The UK's health and social services have become tools of surveillance and control, with working class women the most vulnerable to state intervention. Madame Tlank reviews the State's policies, targets, and projects, and uncovers the warped logic and fragmenting effects of marketised welfare

Well Jeff, ... the fact is that you have the luxury of knowing that you will never ever ever ever EVER be faced with the government bossing you around like a child, simply because you have a parasite living in your body.

- The Law Fairy, Feministing.com

By now people have forgotten what history has proven: that ‘raising' a child is tantamount to retarding his development. The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF.

- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 1970

In what follows I wish to consider the effects of recent UK health and social policies on women and their children who are labeled ‘at risk'.[1]

Having come full circle in half a century, today British citizens stand on the brink of having their 'fundamental rights and freedoms' enshrined in the plasticated chip of a compulsory ID card. But what, asks Martin Twomey of the Hackney NO2ID Group, is this card for exactly and whose interests does it serve?

This man walks into a bar... a bar I happened to be in a few months ago. The conversation turned to identity cards and he told me about his elderly parents’ recollections of WWII identity cards. They spoke of the British public a few years after the war ended becoming fed up with growing intrusion and harassment, with every jobs-worth official from post office clerks to railway porters, bus inspectors to bobbies on the beat constantly demanding people’s identity cards. They told of people gathering in the streets to burn their cards in defiance of what had come to symbolise an overbearing and ever more intrusive state.

The plight of Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble arrested under‘war on terror’legislation has become a cause celebre on the new media art scene. But his case is not a unique masterpiece of injustice. As Alisa Solomon reports, the primary target of State repression has been not artists but immigrants

The era of quantum technology is dawning. With quantum computing set to smash our existing ciphers, quantum encryption is providing a new set of uncrackable codes. But are the new codes completely secure? asks Peter Carty

The age of quantum technology is beginning. MagiQ Technologies in New York and ID Quantique in Geneva are marketing quantum cryptography equipment. So far it is expensive: MagiQ (pronounced ‘magic’) says that its products cost between $50,000 and $100,000, and that clients will include banks, insurers, government agencies and pharmaceutical businesses. And both companies’ applications are restricted to ‘point to point’ – in which pairs of computers are linked with secure communication lines. But the technology is developing rapidly and another company, BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is busy linking computers into the first quantum internet, or Q-NET.

II The revolution shall not be criticised?
In response to ISEA98 Micz Flor, organiser of Revolting temporary media laboratory, asks "why now, why revolution?" Is the current popularity of the term and its associated icons anything more than Middle Youth talking to itself in the latest of a long line of fashionable lingos?

IV Net.Politics Q&A
"What does the Net mean for politics?" Anarchists, nazis, extropians, pornographers, sex-crazed teenagers, book-worm teenagers, budgerigar fanatics, isolated octogenarians, hairdressers - you name it, the Net is home to them all. Or is it? Who gains ascendance within cyberspace? Who has the power in this, the latest technological utopia? Is the Net just a tool or is that popular description just another disingenuous trick - the powerful letting the powerless play with hand-me-down toys while they get on with more serious business. We asked a not-so-random selection of net users what they think.
With an introduction by McKenzie Wark

X The other Tony B.

Echelon is the worldwide signals intelligence network run by the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications Headquarters in collaboration with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Reportedly the system is capable of intercepting large portions of the world's communications, including phone conversations, email and SMS. The Jam Echelon Day (21 October) is intended to raise public awareness of the existence of Echelon and stimulate scrutiny of the world's government agencies that operate it. The rationale is to use the publically available list of Echelon keywords to confuse the system by flooding the Internet with emails containing the list. One criticism of the Jam Echelon project is that Echelon is too sophisticated to respond to simple lists of words.

Gregor Claude reports on the Don’t Blow IT conference, held at Bloomberg’s London HQ, where debate centred on the difference between autistic and autonomous models of privacy

Walking into the Bloomberg building in London you are bombarded with a cacophony of sound and image. It appears to be the entire Bloomberg media output, proudly displayed live and all at once. Having invested enormous resources to gather, process and extract information from the noise of the world, they seek to impress the visitor by throwing it all back together, returning it to noise. While still reeling from this spectacular information sacrifice, they frisk you.

This month’s Head to Head asks: Does the possible introduction of ID cards into the UK represent an attack on freedom? In a political climate in which the sacrifice of personal privacy is widely considered a fair price to pay for the protection of society from ‘terror’, the media debate often does not extend beyond the practicalities involved. Here the two very different types of information expert we aked to respond to this question both reject the middle ground consensus. But aside from this, Hanover Hex – of the Overseas and Home Security Secretariat – and Sean Cubitt – author of Digital Aesthetics – could not disagree more

Hanover Hex – HEAD1

JJ King investigates a European treaty that signals the demise of national sovereignty and continues the gradual decay of the individual’s right to privacy

One thing September 11 has demonstrated is that surveillance systems such as Echelon and Carnivore (see Mute 21) are not providing European or American intelligence services with anything very useful by way of ‘terror’-related information – a fact that makes such systems’ incursions on the privacy of ordinary citizens seem even more unwarranted than they were already. So it is very disturbing indeed that, within ten days of the Great American Catastrophe, the Council of Europe Ministers’ Deputies had approved the US-engineered International Convention on Cybercrime, which advances the surveillance regime over our computer networks still further.

A hidden battle is raging between our fundamental right to privacy and the requirements of the state to maintain and advance its powers of surveillance. The battlefield is complex and confusing, the players numerous. Modern information technologies are key: they have created the many new media in which we communicate, and accordingly increased authorities’ requirements for extensive and invasive information-gathering capabilities.

The means by which these authorities go about obtaining such information is far from straightforward. There are legislative components, such as the Enfopol papers, which are drafted by the Police Cooperation Working Party to define EU policy on ‘lawful interception’. There are physical, technological components, such as Echelon, which has the power to intercept a significant proportion of today’s global communications traffic. Together, such components are actively contributing to a steady decay in personal privacy.

Hari Kunzru reports on Freenet — a new development which could revive free speech on the Internet.

In the wake of file-sharing software like Napster and Gnutella comes Freenet, a file sharing protocol which looks set to intensify the battle between free speech activists and pro-censorship governments, by providing a new means to publish and distribute information anonymously online. Freenet renders obsolete most of the methods that copyright holders and law enforcement agencies have developed to clamp down on the distribution of information, and its programmers claim that its decentralised architecture makes it far more robust and attack-resistant than the DNS-reliant World Wide Web.