First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death … On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. … Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another…

—Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” (##)

Not quite the end of the seventeenth century, but an eerie similarity. Terrorism as the modern plague. A total, city-wide discipline, but updated for our societies of control. Justified or no, haunting in the extreme …