And the pri­va­ti­za­tion of mil­i­tary-grade intel­li­gence capa­bil­i­ties con­tin­ues...

Ryan Mac, Forbes Staff
12/05/2013 @ 9:00AM
Palan­tir Seeks $9 Bil­lion Val­u­a­tion In New Round As CEO Alex Karp Nears Bil­lion­aire Mark

With Twit­ter going pub­lic last month, investors may be look­ing for the next Sil­i­con Val­ley com­pa­ny to assume the man­tle of the region’s next hot tech firm.

On fund­ing alone, Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies is mak­ing a strong case for that title.

In a new round of fund­ing, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny is look­ing to raise $100 mil­lion at a $9 bil­lion val­u­a­tion accord­ing to sources close to the com­pa­ny. Sources con­firmed to FORBES that Palan­tir has already attained $58 mil­lion of the expect­ed total and that it plans to file doc­u­ments dis­clos­ing the round with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion lat­er on Thurs­day.

At $9 bil­lion, Palan­tir has sig­nif­i­cant­ly boost­ed its val­u­a­tion in less than three months. A soft­ware firm that pro­vides data orga­ni­za­tion and analy­sis tools to clients rang­ing from the FBI to JPMor­gan Chase, the com­pa­ny closed a $196.5 mil­lion round of fund­ing in late Sep­tem­ber at about a $6 bil­lion val­u­a­tion. If it were to attain its expect­ed $100 mil­lion this round, Palan­tir will have raised about $800 mil­lion in total backing–a stag­ger­ing amount for a com­pa­ny that has not yet turned a prof­it. Rev­enues are expect­ed to hit $450 mil­lion this year, up from $300 mil­lion last year based on FORBES esti­mates.

It is cur­rent­ly unclear which indi­vid­u­als or enti­ties have invest­ed in Palantir’s lat­est round. Pre­vi­ous back­ers include bil­lion­aires Ken­neth Lan­gone and Stan­ley Druck­en­miller as well as CIA ven­ture arm In-Q-Tel; hedge fund Tiger Glob­al; and Peter Thiel’s ven­ture firm, Founders Fund.

In seek­ing invest­ment at a val­u­a­tion that’s 50% high­er than what it was in Sep­tem­ber, Palan­tir is look­ing to become one Sil­i­con Valley’s most valu­able pri­vate com­pa­nies, a dis­tinc­tion once held by Twit­ter. The San Fran­cis­co-based social media com­pa­ny main­tained a val­u­a­tion of about $10 bil­lion after rais­ing more than $1 bil­lion in fund­ing pri­or to its ini­tial pub­lic offer­ing in Novem­ber.

Palan­tir CEO Alex Karp remained tepid on the thought of an IPO in inter­views with FORBES in August, stat­ing that it would make “run­ning a com­pa­ny like ours very dif­fi­cult.”

“Any busi­ness com­pa­ny would IPO [at our size],” said Karp.

Iron­i­cal­ly if a pub­lic offer­ing were to hap­pen, Karp is among those who would ben­e­fit most. With an esti­mat­ed 10% stake in the com­pa­ny, the CEO’s net worth clocks in at around $900 mil­lion at a $9 bil­lion val­u­a­tion, putting him pre­car­i­ous­ly close to bil­lion­aire range. Karp, how­ev­er, has main­tained that his net worth is of lit­tle impor­tance to him, call­ing wealth “cul­tur­al­ly cor­ro­sive.”

...

Just imag­ine how much Palan­tir would be worth if it was secret­ly help­ing the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty with mass sur­veil­lance tools, which it’s total­ly not doing at all.

Peter Thiel just had anoth­er inter­view where he pro­motes his the­o­ry that tech­no­log­i­cal progress has stag­nat­ed due to gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion (the hip­pies won, as Thiel sort of puts it). He also puts forth an approach on how to deal with the chal­lenges of mass-sur­veil­lance: “If you can fig­ure out effec­tive ways to iden­ti­fy ter­ror­ists, then you don’t need to be as intru­sive. It’s a lack of tech­nol­o­gy that dri­ves intru­sive behav­iour... This is the sort of prob­lem Palan­tir is try­ing to solve.” Have fun chew­ing on that one:

Finan­cial Times
Lunch with the FT: Peter Thiel
Decem­ber 20, 2013 4:06 pm
By Richard Waters
The bil­lion­aire investor and lib­er­tar­i­an thinker believes that in a world of gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance, more tech­nol­o­gy is the answer

Peter Thiel has only just sat down at a cor­ner table in Palo Alto’s Evvia restau­rant and he is already into a dis­qui­si­tion on the his­to­ry of finan­cial bub­bles.

“This,” he declares, after list­ing the fre­quent mar­ket erup­tions of the past three decades, “is his­tor­i­cal­ly very anom­alous. There was one bub­ble in the 1920s and one in the 1720s.”

It is the sort of sweep­ing state­ment, deliv­ered with flat final­i­ty, that Thiel thrives on. Since he has made bil­lion-dol­lar for­tunes twice over, in very dif­fer­ent cor­ners of the invest­ment world (though one of the bil­lions was prompt­ly lost again), you’re inclined to give him the ben­e­fit of the doubt.

But you also can’t help think­ing: real­ly? What of the rail­road bub­ble of the 1870s or the peri­od­ic booms and busts of capitalism’s gild­ed age? As with many of the eclec­tic asser­tions Thiel (pro­nounced “teal”) uses to pep­per his con­ver­sa­tion – allu­sions to Dick­ens and Shake­speare as well as the broad swaths of eco­nom­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal his­to­ry – you wish you could secret­ly Google under the table to fact-check.

Now the 46-year-old Face­book bil­lion­aire, for­mer hedge fund star and self-styled lib­er­tar­i­an Big Thinker is ready to declare one final bub­ble. This time it is the result of exces­sive gov­ern­ment bor­row­ing to refloat a world strug­gling to get beyond the finan­cial cri­sis. With this, he argues, we have arrived at the Last Bub­ble. There will be no more. Peri­od.

...

His man­ner is both pur­pose­ful and wary. He seems unabashed about mak­ing declar­a­tive state­ments that take a big swing at con­tro­ver­sial ideas but cloaks them in hes­i­tant “ums” and takes sev­er­al runs at for­mu­lat­ing his thoughts. He begins almost every state­ment with the words “I think”, as though polite­ly leav­ing it up to the lis­ten­er to choose whether to swal­low each new asser­tion as unde­ni­able fact. Such as: “And of course, um, and of course as a lib­er­tar­i­an, I think it’s imper­a­tive that we stop anoth­er mas­sive ter­ror­ist attack on the US because the worst thing that could hap­pen to this coun­try is that we could get anoth­er Patri­ot Act.”

Div­ing head first into big ideas is a mark of the high seri­ous­ness that Sil­i­con Val­ley types like to affect, and Thiel is no excep­tion. Though it isn’t entire­ly down to him that we plunged into the his­to­ry of finan­cial bub­bles with bare­ly a moment for niceties.

...

Ven­ture cap­i­tal, where suc­cess depends on pick­ing win­ners in the next hot tech mar­kets and stick­ing with them, seems a long way from rid­ing booms and busts as a hedge fund man­ag­er. In Thiel’s world, how­ev­er, all things are con­nect­ed, as he stitch­es ideas togeth­er into a grand uni­fy­ing the­o­ry of our times.

The pieces fit togeth­er some­thing like this. The his­tor­i­cal­ly anom­alous bub­bles of recent years – Japan’s stock mar­ket boom of the 1980s, the dot­com mania of the 1990s, the hous­ing finance fren­zy of the past decade and, now, the gov­ern­ment bub­ble – all result­ed from the fact that peo­ple retained out­sized expec­ta­tions for the future, even as real­i­ty came up short.

The rea­son for this expec­ta­tion gap, Thiel argues, is that tech­no­log­i­cal progress came to a halt at the end of the 1960s. As the web­site of Founders Fund declares: “We want­ed fly­ing cars, instead we got 140 char­ac­ters.” Thiel is still mak­ing it up to Twit­ter for this jab: it’s a per­fect­ly fine com­pa­ny, he says, and may even be worth the high val­u­a­tion placed on it by Wall Street, though he adds with dead­pan irony that “it may not be enough to take civil­i­sa­tion to the next lev­el”.

No mat­ter that Thiel has made a for­tune on Face­book (accord­ing to Forbes, his total wealth is $1.8bn): the inter­net, in his ver­sion of events, has not been enough to make up for an inno­va­tion short­fall.

He is wary of talk­ing pub­licly about Face­book, since he still sits on its board. But he does say this about the com­pa­ny: “The nuanced truth is, Face­book is a great com­pa­ny, it is a spe­cif­ic suc­cess – it is not, how­ev­er, enough to save our civil­i­sa­tion. Those are not incon­sis­tent state­ments, you know.”

As to why progress stalled, he says he is less cer­tain. But if pressed it becomes appar­ent that he has plen­ty of the­o­ries. In one suc­cinct for­mu­la­tion, he puts it this way: “We land­ed on the moon in July 1969 and Wood­stock start­ed three weeks lat­er. With the ben­e­fit of hind­sight, that’s when the hip­pies won and some­how progress sort of died, the idea of progress came to an end.”

...

I push him for oth­er short­com­ings, with the argu­ment that no one will believe an excess of chess-play­ing is his main char­ac­ter flaw. He cau­tious­ly offers bad time man­age­ment and says he is “not that detail-ori­ent­ed.” What about see­ing oth­er people’s points of view, I sug­gest?

“I think I’ve got­ten bet­ter at that over the years,” he says. “I think in my twen­ties I tend­ed to think of all peo­ple as sort of more or less alike.”

He goes on: “I now think that peo­ple are real­ly dif­fer­ent in all these sub­tle ways that are very impor­tant. So if you give crit­i­cal feed­back to peo­ple, there are some peo­ple who will be in tears and oth­ers with whom it won’t even reg­is­ter.”

He sounds equal­ly uncom­fort­able dis­cussing him­self. The “ums” mul­ti­ply as he tries to explain why he threw in law and bank­ing and came to Sil­i­con Val­ley to pur­sue some­thing far more world-chang­ing. “There was this deci­sion to move back to Cal­i­for­nia and try some­thing new and dif­fer­ent,” he says as though it were some­thing that hap­pened to some­one else.

He is sim­i­lar­ly vague when talk­ing about the ori­gins of his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy. “I’ve always been very inter­est­ed in ideas and try­ing to fig­ure things out.” His under­grad­u­ate degree, from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, was in phi­los­o­phy but his stance against the dom­i­nant polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy on many issues seems more vis­cer­al than intel­lec­tu­al. “I think that one of the most con­trar­i­an things one can do in our soci­ety is try to think for one­self,” he says.

He only real­ly regains his stride when talk­ing about how tech­no­log­i­cal ambi­tion has gone from the world, leav­ing what he calls an “age of dimin­ished expec­ta­tions that has slow­ly seeped into the cul­ture”. Pre­dictably, giv­en his lib­er­tar­i­an bent, much of this is traced back to reg­u­la­tion.

This is his expla­na­tion for why the com­put­er indus­try (which inhab­its “the world of bits”) has thrived while so many oth­ers (“the world of atoms”) have not. “The world of bits has not been reg­u­lat­ed and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of progress in the past 40 years, and the world of atoms has been reg­u­lat­ed, and that’s why it’s been hard to get progress in areas like biotech­nol­o­gy and avi­a­tion and all sorts of mate­r­i­al sci­ence areas.”

. . .

The main cours­es have long since arrived and Thiel has been pick­ing at his salmon with­out much inter­est while ignor­ing the dol­lop of mashed pota­to on the side. The dark wedge of col­lard greens on my plate packs a rich and tangy punch, like swal­low­ing a week’s sup­ply of vit­a­mins in one go, though it rather over­shad­ows the sole along­side.

Despite occa­sion­al bouts of deter­min­ism – “On my bad days I find the sort of Spen­g­ler­ian decline of the west very com­pelling” – Thiel says he believes in the uncon­strained abil­i­ty of indi­vid­u­als to make a dif­fer­ence. But, he com­plains, “Peo­ple have become too incre­men­tal­ist and too risk-averse and not try­ing hard enough.”

He holds up Elon Musk, a friend from the Pay­Pal days and now head of both elec­tric car­mak­er Tes­la Motors and pri­vate rock­et com­pa­ny SpaceX, as an exam­ple of how big ideas can still flour­ish. By com­par­i­son, says Thiel, most peo­ple are trapped by social con­for­mi­ty into spout­ing received ideas, from “the aver­age lib­er­al in San Fran­cis­co ... [to] the aver­age church lady in Alaba­ma”. The result, he says, is that “I nev­er know how much peo­ple believe any of the stuff they say”.

Despite this, he still claims to be an opti­mist. Though his is not the kind that seems endem­ic in Sil­i­con Val­ley, where a Pollyan­na-ish belief in the best out­come reigns supreme.

“I believe things could be a lot bet­ter,” he says, in self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. “There are all these things that aren’t being done.” The fact that “we’re not find­ing cures to can­cer” or that a third of peo­ple past the age of 85 have Alzheimer’s, for instance, is a “crazy cat­a­stro­phe”.

“I think that all these things could be emi­nent­ly cur­able,” he says. “I think that we could find much cheap­er sources of ener­gy if we worked at this. I think there could be, you know, rad­i­cal life exten­sion.” Although Founders Fund has stayed away from ener­gy, which has proved a grave­yard for start-up investors, it has backed a num­ber of new biotech and health­care busi­ness­es with ambi­tious goals.

For Thiel, only an accel­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy can pro­vide the solu­tion. Take the prob­lem of uncon­trolled gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance. While many would see that as the result of too much tech­nol­o­gy in the hands of an unchecked intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment, Thiel thinks there isn’t enough.

“If you can fig­ure out effec­tive ways to iden­ti­fy ter­ror­ists, then you don’t need to be as intru­sive. It’s a lack of tech­nol­o­gy that dri­ves intru­sive behav­iour,” he says. This is the sort of prob­lem Palan­tir is try­ing to solve.

...

Well here’s an Earth Day warm fuzzy. It’s not much of a warm fuzzy for the Earth. But Palan­tir comes across as not look­ing total­ly scary so it’s a some­what scary warm fuzzy:

Land grabs by elites may endan­ger ele­phants across Africa
BY Asso­ci­at­ed Press April 20, 2014 at 6:08 PM EDT

WASHINGTON — Polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary elites are seiz­ing pro­tect­ed areas in one of Africa’s last bas­tions for ele­phants, putting broad swaths of Zim­bab­we at risk of becom­ing fronts for ivory poach­ing, accord­ing to a non­prof­it research group’s report that exam­ines gov­ern­ment col­lu­sion in wildlife traf­fick­ing.

Zim­bab­we has main­tained robust ele­phant pop­u­la­tions com­pared with oth­er coun­tries on the con­ti­nent. But eco­nom­ic penal­ties imposed by the Unit­ed States and Europe have led Zim­bab­weans with ties to Pres­i­dent Robert Mugabe’s rul­ing par­ty to find new meth­ods of mak­ing mon­ey. The report, set for release Mon­day, says they may be turn­ing to ele­phants’ high­ly val­ued ivory tusks.

Zimbabwe’s embassy in Wash­ing­ton did not respond to a request for com­ment.

Born Free USA, an ani­mal advo­ca­cy group, com­mis­sioned the report from Wash­ing­ton-based C4ADS to bet­ter under­stand the role orga­nized crime and cor­rupt gov­ern­ment offi­cials play in ivory traf­fick­ing across Africa, said Adam Roberts, Born Free USA’s chief exec­u­tive offi­cer.

...

North of Zim­bab­we, in cen­tral Africa, an esti­mat­ed 23,000 ele­phants, or rough­ly 60 each day, were killed last year. A pound of ele­phant tusk sells for about $1,500 on the black mar­ket. That’s more than dou­ble the price just five years ago. Ivory is used to make carved orna­ments and trin­kets.

Rhi­noc­er­os­es also are heav­i­ly poached for their horns, which some Asian cul­tures believe con­tain med­i­c­i­nal prop­er­ties.

TRAFFIC, a glob­al wildlife trade mon­i­tor­ing net­work, says there are between 47,000 and 93,000 ele­phants in Zim­bab­we. The gap is due to the fact that full-fledged sur­veys of the ani­mals have not been car­ried out since 2007, said Richard Thomas, the organization’s spokesman.

Across Africa, there are close to 500,000 ele­phants, a frac­tion of the near­ly 10 mil­lion that roamed there just 100 years ago.

...

The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion in Feb­ru­ary pub­lished a nation­al strat­e­gy for com­bat­ing the multi­bil­lion-dol­lar poach­ing indus­try, rely­ing on many of the same tac­tics used against ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions and drug car­tels. The plan out­lines a “whole of gov­ern­ment approach” that includes work­ing with oth­er coun­tries to increase the num­ber of inves­ti­ga­tions and arrests, using high-tech gear to iden­ti­fy poach­ing hot spots, and tar­get­ing the bank accounts of wildlife traf­fick­ers and the cor­rupt bureau­crats who assist them.

“Our find­ings shine a bright light on Zim­bab­we, Mozam­bique, Tan­za­nia, Sudan, and Kenya, where poach­ers move across bor­ders with near impuni­ty, slaugh­ter ele­phants with com­plete dis­re­gard, and use the ivory to fund vio­lent oper­a­tions across the con­ti­nent,” said Born Free USA’s Roberts. “Glob­al lead­ers can­not stand by while the human tragedy and poach­ing cri­sis con­tin­ue.

Zim­bab­we, the report said, could become a poach­ing hot spot with lit­tle warn­ing.

...

Among the areas in jeop­ardy is Zimbabwe’s Save Val­ley Con­ser­van­cy, a 1,000-square-mile col­lec­tion of unfenced wildlife reserves that is home to most of the country’s ele­phants and rhi­noc­er­os­es. Land reform poli­cies have allowed polit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed peo­ple to receive hunt­ing per­mits and land leas­es in the con­ser­van­cy, accord­ing to C4ADS.

“Many have his­to­ries of exploita­tive busi­ness prac­tices, muscling into firms, strip­ping them of all val­ue, and mov­ing on, which cre­ates a high risk of sys­tem­at­ic poach­ing on seized lands,” the report said.

The lack of trans­paren­cy into the inner work­ings of Mugabe’s gov­ern­ment makes it dif­fi­cult to estab­lish direct links between gov­ern­ment loy­al­ists and their inter­ests in wildlife areas. The report said own­er­ship is often masked through asso­ciates, fam­i­ly mem­bers, and shell com­pa­nies.

Using data-min­ing soft­ware devel­oped by Palan­tir, a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny in Cal­i­for­nia, C4ADS named 18 peo­ple involved in what the report describes as the “political/military takeover of Save Val­ley Con­ser­van­cy.”

They include Maj. Gen. Engel­bert Ruge­je, the inspec­tor gen­er­al of Zimbabwe’s defense forces. Ruge­je is not on the sanc­tions list main­tained by the U.S. Trea­sury Depart­ment. He did not respond to a request for com­ment.

The U.S. Embassy in Zim­bab­we has long been aware of con­cerns over Ruge­je.

...

Well there we go. Palan­tir’s vast data­base tech­nol­o­gy and its abil­i­ty to find mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions in vast swathes of data can be used to track down elite poach­ing oper­a­tions and also pre­vent all of the oth­er dam­age asso­ci­at­ed with their loss. If Peter Thiel was­n’t on record describ­ing envi­ron­men­tal­ism as a neg­a­tive force that has ‘out­lawed inno­va­tion’ this would be much bet­ter news. Still, it could be worse! Hap­py Earth Day.

Here’s anoth­er area where IT, gov­ern­ment, and the pri­vate sec­tor col­lide in poten­tial­ly alarm­ing ways: the state of Utah just became the first state to imple­ment “Palan­tir Law Enforce­ment”, which links up the records man­age­ment sys­tem of all the par­tic­i­pat­ing depart­ments and cre­ates “a real­ly cool crim­i­nal Face­book. It shows links, rela­tion­ships, crim­i­nal trends... it will also show you in real time where oth­er crimes are occur­ring on a dash­board.” It’s “real­ly cool”, it’s filled with crim­i­nal records, and it’s run by Palan­tir:

Cot­ton­wood Hol­la­day Jour­nal
CHPD Launch­es Inno­v­a­tive Tech­nol­o­gy to Solve Crimes
July 3, 2014
By Sher­ry Sorensen

Rapid­ly advanc­ing tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing the way we live, and it’s even chang­ing the way police fight crime.

In Feb­ru­ary, the Cot­ton­wood Heights Police Depart­ment joined with the Salt Lake City Police Depart­ment and more than a dozen oth­er agen­cies in using the Palan­tir Law Enforce­ment soft­ware.

When­ev­er an offi­cer responds to a crime, issues a cita­tion, or arrests some­one, the infor­ma­tion is entered into the depart­men­t’s records man­age­ment sys­tem. Palan­tir allows inves­ti­ga­tors to search the RMS of any par­tic­i­pat­ing agency in the state of Utah.

“We can input details about a crime or sus­pect, and with­in sec­onds it looks at all those sys­tems. It used to take 2–3 weeks to gath­er that infor­ma­tion using per­son­al con­tacts from dif­fer­ent agen­cies, and now we can do it in sec­onds,” Salt Lake City Deputy Chief Mike Brown said.

Based on a 2010 impact study of the inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­o­gy’s effec­tive­ness in Salt Lake City, agen­cies now have access to “more than 988,000 doc­u­ments, 40,000 mugshots, 117,000 arrest records and 520,000 case reports,” and the time to per­form com­plex inves­ti­ga­tions has been reduced by 95 per­cent using the soft­ware.

Police Chief Rob­by Rus­so said the ben­e­fits for Cot­ton­wood Heights and oth­er par­tic­i­pat­ing agen­cies to have access to the map­ping and data shar­ing capa­bil­i­ties of Palan­tir are immea­sur­able.

“I wish we had had this sort of data 30 years ago,” he said. “It’s like a real­ly cool crim­i­nal Face­book. It shows links, rela­tion­ships, crim­i­nal trends... it will also show you in real time where oth­er crimes are occur­ring on a dash­board.”

Although the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny’s web­site claims that “Palan­tir Law Enforce­ment pro­vides robust, built-in pri­va­cy and civ­il lib­er­ties pro­tec­tions,” Rus­so remained cau­tious when con­sid­er­ing con­tribut­ing data to the sys­tem.

“We were a lit­tle appre­hen­sive at first because they’re a pri­vate ven­dor. I’m very con­cerned when it comes to risk­ing oth­er peo­ple’s per­son­al infor­ma­tion,” he said.

In the end, he was sat­is­fied with the safe­ty mea­sures in place to pro­tect that infor­ma­tion.

SLPD and sev­er­al oth­er agen­cies deployed the soft­ware in 2010 through an Urban Secu­ri­ty Ini­tia­tive Grant. Since then, the state of Utah has also con­tributed fund­ing, allow­ing the pro­gram to go through sev­er­al expan­sions with no cost to the law enforce­ment agen­cies.

...

Cur­rent­ly, there are 60 agen­cies in Utah that use Palan­tir, with an esti­mat­ed 25 who par­tic­i­pate in data inte­gra­tion.

Utah is the first state nation­wide to expand the soft­ware to a statewide lev­el.

“Utah’s real­ly well poised to be a bea­con to the rest of the law enforce­ment com­mu­ni­ty nation­wide on how to do data shar­ing,” Palan­tir ana­lyst Ben Thomas said.

Palan­tir is, not sur­pris­ing­ly, col­lect­ing and ana­lyz­ing data from sites like Face­book for the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. Sur­pris­ing­ly, Palan­tir claims it was­n’t real­ly com­fort­able with this job because of the con­cerns that doing social net­work data col­lec­tion for the US gov­ern­ment would hurt its rep­u­ta­tion in the tech com­mu­ni­ty *snick­er*. But, of course, they took the job any­way:

Quartz
The US mil­i­tary is already using Face­book to track your mood
By Patrick Tuck­er, Defense One July 3, 2014

Crit­ics have tar­get­ed a recent study on how emo­tions spread on the pop­u­lar social net­work site Face­book, com­plain­ing that some 600,000 Face­book users did not know that they were tak­ing part in an exper­i­ment. Some­what more dis­turb­ing, the researchers delib­er­ate­ly manip­u­lat­ed users’ feel­ings to mea­sure an effect called emo­tion­al con­ta­gion.

Though Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, home to at least one of the researchers, said the study received no exter­nal fund­ing, but it turns out that the uni­ver­si­ty is cur­rent­ly receiv­ing Defense Depart­ment mon­ey for some extreme­ly sim­i­lar-sound­ing research—the analy­sis of social net­work posts for “sen­ti­ment,” i.e. how peo­ple are feel­ing, in the hopes of iden­ti­fy­ing social “tip­ping points.”

The tip­ping points in ques­tion include “the 2011 Egypt­ian rev­o­lu­tion, the 2011 Russ­ian Duma elec­tions, the 2012 Niger­ian fuel sub­sidy cri­sis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey,” accord­ing to the web­site of the Min­er­va Ini­tia­tive, a Defense Depart­ment social sci­ence project.

It’s the sort of work that the US mil­i­tary has been fund­ing for years, most famous­ly via the open-source indi­ca­tors pro­gram, an Intel­li­gence Advanced Research Projects Activ­i­ty (IARPA) pro­gram that looked at Twit­ter to pre­dict social unrest.

If the idea of the gov­ern­ment mon­i­tor­ing and even manip­u­lat­ing you on Face­book gives you a cold, creep­ing feel­ing, the bad news is that you can expect the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to spend a great deal more time and mon­ey research­ing sen­ti­ment and rela­tion­ships via social net­works like Face­book. In fact, defense con­trac­tors and high-lev­el USin­tel­li­gence offi­cials say that social net­work data has become one of the most impor­tant tools they use in the col­lect­ing intel­li­gence.

Defense One recent­ly caught up with Lt. Gen. Michael Fly­nn, the direc­tor of the Defense Intel­li­gence Agency who said the US mil­i­tary has “com­plete­ly revamped” the way it col­lects intel­li­gence around the exis­tence of large, open­ly avail­able data sources and espe­cial­ly social media like Face­book. “The infor­ma­tion that we’re able to extract form social media—it’s giv­ing us insights that frankly we nev­er had before,” he said.

In oth­er words, the head of one of the biggest US mil­i­tary intel­li­gence agen­cies needs you on Face­book.

“Just over a decade ago, when I was a senior intel­li­gence offi­cer, I spent most of my time in the world of ‘ints’—signals intel­li­gence imagery, human intelligence—and used just a lit­tle bit of open-source infor­ma­tion to enrich the assess­ments that we made. Fast for­ward to 2014 and the explo­sion of the infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment in just the last few years alone. Open-source now is a place I spend most of my time. The open world of infor­ma­tion pro­vides us most of what we need and the ‘ints’ of old, they enrich the assess­ments that we’re able to make from open-source infor­ma­tion.”

Open-source intel­li­gence can take a vari­ety of forms, but among the most volu­mi­nous, per­son­al and use­ful is Face­book and Twit­ter data. The avail­abil­i­ty of that sort of infor­ma­tion is chang­ing the way that DIA trains intel­li­gence oper­a­tives. Long gone are the spooks of old who would fish through trash for clues on tar­gets. Here to stay are the eyes look­ing through your vaca­tion pic­tures.

“We train them dif­fer­ent­ly even than we did a year ago because of the types of tools we have. There are adjust­ments to the trade craft, and that’s due to the amount of infor­ma­tion we can now get our hands on,” Fly­nn said.

The growth of social media has not just changed day-to-day life at agen­cies like DIA, it’s also giv­en rise to a mini gold rush in defense con­tract­ing. The mil­i­tary will be spend­ing an increas­ing amount of the $50 bil­lion intel­li­gence bud­get on pri­vate con­trac­tors to per­form open-source intel­li­gence gath­er­ing and analy­sis, accord­ing to Fly­nn. That’s evi­denced by the rise in com­pa­nies eager to pro­vide those ser­vices.

Some of them are well known like Palan­tir, the Sil­i­con Val­ley data visu­al­iza­tion giant that’s been fea­tured promi­nent­ly in Bloomberg Busi­ness­week and has graced the cov­er of Forbes. Col­lect­ing or ana­lyz­ing social net­work data wasn’t some­thing they orig­i­nal­ly want­ed to get into accord­ing to Bryant Chung, a Palan­tir employ­ee. Palan­tir doesn’t mar­ket itself as a data col­lec­tion com­pa­ny. They pro­vide a tool set to help agen­cies visu­al­ize and share data.

The com­pa­ny wor­ried that part­ner­ing with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to do social net­work data col­lec­tion could hurt their rep­u­ta­tion among the tech com­mu­ni­ty, increas­ing­ly wary of the gov­ern­ment, accord­ing to Chung. When the com­pa­ny was approached by NATO and some US intel­li­gence groups, they decid­ed to explore the mar­ket­place for sen­ti­ment analy­sis of social net­work data.

“There are a lot of oth­er com­mer­cial com­pa­nies already in that space. Unless we know we’re going to crush it, we don’t want to get in,” Chung said. “I think we have a dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed capa­bil­i­ty, espe­cial­ly at a macro lev­el. For exam­ple, you are inter­est­ed in mon­i­tor­ing an elec­tion some­where in Africa and you want to know who are the peo­ple tweet­ing on one side of an elec­tion ver­sus the oth­er, or who are the most influ­en­tial tweet­ers or you what if you have intel­li­gence that an explo­sion is about to hap­pen at a par­tic­u­lar square, can you con­firm that using Tweets?” That’s the sort of thing Palan­tir wants to help you with.

Many of the groups doing this sort of work on behalf of the gov­ern­ment are small out­fits you prob­a­bly have nev­er heard of. And ide­al­ly, you nev­er would.

One of them is a com­pa­ny out of Austin, Texas, called Snap­Trends, found­ed in 2012. They pro­vide a “social lis­ten­ing” ser­vice that ana­lyzes posts to pro­vide insights about the cir­cum­stances of the poster, one of the most impor­tant of which is the poster’s loca­tion. The com­pa­ny uses cell tow­er den­si­ty, social net­work knowhow, and var­i­ous oth­er ele­ments to fig­ure out who is post­ing what and where. Are you some­one who refus­es to geo-tag your tweets out of con­cerns for pri­va­cy? Do you turn off your phone’s GPS receiv­ing capa­bil­i­ty to stay under the prover­bial radar? It doesn’t mat­ter to Snap­Trends.

One tweet and they can find you.

“If it’s a dense envi­ron­ment. I can put you with­in a block. If it’s a [bad] envi­ron­ment I can put you with­in two or three blocks,” said Todd Robin­son, direc­tor of oper­a­tions for Defense Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence for the com­pa­ny Gen­er­al Dynam­ics Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy, GDIT, and Snap­Trends pres­i­dent for Mid­dle East­ern oper­a­tions. GDIT part­nered with Snap­Trends to sell their ser­vices to the gov­ern­ment. “Once I do have you, I click this but­ton right here, I can go back five years [of social media posts.]”

Snap­Trends says that the tool was extreme­ly help­ful in the inves­ti­ga­tion fol­low­ing the 2013 Boston Marathon bomb attacks. Using social net­work analy­sis, “we found the col­lege kids that had access to the com­put­ers [owned by the sus­pects]. We were able to get to them first,” said Robins.

The use of social net­work data for intel­li­gence isn’t just fair, Rob­bins says, it’s a no-brain­er. Scrawl­ing Face­book for clues about human behav­ior doesn’t require break­ing in via back­doors or oth­er elab­o­rate pieces of tech­no­log­i­cal trick­ery. “When you join Twit­ter and Face­book, you sign an agree­ment say­ing you will post that to a pub­lic web page. We just pull data from that web page.”

”I’m a retired intel­li­gence guy,” he said. “This is not that dif­fi­cult, peo­ple.

But while social data may be an impor­tant tool in intel­li­gence col­lec­tion, it’s hard­ly a per­ma­nent one.

In the same way that observ­ing the behav­ior of some sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles changes the behav­ior of those par­ti­cles (called the observ­er effect), watch­ing the tweets and posts of tar­gets can cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple tweet less. You poi­son your own well by draw­ing from it. That hap­pens on an indi­vid­ual lev­el in terms of spe­cif­ic human tar­gets but also on a larg­er, soci­etal lev­el.

“We’ve seen that already,” Robin­son said. “There is always a risk that as peo­ple under­stand this, they’ll quit putting [posts] on there.”

The view was sec­ond­ed by Snap­Trends co-founder and­CEO, Eric Klas­son. “The more the ‘bad guys’ know about what is pos­si­ble, the less they will use social media. This under­mines state, local, fed­er­al and inter­na­tion­al law enforce­ment efforts,” he told Defense One.

When asked if he was con­cerned that peo­ple might stop using Face­book, Twit­ter and oth­er social net­works as a result of US intel­li­gence activ­i­ties, Fly­nn answered mat­ter-of-fact­ly: “Yes.”

...

You also have to won­der what oth­er gov­ern­ments might be hir­ing these kinds of ser­vices.

We recent­ly got a pret­ty sig­nif­i­cant update on Palan­tir’s grand designs for the UK health­care sec­tor. First, recall how Palan­tir man­aged to get gov­ern­ment con­tracts to help mon­i­tor the COVID out­break. And not just with the CDC in the US. As of April of 2020, Palan­tir was work­ing with over a dozen gov­ern­ments in assist­ing their COVID response, includ­ing the UK’s Nation­al Health Ser­vice (NHS). Palantir’s NHS con­tract involved using Palantir’s Foundry plat­form to help the NHS deter­mine cur­rent occu­pan­cy lev­els at hos­pi­tals, down to the num­ber and type of beds, as well as the capac­i­ty of acci­dent and emer­gency, depart­ments and wait­ing times. Also recall how Palan­tir also decid­ed to qui­et­ly expand its foot­print in the UK health­care sec­tor by secret­ly buy­ing UK health data firms, and even offered the founders of the acquired firms extra sweet deals if the founders agreed to shift their data and ser­vices to Palan­tir’s Foundry plat­form. Palan­tir clear­ly has big plans for get­ting its hands on UK health­care sec­tor data.

And now here’s the update: Palan­tir was just award­ed the largest IT con­tract in the NHS’s his­to­ry. A £480m plan to build a “fed­er­at­ed data plat­form” (FPD), that will merge the med­ical data cur­rent­ly resid­ing in sep­a­rate ‘silos’ scat­tered across the UK health­care sec­tor. In oth­er words, Palan­tir is poten­tial­ly gain­ing access to almost all health­care data in the UK.

The con­tract is for 5 years, although it’s hard to imag­ine that con­tract not being extend­ed indef­i­nite­ly should it be a suc­cess. Inter­est­ing­ly, it sounds like there’s one glar­ing Achilles heel in the plan that could doom it, sim­i­lar to the two pre­vi­ous doomed attempts to merge the UK’s health­care data under one umbrel­la: pub­lic trust. Because patients will need to opt-in to the sys­tem, and if enough peo­ple choose not to do so over pri­va­cy con­cerns the whole point of the project is moot. That’s part of the arguably scan­dalous nature of this deci­sion. As David Davis, the Tory for­mer Brex­it sec­re­tary, put it, “Blunt­ly, it is the wrong com­pa­ny to be put in charge of our pre­cious data resource. Even if it behaved prop­er­ly, nobody would trust it.”

Pub­lic advo­cates are already rais­ing alarms about this deci­sion, with Sam Smith, of the cam­paign group Med­Con­fi­den­tial, warn­ing, “NHS Eng­land expects to copy all data from the NHS into Palan­tir and then get pub­lic sup­port for doing so after­wards. The pub­lic may say no.” Inter­est­ing­ly, a spokesper­son for the Depart­ment of Health and Social Care assured the pub­lic that, “Patients’ data has and always will remain under the full con­trol and pro­tec­tion of the NHS, and it will not be accessed by the com­pa­ny that makes the soft­ware.” So the UK gov­ern­ment is insist­ing that Palan­tir won’t “access” any of the NHS data, which is the kind of lan­guage that sug­gests Palan­tir will pos­sess the data but just not “access” it.

There’s anoth­er per­son who inad­ver­tent­ly raised more alarms back in Jan­u­ary: Peter Thiel, who gave an inter­view where he called the UK pub­lic’s sup­port for the NHS “Stock­holm Syn­drome” and called for the mass pri­va­ti­za­tion of the UK health­care sec­tor. Palan­tir pro­ceed­ed to issue state­ments about how Thiel’s views are pri­vate and not reflec­tive of the com­pa­ny’s views.

Ok, first, here’s the report from last month about the NHS award­ing the giant £480m con­tract to Palan­tir, the largest IT con­tract the NHS his­to­ry:

The Guardian

NHS Eng­land gives key role in han­dling patient data to US spy tech firm Palan­tir

Exclu­sive: Com­pa­ny that works with intel­li­gence ser­vices wins £480m con­tract in joint bid with Accen­ture

Denis Camp­bell Health pol­i­cy edi­tor
Mon 20 Nov 2023 02.00 EST
Last mod­i­fied on Mon 20 Nov 2023 18.01 EST

The NHS is to hand a key role in han­dling patient data and share of a £480m con­tract to the US spy tech­nol­o­gy firm Palan­tir this week, the Guardian can reveal.

NHS Eng­land is set to con­firm that Palantir’s joint bid with pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices com­pa­ny Accen­ture to oper­ate the NHS’s new “fed­er­at­ed data plat­form” (FDP) has been suc­cess­ful.

It is prepar­ing to make an announce­ment on Tues­day that is like­ly to spark fierce debate about the safe­ty of patient data, pub­lic trust in the NHS and Palantir’s suit­abil­i­ty to be involved in the FDP. The con­struc­tion of the plat­form is the biggest IT con­tract the NHS has ever award­ed.

The con­tract will be for five years but could be extend­ed to sev­en.

The plat­form is designed to help indi­vid­ual hos­pi­tal trusts and NHS inte­grat­ed care sys­tems – region­al group­ings of trusts – share infor­ma­tion and “talk” to each oth­er more eas­i­ly.

...

Palan­tir is best known for its work with intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary agen­cies in the US, UK and else­where, such as the CIA. The firm gained a foothold in the NHS in March 2020 when, at the government’s invi­ta­tion, it began analysing huge amounts of health ser­vice data to help with the offi­cial response to the unfold­ing Covid pan­dem­ic.

...

NHS Eng­land also received bids for the FDP from Quan­texa, a British com­pa­ny, in tan­dem with IBM, and from Ora­cle Cern­er. Palan­tir already helps the NHS process data and works for the UK Min­istry of Defence.

The British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, the doc­tors’ union, recent­ly wrote to the then health sec­re­tary, Steve Bar­clay, detail­ing a num­ber of seri­ous con­cerns involv­ing pri­va­cy and ethics, about both the FDP and Palan­tir in par­tic­u­lar.

In a Com­mons debate this month David Davis, the for­mer Brex­it sec­re­tary, said Palantir’s close rela­tion­ship with the CIA meant that “it is the wrong com­pa­ny to put in charge of our pre­cious data resource. Even if it behaved per­fect­ly, nobody would trust it,” he told MPs.

In a recent blog­post, Prof Sir Stephen Powis, the med­ical direc­tor for NHS Eng­land, and oth­er senior staff explained that the FDP “will enable NHS organ­i­sa­tions to bring togeth­er oper­a­tional data, cur­rent­ly stored in sep­a­rate sys­tems, to sup­port staff to access the infor­ma­tion they need in one safe and secure envi­ron­ment”.

They added: “This could be the num­ber of beds in a hos­pi­tal, the size of wait­ing lists [for] elec­tive care ser­vices or the avail­abil­i­ty of med­ical sup­plies.”

Palan­tir under­took a sus­tained lob­by­ing cam­paign to win the con­tract. It hired the con­sul­tan­cy firm Glob­al Coun­sel and ben­e­fit­ed from the help of sev­er­al well-con­nect­ed key play­ers there, includ­ing ex-Tory health min­is­ter Nico­la Black­wood and Matthew Swindells, a for­mer deputy chief exec­u­tive of NHS Eng­land, the New York Times report­ed in Sep­tem­ber.

———–

“NHS Eng­land gives key role in han­dling patient data to US spy tech firm Palan­tir” by Denis Camp­bell; The Guardian; 11/20/2023

“It is prepar­ing to make an announce­ment on Tues­day that is like­ly to spark fierce debate about the safe­ty of patient data, pub­lic trust in the NHS and Palantir’s suit­abil­i­ty to be involved in the FDP. The con­struc­tion of the plat­form is the biggest IT con­tract the NHS has ever award­ed.”

The con­struc­tion of a new “fed­er­at­ed data plat­form” (FPD). It’s the biggest IT con­tract in NHS his­to­ry, award­ed to Palan­tir and Accen­ture. Sus­tained lob­by­ing works:

...
NHS Eng­land is set to con­firm that Palantir’s joint bid with pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices com­pa­ny Accen­ture to oper­ate the NHS’s new “fed­er­at­ed data plat­form” (FDP) has been suc­cess­ful.

...

The con­tract will be for five years but could be extend­ed to sev­en.

The plat­form is designed to help indi­vid­ual hos­pi­tal trusts and NHS inte­grat­ed care sys­tems – region­al group­ings of trusts – share infor­ma­tion and “talk” to each oth­er more eas­i­ly.

...

Palan­tir is best known for its work with intel­li­gence and mil­i­tary agen­cies in the US, UK and else­where, such as the CIA. The firm gained a foothold in the NHS in March 2020 when, at the government’s invi­ta­tion, it began analysing huge amounts of health ser­vice data to help with the offi­cial response to the unfold­ing Covid pan­dem­ic.

...

Palan­tir under­took a sus­tained lob­by­ing cam­paign to win the con­tract. It hired the con­sul­tan­cy firm Glob­al Coun­sel and ben­e­fit­ed from the help of sev­er­al well-con­nect­ed key play­ers there, includ­ing ex-Tory health min­is­ter Nico­la Black­wood and Matthew Swindells, a for­mer deputy chief exec­u­tive of NHS Eng­land, the New York Times report­ed in Sep­tem­ber.
...

And note the warn­ing from for­mer Brex­it sec­re­tary David Davis: even if Palan­tir behaved com­plete­ly eth­i­cal­ly, its bad rep­u­ta­tion alone could kill the via­bil­i­ty of the plat­form. Patients have to agree to share their data with this new FPD plat­form. If that does­n’t hap­pen due to patient con­cerns, the project will be a fail­ure:

...
The British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, the doc­tors’ union, recent­ly wrote to the then health sec­re­tary, Steve Bar­clay, detail­ing a num­ber of seri­ous con­cerns involv­ing pri­va­cy and ethics, about both the FDP and Palan­tir in par­tic­u­lar.

In a Com­mons debate this month David Davis, the for­mer Brex­it sec­re­tary, said Palantir’s close rela­tion­ship with the CIA meant that “it is the wrong com­pa­ny to put in charge of our pre­cious data resource. Even if it behaved per­fect­ly, nobody would trust it,” he told MPs.
...

So what are the actu­al­ly data pri­va­cy risks asso­ci­at­ed with this deci­sion? Is Palan­tir gain­ing access to all sorts of med­ical details about Britain’s pop­u­la­tion? Yes, accord­ing to Sam Smith, of the cam­paign group Med­Con­fi­den­tial, who warns that,j “NHS Eng­land expects to copy all data from the NHS into Palan­tir and then get pub­lic sup­port for doing so after­wards. The pub­lic may say no.” On the oth­er hand, a spokesper­son from the Depart­ment of Health and Social Care insists that, “Patients’ data has and always will remain under the full con­trol and pro­tec­tion of the NHS, and it will not be accessed by the com­pa­ny that makes the soft­ware.” So we have patient advo­cates warn­ing about the copy­ing of patient data to Palan­tir’s sys­tems while the NHS is assur­ing the pub­lic that Palan­tir won’t “access” that data. It’s the kind of pub­lic state­ment that sure sounds like Palan­tir will indeed have access to the data, but has promised that it won’t actu­al­ly do so:

The Guardian

Patients may shun new NHS data store over pri­va­cy fears, doc­tors warn

BMA rais­es con­cerns with min­is­ter about planned data plat­form, which could be run by US firm Palan­tir

Denis Camp­bell Health pol­i­cy edi­tor
Fri 10 Nov 2023 11.50 EST
Last mod­i­fied on Fri 10 Nov 2023 14.37 EST

Patients fear that their per­son­al infor­ma­tion may be mis­used by the NHS’s new data store, espe­cial­ly if the US spy tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Palan­tir runs it, doc­tors’ lead­ers have warned min­is­ters.

The planned cre­ation of the “fed­er­at­ed data plat­form” (FDP) has prompt­ed con­cerns about pri­va­cy and trust in the NHS and sug­ges­tions that sus­pi­cion around it will lead patients to refuse to share their data.

...

The health ser­vice is wide­ly expect­ed to award the con­tract to Palan­tir, a con­tro­ver­sial data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny with close ties to the CIA and the Pen­ta­gon, despite Con­ser­v­a­tive, Labour and Lib­er­al Demo­c­rat politi­cians voic­ing unease about the its suit­abil­i­ty.

The British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (BMA) has writ­ten to Steve Bar­clay, the health sec­re­tary, set­ting out a range of “seri­ous con­cerns” about the FDP, includ­ing that an alleged lack of pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion and of vet­ting of bid­ders on “eth­i­cal” grounds may encour­age patients to shun it.

Dr Lat­i­fa Patel, the chair of the BMA’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive body, said in the let­ter that the FDP could end up falling vic­tim to the same lack of sup­port from the pub­lic and doc­tors that sank the NHS’s last two attempts to pull an array of patient data togeth­er into one place.

“The pub­lic and the pro­fes­sion have not been ade­quate­ly con­sult­ed and reas­sured and the scope and scale of the pro­gramme do not appear to have been suf­fi­cient­ly estab­lished,” she said.

“It is not appar­ent that a full and con­sid­ered eth­i­cal review has been car­ried out against all poten­tial ven­dors, and in the space left by this inac­tion, spec­u­la­tion about the role, pur­pose and scope of Palan­tir, as well as their exist­ing involve­ment with­in the NHS data archi­tec­ture, has cul­ti­vat­ed fear among patients of how their con­fi­den­tial data will be han­dled.”

Doc­tors and patients need to know that “sen­si­tive and con­fi­den­tial patient data will not be used for com­mer­cial gain”, she said. “It is imper­a­tive that reas­sur­ance be giv­en to patients and our pro­fes­sion as soon as pos­si­ble to stem the num­ber of peo­ple choos­ing to opt out of data shar­ing. Far from cre­at­ing a plat­form that will sup­port deci­sion-mak­ing, the con­tin­u­a­tion of this pro­gramme with­out full and prop­er pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion stands to dam­age the NHS.”

...

In a par­lia­men­tary debate this week, David Davis, the Tory for­mer Brex­it sec­re­tary, warned against Palan­tir being award­ed the con­tract. He told MPs: “Blunt­ly, it is the wrong com­pa­ny to be put in charge of our pre­cious data resource. Even if it behaved prop­er­ly, nobody would trust it.”

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayn­er; the Labour for­mer health min­is­ter Philip Hunt and the Lib Dem peer Sal Brin­ton have also voiced unease.

Sam Smith, of the cam­paign group Med­Con­fi­den­tial, said: “NHS Eng­land expects to copy all data from the NHS into Palan­tir and then get pub­lic sup­port for doing so after­wards. The pub­lic may say no.”

Ming Tang, NHS England’s chief data offi­cer, sought to reas­sure peo­ple about the FDP’s role and secu­ri­ty when she spoke last week at the dig­i­tal health AI and data con­fer­ence. “Everyone’s got data con­cerns and there­fore [con­cerns about] trust in the plat­forms that we’re using, who’s pro­vid­ing those plat­forms and whether some­thing bad’s going to hap­pen to the data,” she said in remarks report­ed by the Health Ser­vice Jour­nal.

But she denied that the infor­ma­tion held by the FDP would be “a mas­sive data lake” and reject­ed com­par­isons between it and care.data, one of the NHS’s two pre­vi­ous failed big data projects.

The Depart­ment of Health and Social Care said more joined-up data would improve NHS care. “That’s why the NHS is cur­rent­ly con­duct­ing a pro­cure­ment process for a sup­pli­er of the fed­er­at­ed data plat­form (FDP), which will be used to con­nect exist­ing data to help local health teams bet­ter pri­ori­tise wait­ing lists, man­age the­atre capac­i­ty and iden­ti­fy their staffing needs. This process has not yet con­clud­ed,” a spokesper­son said.

“Patients’ data has and always will remain under the full con­trol and pro­tec­tion of the NHS, and it will not be accessed by the com­pa­ny that makes the soft­ware.”

————-

“Patients may shun new NHS data store over pri­va­cy fears, doc­tors warn” by Denis Camp­bell; The Guardian; 11/10/2023

“The British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion (BMA) has writ­ten to Steve Bar­clay, the health sec­re­tary, set­ting out a range of “seri­ous con­cerns” about the FDP, includ­ing that an alleged lack of pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion and of vet­ting of bid­ders on “eth­i­cal” grounds may encour­age patients to shun it.”

A lack of pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion or vet­ting of bid­ders on “eth­i­cal” grounds. Yeah, that’s not exact­ly how you win over a skep­ti­cal pub­lic. But that’s the deci­sion the con­ser­v­a­tive UK gov­ern­ment made. And then we get this warn­ing from
Sam Smith of Med­Con­fi­den­tial about plans to copy NHS data into Palan­tir’s sys­tems cou­pled with assur­ances from NHS that Palan­tir won’t “access” the data. It’s the kind of set up that basi­cal­ly puts Palan­tir and the NHS into a “trust us, we won’t abuse this data” posi­tion. Which is rather prob­lem­at­ic giv­en the untrust­wor­thy nature of Palan­tir’s lead­er­ship:

...
Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayn­er; the Labour for­mer health min­is­ter Philip Hunt and the Lib Dem peer Sal Brin­ton have also voiced unease.

Sam Smith, of the cam­paign group Med­Con­fi­den­tial, said: “NHS Eng­land expects to copy all data from the NHS into Palan­tir and then get pub­lic sup­port for doing so after­wards. The pub­lic may say no.”

...

The Depart­ment of Health and Social Care said more joined-up data would improve NHS care. “That’s why the NHS is cur­rent­ly con­duct­ing a pro­cure­ment process for a sup­pli­er of the fed­er­at­ed data plat­form (FDP), which will be used to con­nect exist­ing data to help local health teams bet­ter pri­ori­tise wait­ing lists, man­age the­atre capac­i­ty and iden­ti­fy their staffing needs. This process has not yet con­clud­ed,” a spokesper­son said.

“Patients’ data has and always will remain under the full con­trol and pro­tec­tion of the NHS, and it will not be accessed by the com­pa­ny that makes the soft­ware.”
...

And that brings us to the fol­low­ing piece from Jan­u­ary of this year about Peter Thiel’s thoughts on the direc­tion the UK should go in reform­ing its health­care sys­tem. Thoughts that pre­dictably revolve around mass pri­va­ti­za­tion and a reliance on “mar­ket mech­a­nisms” and dereg­u­la­tion:

The Tele­graph

Britain’s affec­tion for the NHS is Stock­holm syn­drome, says bil­lion­aire

Peter Thiel, a tech entre­pre­neur, says peo­ple need to ditch the view that the health ser­vice is the ‘most won­der­ful thing in the world’

Ewan Somerville 18 Jan­u­ary 2023 • 9:01pm

Britain’s affec­tion for the NHS is akin to “Stock­holm syn­drome”, the bil­lion­aire tech entre­pre­neur Peter Thiel has told the Oxford Union.

The ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist, whose data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies Inc is vying for a £480 mil­lion NHS data con­tract, warned that “the NHS makes peo­ple sick”.

“The first step is to get out of the Stock­holm syn­drome,” the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist said, adding that it needs “mar­ket mech­a­nisms” to fix it, includ­ing pri­vatis­ing parts of it, avoid­ing rationing and loos­en­ing reg­u­la­tions.

“In the­o­ry, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” Mr Thiel said dur­ing a ques­tion and answer ses­sion with stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford’s 200-year-old debat­ing soci­ety on Mon­day.

“In prac­tice, you have to some­how make it all back­wards-com­pat­i­ble in all these ridicu­lous British ways.”

‘The NHS makes peo­ple sick’

The Pay­pal co-founder said that British peo­ple need­ed to ditch the view that the NHS is “the most won­der­ful thing in the world” and under­stand it as an “iatro­genic” insti­tu­tion, a term that refers to med­ical treat­ment caus­ing ill­ness.

“High­ways cre­ate traf­fic jams, wel­fare cre­ates pover­ty, schools make peo­ple dumb and the NHS makes peo­ple sick,” Mr Thiel, a major donor to Don­ald Trump’s 2016 US elec­tion cam­paign, added.

Palantir’s Foundry soft­ware was used dur­ing the Covid pan­dem­ic to track the take-up of vac­cinesand has been used to help man­age the soar­ing back­log of patients wait­ing for elec­tive surg­eries.

A spokesman for the com­pa­ny told Bloomberg: “Peter Thiel was speak­ing as a pri­vate indi­vid­ual and his com­ments do not in any way reflect the views of Palan­tir.

...

NHS ordered to ‘tur­bo-charge’ use of pri­vate sec­tor

It comes as the NHS has been ordered by Rishi Sunak, the Prime Min­is­ter, to “tur­bo-charge” use of the pri­vate sec­tor to help clear record wait­ing lists, as pres­sures on the health ser­vice mount.

A new task­force, bring­ing togeth­er inde­pen­dent hos­pi­tal lead­ers and NHS offi­cials, is exam­in­ing how to sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand use of the pri­vate sec­tor and give patients more choice over where they receive treat­ment.

...

———–

“Britain’s affec­tion for the NHS is Stock­holm syn­drome, says bil­lion­aire” by Ewan Somerville; The Tele­graph; 01/18/2023

“The ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist, whose data ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny Palan­tir Tech­nolo­gies Inc is vying for a £480 mil­lion NHS data con­tract, warned that “the NHS makes peo­ple sick”.”

Yes, Peter Thiel made these com­ments at the same time Palan­tir was lob­by­ing the UK gov­ern­ment over the con­tract it just won. Com­ments that includ­ed the notion that you can just “rip the whole thing from the ground and start over.”
Dis­man­tling the NHS and pri­va­tiz­ing it is the goal here. He’s not hid­ing his intent:

...
“The first step is to get out of the Stock­holm syn­drome,” the ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist said, adding that it needs “mar­ket mech­a­nisms” to fix it, includ­ing pri­vatis­ing parts of it, avoid­ing rationing and loos­en­ing reg­u­la­tions.

“In the­o­ry, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” Mr Thiel said dur­ing a ques­tion and answer ses­sion with stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford’s 200-year-old debat­ing soci­ety on Mon­day.

“In prac­tice, you have to some­how make it all back­wards-com­pat­i­ble in all these ridicu­lous British ways.”

‘The NHS makes peo­ple sick’

The Pay­pal co-founder said that British peo­ple need­ed to ditch the view that the NHS is “the most won­der­ful thing in the world” and under­stand it as an “iatro­genic” insti­tu­tion, a term that refers to med­ical treat­ment caus­ing ill­ness.

“High­ways cre­ate traf­fic jams, wel­fare cre­ates pover­ty, schools make peo­ple dumb and the NHS makes peo­ple sick,” Mr Thiel, a major donor to Don­ald Trump’s 2016 US elec­tion cam­paign, added.

...

A spokesman for the com­pa­ny told Bloomberg: “Peter Thiel was speak­ing as a pri­vate indi­vid­ual and his com­ments do not in any way reflect the views of Palan­tir.
...

And, of course, this is all hap­pen­ing the con­text of a ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive UK gov­ern­ment that, itself, shares Thiel’s pri­va­ti­za­tion goals. It’s not hard to see why the UK pub­lic, suf­fer­ing from the ‘Stock­holm Syn­drome’ of lik­ing pub­lic health care it seems, would be para­noid:

...
It comes as the NHS has been ordered by Rishi Sunak, the Prime Min­is­ter, to “tur­bo-charge” use of the pri­vate sec­tor to help clear record wait­ing lists, as pres­sures on the health ser­vice mount.

A new task­force, bring­ing togeth­er inde­pen­dent hos­pi­tal lead­ers and NHS offi­cials, is exam­in­ing how to sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand use of the pri­vate sec­tor and give patients more choice over where they receive treat­ment.
...

Will the new FPD be turned into a means for “tur­bo-charg­ing” this push towards pri­va­ti­za­tion? It’s not hard to imag­ine that’s part of the goal here. And not just a goal, but the goal. At this point, the UK gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate data giant tasked with merg­ing all of the NHS’s patient data are uni­fied in a desire to break the sys­tem and replace it with pri­vate actors. These are the enti­ties lead­ing this ‘reform’ agen­da. So we’ll see if the project suc­ceeds. But keep in mind that the enti­ties intent on break­ing and replac­ing the UK’s health­care sys­tem may not be super unhap­py if the project fails. They have big­ger, bold­er ‘reforms’ in mind. The kind of ‘reforms’ that will be a lot eas­i­er to imple­ment if there’s mass fail­ure first.