IT’S BACK, IT HAS ANOTHER EXCUSE, AND IT’S STILL AN EXTRAORDINARILY BAD IDEA ~ Rob Ray ~ In a very specific, eye-rolling-and-muttering-obscenities sort of way, there’s something almost comforting about the reliability of the civil service (usually backed up by Tony Blair because the guy just. can’t. let. go) in its attempts to apply political necromancy to the forcing of ID cards on everyone in Britain. There have been endless excuses made up for them over the years despite their unpopularity with both left and right, from their WWII imposition (rolled back on the grounds they were too socialist), to Blair’s 2006 attempt to introduce them on bizarre grounds of “easing travel” (as though passports don’t exist) and now again, this time to “curb migration”. The real reason, clear to anyone cynical enough to be even slightly distrustful of State motivations, has always been entirely obvious — the police and security services want them, to enable the harassment of people who don’t fit. And that’s certainly not just migrants, though no doubt the idea would be a wonderful method of aping the disgusting treatment meted out to sans papiers unfortunates across Europe. The people who’d get an ID card-related battering would very much include those born and raised in good old Blighty. Rough sleepers, chaotic individuals, habitual dissenters and indeed anyone else police don’t like the look of would be made available for rounding up and putting on the database. It’s a security-State obscenity which, if Britain had anything approaching a collective soul, should cut to the quick. Free-born you surely are, now show me yer papers. Public opinion across the board is lukewarm on the concept and in the political sphere, as a Freedom colleague noted to me in conversation, there are some very awkward potential implications: “To me that once again shows how little the government takes Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement into consideration. How exactly does the government intend to force British IDs declaring Britishness on the half that consider themselves Irish?” Quite. But perhaps the most glaring argument against the Identity Card is a more modern one than such simple classics as “piss off you nosey prick”, or “fuck you I’m not British”. Increasingly the role the civil service and police would like it to play is redundant. The Police National Database, implemented (as so many shady systems are) on a promise of protecting children from abuse, contains four billion items of data encompassing 13 million people, with an explicit brief of combating, among other things, modern day slavery and people trafficking. Quietly slipped out last November was a vaguely-worded “end of life transformation” of the system. It’s not hard to see where that’s going. It’ll move to the Cloud, incorporate AI for pattern search and facial recognition, and plug in to lots of other databases for maximum oversight. It’s the dream of any security state — a Panopticon applied to the whole country. Every citizen and migrant with their own file and full biometrics instantly accessible to any bored copper looking to take out their frustrations on an unsuspecting civilian. In such a world the invasiveness and pettiness of ID cards begins to look almost quaint, a relic from the wandering minds of old soaks rattling around in the bowels of London’s political Gormenghast. But on the back of such relics grander tyrannies are built, and that is why, once more, they need to be staked, set aflame, and buried at the crossroads. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Pachyderm11 on DeviantArt The post Identity Cards? Again? Really? appeared first on Freedom News.

ALGORITHMS, FACIAL RECOGNITION, AND TIGHTENING PROTEST LAWS SIGNAL A DEEPENING SURVEILLANCE STATE ~ Blade Runner ~ The UK is expanding its use of predictive policing and surveillance, framing it as a response to crime, protest, and public safety. But the direction is clear: more monitoring, earlier intervention, and more control over dissent. In early April, The Guardian revealed that the Ministry of Justice is developing a “murder prevention” system. The tool aims to identify individuals judged to be at high risk of committing lethal violence, based on data drawn from multiple agencies—social care, policing, education. The government has framed the project as a research initiative to improve risk assessments and early intervention. But its underlying logic marks a shift toward ‘precrime’—managing individuals on the basis of what they might do, rather than what they’ve done. The comparison to Minority Report—Philip K. Dick’s 1956 story, later adapted into a 2002 film—is hard to avoid. In both, people are flagged not by witnesses or evidence, but by prediction systems that turn patterns into verdicts. Dick’s vision included ‘precogs’—human oracles housed by the state—while today’s version relies on datasets and AI algorithms. In both, the future is treated as knowable, and the present is shaped around managing that future in advance. Notably, overall crime rates in England and Wales have been falling for decades. According to the Office for National Statistics, incidents have dropped from nearly 20 million in the mid-1990s to under 5 million in recent years. Homicide levels have followed a similar decline, with 594 recorded in the year ending March 2021—far below their peak in the early 2000s. Only 35 of those involved firearms. The relative rarity of such violence raises questions about why a predictive “murder prevention” system is being pursued now. At the same time, police forces face severe financial pressure. The Metropolitan Police is planning to cut 1,700 officers and staff to cover a £260 million budget gap. Other forces face similar cuts. But rather than scaling back, policing is being reorganised—away from visible presence and toward data-driven surveillance, algorithmic profiling, and anticipatory enforcement. The Crime and Policing Bill 2025 reinforces this direction. It allows police to access DVLA-held driver licence records for law enforcement purposes. While the Home Office denies any link to facial recognition, civil liberties groups have raised concerns that this access could be repurposed—effectively turning the DVLA database into a foundation for real-time identification. Combined with surveillance networks already active in shops, housing estates, and transport hubs, this lays the groundwork for a more integrated system of biometric tracking, with limited transparency or oversight. These tools are disproportionately deployed in working-class areas and are consistently shown to disproportionately misidentify Black and Brown individuals. In August 2024, following a series of racist attacks across England, Prime Minister Keir Starmer proposed the expanded use of live facial recognition technology (LFR) as part of the government’s response. Civil liberties groups, including Statewatch, condemned the move, warning that it would further entrench surveillance and racialised policing. In an open letter, over two dozen organisations argued that the UK risks becoming “an outlier in the democratic world” by embracing a technology with no explicit legal basis, widespread inaccuracy, and discriminatory impacts. Critics noted that the government’s response to racist violence focused not on addressing its causes, but on expanding state power over already over-policed communities. The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unrest. UK military operations abroad—most recently joint airstrikes in Yemen—raise the likelihood of retaliatory attacks. Surveillance systems originally developed for counter-terrorism are now being used to monitor social movements and suppress political disruption. Recent protest laws support this shift. The Public Order Act and related legislation criminalise slow marches, locking-on, and disruption to infrastructure. These laws were drafted in response to climate protests from groups such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. Often operating without strong ties to other struggles—like labour, housing or anti-racist organising—these campaigns were easier to isolate and criminalise. The resulting legal framework now stands ready for broader use. The surveillance and predictive systems now being assembled are being designed not only for the current moment, but in preparation for what comes next. Whether in response to renewed austerity, military escalation, or widespread resistance, these tools are positioned to contain unrest before it surfaces. What’s emerging is a model of preemptive policing—structured around behaviour, association, and predicted risk. Individuals are reduced to data profiles, tracked not for what they’ve done but for their statistical proximity to disruption. Suppression is exercised in advance.  Risk scoring, biometric surveillance, and protest restrictions are being embedded into law and infrastructure. These powers are built to be extended—to trade unionists, migrant organisers, housing activists, and anyone seen to disrupt the smooth functioning of a society of control. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image by Rasmus The post How the UK is shaping a future of Precrime and dissent management appeared first on Freedom News.

“THERE’S A STRONG TRADITION OF FAR-RIGHT ACTIVISM IN UNIVERSITIES, ANTI-FASCISTS HAVE BEEN TRYING TO COMBAT THAT AND THEY’VE BEEN DEMONISED FOR IT” ~ Mike Finn joins us to talk about Austria’s targeting of anti-fascists barely a month after being forced into a three-party coalition to shut out the far-right, and how “liberal order” governments across Europe often still seem to think of the left as the greater threat. We also talk about the chaos of tariff imposition and its ideological underpinnings, especially in the context of a globalisation project we have never been huge fans of. Back at home, an attempt is being made to pile pressure on Israel-supporting companies with a revived boycott campaign alongside direct action from Youth Demand, and the government has unveiled its latest dystopian brain fart … The post Anarchist News Review: Anti-fascist crackdown, Stock market falls, new BDS and predicting murder appeared first on Freedom News.