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.

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.

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.

Here a text we published recently in the Dutch magazine Flexmens. It's quite an impressive analysis on the circumstances surrounding the murder of the Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, in Januari this year. An attack on Turkish nationalism and western xenophobia.

Nationalism and its Discontents

On the murder of Hrant Dink

In shock I scan the past two and a half months’ online news sources about the assassination of the journalist Hrant Dink, shot in Istanbul on January 19, 2007 in front of his bilingual newspaper Agos, by the seventeen year old O.S. I am shocked by the tacit and explicit racism I see in the commentary sections. It's present in Turkish, European and American sources: Racism against Armenians in Turkish news sources and web sites of Turkish communities throughout Europe. Racism against Turks in Dutch and English news blogs.

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'.  The invasive effects of the monitoring are distributed according to race and class, because, as the invention of a statistically nonexistent 'AIDS-immigrant-parasite' crisis goes to show, the policy is about the racial stratification of the labour market.
<http://archive.blogsome.com/2007/06/04/the-health-of-the-body-politic/#more-542>