"The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Le philosophe et historien Michel Foucault a particulièrement attiré l'attention dessus dans Surveiller et punir (1975) en en faisant le modèle abstrait d'une société disciplinaire, inaugurant une longue série d'études sur le dispositif panoptique.