The FBI considers sovereign-citizen extremists as comprising a domestic terrorist movement, which, scattered across the United States, has existed for decades . . . Sovereign citizens do not represent an anarchist group, nor are they a militia, although they sometimes use or buy illegal weapons. Rather, they operate as individuals without established leadership and only come together in loosely affiliated groups to train, help each other with paperwork, or socialize and talk about their ideology. They may refer to themselves as 'constitutionalists' or 'freemen,' which is not necessarily a connection to a specific group, but, rather, an indication that they are free from government control. They follow their own set of laws. While the philosophies and conspiracy theories can vary from person to person, their core beliefs are the same: The government operates outside of its jurisdiction. Because of this belief, they do not recognize federal, state, or local laws, policies, or regulations.
Patrick McGoohan plays a man who resigns from a top secret position and is abducted from his London home. He finds himself in a beautiful village where everything is bright and cheerful - the people, their clothes, the buildings, the flowers. But despite this rosy exterior, the village serves a sinister purpose. People are forcibly brought there in order to have their valuable knowledge protected or extracted. Everyone in the Village is assigned a number instead of a name - the Prisoner is Number Six. Chief interrogator and administrator is Number Two, but he isn't the boss - an unseen Number One is the boss.
Failure is not tolerated in the Village, and most episodes feature a new Number Two, though some are privileged to return for a second chance to break Number Six and discover why he resigned.
The Prisoner struggles to keep this information from his captors and to find out which side runs the Village and where it is. He strives to discover the identity of Number One, and above all, he attempts to escape.
Fundamentally, however, The Prisoner is an epistemological exercise that focuses on the concept of reality, both in the subjective and objective sense – that is, can we really know anything about anything? Is reality a mere social construct? Since society creates any knowledge that people may possess, does this mean that human beings are simply products of the given social setting from which they are manufactured? As Steven Paul Davies notes in The Prisoner Handbook (2002): 'Thinking for yourself is not necessarily thinking by yourself.' And as Number 2 warns Number 6 in the episode entitled 'Once upon a Time':
Society is the place where people exist together. That is civilization. The lone wolf belongs to the wilderness. You must not grow up to be a lone wolf.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of those in power is conformity to the constructs of society. This means both figuratively and literally eliminating the lone wolf, the individual. Modern psychiatry defines 'normality' as conformity. This 'measuring of the human psyche by psychologists,' as Davies puts it, has seriously affected how we live our lives and how we view nonconformists. Media representations of 'normality' have become the criteria that society uses to evaluate its members. The concept of normality has become subjective as our views have changed to meet societal demands. The individual, as the term was once defined, is becoming passé. As McGoohan commented in 1968:
At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves. The inquisition of the mind by psychiatrists is far worse than the assault on the body of torturers.
'This pernicious law poses one of the greatest threats to civil liberties in our nation’s history,' writes Brian J. Trautman. Under AUMF, 'this law can be used by authorities to detain (forever) anyone the government considers a threat to national security and stability – potentially even demonstrators and protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.'
