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.

We are standing on the brink of an immense revelation. The revelation of people to states. In the UK – the surveillance workshop of the world – people are becoming increasingly visible through IT projects like the Electronic Patients Record and the National Identity Register, as well as a forthcoming points-based immigration regime premised on the ability to identify subjects and then track and cross-reference their data as never before. Joining-up data, and hence governance, is the name of the game. What are the implications then of this dangerous regime of identity capture, assessment, and tracking for political demands for representation and rights? What are the risks and advantages of visibility, of joining the demos, when identification by the state triggers joined-up ‘knowledge’, often with punitive results? The bright light of IT in the hands of increasingly authoritarian regimes is chasing away the shadows that once provided the minimum of protection, income and manoeuvrability to people at the edges of society. The basic survival of the poor, undocumented or ‘illegalised’ often depends on the ability to operate without detection, the necessity of ID, or the creation of official records. This grey zone of anonymity is constantly squeezed in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs, technocratic convenience and, of course, the economy. This issue of Mute focuses on the exposure of subjects not just to state surveillance and databasing, but to sovereign state power enacted either through the ordinary rule of law or through its suspension in the state of emergency.

As Elizabeth Povinelli writes in these pages, ‘The state of exception and its tethering to moral panic, is a routinised form of state action.’ State/media orchestrated panics, usually presenting a society on the brink of calamity, have become the precondition of the state’s operations. In order to justify massive social change such as ‘managed migration’, in which would-be immigrants to the UK will be subjected to an inhuman assessment based on ‘skills’, the emotive bomb of ‘swamping’ is detonated again and again. In order to roll back hard-won indigenous rights and ‘neoliberate’ communities and their lands in Australia, the bomb of culturally ingrained child sexual abuse amongst Aboriginals is detonated. As Povinelli says, these moral panics are like screaming fire in a movie theatre – no time to think, just act. The time of the here and now privileges those with power, after all, this is the time-frame in which the world’s traders make fortunes.

Another stitched-up ALMO vote just in time for the upgrading of housing (i.e. mortgagee home 'ownership') to Top Government Priority!  (For those of you who've just joined us, an ALMO is the pre-privatization of council estates palmed off either by Brezhnevite 'voting', as here in Lambeth, or by simple decree, as in Hackney, on tenants who stubbornly fail to volunteer for transfer to the private sector.)  In this case the miraculous 51% majority was delivered by excluding 'spoiled' answers to questions like:

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 surveillance complex is class-specific in that that it's administered through things like benefits, immigration control, council housing, 'social services' and zero tolerance policing, which some full homeowning citizens will never need to worry about.  Mass refusal based on existing practices of necessary illegality looks the best hope, as in the case of the poll tax.  But no-one is pretending it will be easy.  This is a call to act before it's too late.  Please distribute onwards (also available as a printed booklet from BM ANARFED, London WC1N 3XX).    

DEFENDING ANONYMITY - 2nd edition

Thoughts for struggle against identity cards

CONTENTS Introduction - what�s really wrong with ID? Common arguments against ID, and their limitations National ID on the cards (from Organise! 64, Summer 2005) RFID � a new technology for ID cards (also from Organise! 64) Interview with the French Anarchist Federation Information from the German Anarchist Federation Panoptican Society (based on a leaflet from Manchester) Ways to fight ID - starting now! Getting involved with Defy-ID LATEST UPDATES from Resistance bulletin, and links to other AF publications.

Introduction - what�s really wrong with ID?

The Labour Party has steamed ahead with its national identity scheme and anyone concerned about threats to our freedom from an increasingly authoritarian state should be worried by the Identity Cards Act, which has been passed with little change from what the government wanted, in spite of all the 'write to your MP' lobbying by No2ID and optimistic hopes of House of Lords amendments.