Confirmation that 'Stewart Home' is not alone (so to speak) in populating (anti-)social networking sites with pathological quasi-doubles, incubi, revenants or whatever else.  Cornwall police claim that schoolchildren have been 'impersonating paedophiles' on MSN and Bebo chatrooms in an evil plot to scare 'rival'[sic] kids.  Are these the same chatrooms that the ever-vigilant, Hardworking Families-friendly Guardian recently warned have had their Family Filters hacked to pieces by precocious but somehow still defenceless infants?  And how, exactly, doe

From Private Eye, a brief update on the lie detector system soon to be used across the UK on suspected 'benefit thieves'*, i.e. all claimants.  The system comes from Mossad, but what's really alarming is that it is administered by scorched-earth PFI war machine Capita.
*NB. Readers with no sympathy for 'benefit thieves' have come to the wrong website.

Outsourcing
LIE OF THE LAND

Lie–detector technology developed by Mossad for interrogating suspeted Palestinian terrorists is being used in British Jobcentres.

Where the struggle for migrants’ rights can be risky and divisive, informal organising by ‘illegals’ is a means to ensure survival. But both formal and informal organising can combine to protect an essential buffer zone of invisibility for undocumented workers — writes Unterschreber

In Mute 2.6 fictitious capital collided with hypermetrical verse distemper[*].  What follows makes matters worse by further entangling these things with forthcoming Mute subject matter: baby biometrics, tax credit tagging for Hard To Let Families, etc.

[* See also: QUID 18: créateur d'intérieurs (£4 incl. P&P, from Keston Sutherland, Arts B, University of Sussex, Flamer, Brighton BN1 9QH, or http://www.barquepress.com/quid.html)]

Soft hands from Baby Bonds

This Anarchist Federation analysis of the National (UK) ID Database, parts of which are already up and running with no need for cards, needs to be read as widely as possible.  A terrifying account of how much more than abstract 'privacy' is at stake, and FOR WHOM.

The Australian government is thinking of formalizing its de facto power to close the border to medical undesirables, in this case those with 'HIV or leprosy'.  No nation-state seems more determined to demonstrate the literal validity of Agamben's biopower-concentration camp thesis.  Here Mute contributor Angela Mitropoulos notes the source of John Howard's theatre of outrage in the 'normal' regulation of labour and its reproduction.  More proof if it were needed that bio-identity tracking (eg health profiling) is not a mere 'civil liberties' issue of abstract 'privacy'.&