ missions that make no operational distinction between the suburbs of Basra or the Banlieue; and the increasing integration of defence and national security functions at home and abroad.

It is not just a case of “sleepwalking into” or “waking up to” a “surveillance society”, as Britain’s Information Commissioner famously warned, it feels more like turning a blind eye to the start of a new kind of arms race, one in which all the weapons are pointing inwards. Welcome to the Neo-ConOpticon.

We have often commented on the siloviki system in Russia but it seems that all states and proto-states (which is what the EU is until the Lisbon Treaty is finally approved) are developing their equivalent structures.

Something very big is going on here. The public are, perhaps, not fully aware of the possible implications in terms of the diversion of taxation and the potential for restrictions on freedoms otherwise taken for granted - or the potential for damage to 'inconvenient' minorities.

Part of the problem here is that those researching these issues tend to be over-enthusiastic political nerds whose sense of outrage puts off most ordinary citizens.

But they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they try to get their message across in over-simplified terms, they will be pigeon-holed with the often dim-witted people who go on marches and undertake campaigns that merely elicit a yawn from a bored establishment.

Yet if they do what they are doing now - supplying detailed intelligent argument about the shape of things to come - then they have to rely on a steady drip of understanding working through layers of political self interest until someone finally wakes up to what is happening, probably too late.

This is a shame but it may also be a tragedy because what they have to say is of vital importance, whether you agree that they have the full picture or not.

The lack of debate means that unaccountable people are putting in place, without scrutiny or adequate questioning from a supine political class, a complex internal security structure in the interstices of liberal democracy with the eager connivance of private sector interests talking up threat for profit.

This may not surprise us in a communist state like China or a post-communist empire like Russia but both the US (guarded by its Constitution to a great though not certain degree) and the European Union (with a framework now actively being moulded by security interests) purport to be liberal democracies.

The argument for a diversion of tax revenue into internal security, border settlement along the edges of the 'empires' and population management (in effect, intervention from above in the political proces, culture and society) is ostensibly one of citizen protection.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric does not quite match the reality. Citizen protection (essentially, preserving the ability for freedoms to be enjoyed) slides into more complex issues of economic security (especially energy and food security) and then into a very different kettle of fish, state security.

State security and citizen protection are not as perfectly aligned as the theoreticians of the new world order would like to suggest. We don't have to quote chapter and verse on Stalinism but even the most liberal and democratic of republics can elide without scrutiny and debate into:

• considering radical dissent to be prima facie evidence for radical acts
• considering radical acts to justify radical counter-measures
• considering the cover-up of radical counter-measures such as restrictions on freedom of information or torture as essential to their success

Instead of the protection of the rights of each individual citizen being paramount as free individuals, the authoritarian mentality judges individuals by their alignment with social norms that are eventually designed to make the job of security and social control easier.

Every incident of threat or any barrier to easy or cheap security implementation becomes a tool for extending the boundaries of authority through new legislation and regulation demanded of weak legislatures who have been half house-trained through the agency of weak and centralised parties.

The report's title brings together two separate ideological concepts in its 'neoconopticon' neologism. We all think we understand the neocon bit because of recent history but it is a little more complicated than the foreign policy adventuring of Messrs Bush and Blair.

The essence of neoconservatism is not its apparent politics of the Right masked by a revised post-communist progressivism, but the fact that it is the political expression of the authoritarian personality in the West, beyond Left or Right, one that sees liberty as necessarily to be protected by auctoritas.

This is Roman thinking, designed to preserve the boundaries of empire and free trade by politically emasculating all forms of liberty that do not fit with an atomised population that trades, pleasures itself, moves around and chooses from its range of non-threatening lifestyles without politics.

This atomisation of the population, withdrawn from the active politics of locality and tradition (including class, religious and national tradition), creates the very security problems that have encouraged atomisation - organised crime, 'leaderless resistance', the rise of atavistic ethnicisms, terrorism ....

This leads us to the second part of the neologism, a reference to a rational but inhumane attempt to be humane - the panopticon prison system of leading liberal theorist of the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham.

Like the guillotine, the panopticon was supposed to be a reform, an improvement on the cruel disorder of previous systems of social control. Rationalism, perhaps the most anti-human of idealisms, looks down upon creation, thinks it is not up to scratch and invariably comes up with new cruelties.

Bentham's purpose was clear - the system (which ensured that no prisoner was ever free of the gaze of his jailer) was "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

This impulse can only be considered totalitarian and yet it was also classically liberal. Persons had done wrong and rationally were to be considered as worthy of this treatment because they had stepped over the bounds of a free society based on trust and contract.

Totalitarian, authoritarian and yet liberal, designed to ensure freedoms within the carapace of accepted constitutions by ensuring constant surveillance, paid out of the people's own funds in order to isolate off those who are deemed a threat and still ensure 'right thinking' in the rest.

But wait, consider what crimes might have placed a man under this omniscient system in the 1780s if it had ever been implemented - idleness, poverty (the system was specifically designed to displace the poor laws), poaching, homosexuality, blasphemy.

Now consider what thought-crimes and politically correct expectations in regard to conduct are emerging within the new 'liberal totalitarianism'. Will it become a 'crime' to have the wrong light bulb or give your children too much sugar at meal times? Holocaust denial can get itself a prison sentence already.

The obsessive fears of the paranoid security class, the greed of new industries providing goods and services, the float of security officials between public and private sectors, progressive expectations and nostrums and the instinct for order may all see the 'neoconopticon' develop beyond democratic control.

Statewatch's detailed and interesting report should not just be shelved alongside other radical moans about the State or the ruling order. It is a vital document of political education in a debate that should inform our thinking as voters and of our politicians as our representatives.