The corporate that aspires to be inside “each missile,… each drone,” together with, it appears, these belonging to the Israeli Defence Forces, is now working the affected person knowledge platform of the world’s second largest public well being care system.
The Rishi Sunak authorities this week lastly introduced its determination, presumably made way back, handy the administration of all NHS England affected person information to Palantir, a tech firm whose consumer listing contains the US navy, intelligence companies and ICE, in addition to the armed forces of the UK, Israel and different western international locations. The five-year contract between NHS England — the non-departmental authorities physique that runs the Nationwide Well being Service in England — and Palantir is value £360 million ($450 million), however that determine might rise as excessive as £480 million ($600 million) if, as anticipated, it’s prolonged by two additional years.
That’s some huge cash for an organization that, like so many different Silicon Valley giants, is but to publish a single annual revenue in its 20 years of operations. Extra worthwhile nonetheless is the NHS’ affected person knowledge system, which is the most important repository of well being knowledge on the earth. As WIRED UOk journal reported in 2019, earlier than Palantir had even signed its first contract with the NHS, Amazon, Google and the remainder of Silicon Valley all wished to get their palms on the information trove. Unsurprisingly, sufferers had been much less eager on the concept:
Cautious use of well being knowledge might save lives, lower prices of delivering well being care and even grow to be a pleasant little earner for the NHS – certainly, an EY evaluation that’s steadily touted by the federal government suggests opening up the vaults might earn the underfunded public well being organisation as a lot as £9.6 billion yearly. However the tradeoffs could possibly be our privateness, letting massive tech additional monetise drugs, and locking hospitals and clinics into costly tech programs that may price us extra in the long term.
“Ripping the Entire [of the NHS] from the Floor”
The £360 million deal grants Palantir and its 4 companions, Accenture, PwC, NECS and Carnall Farrar, accountability for overhauling and managing that system. The federal government’s determination to choose Palantir could not have come as a shock to shut observers — greater than a yr in the past we reported that NHS England had quietly instructed NHS Digital to assemble affected person knowledge from NHS hospitals and extract it to its knowledge platform, which relies on Palantir’s Foundry enterprise knowledge administration platform — however that doesn’t make it any much less controversial.
This can be a firm whose co-founder and present chairman of the board, Peter Thiel, lately described the British public’s affection for the NHS as “Stockholm Syndrome.” Talking in an Oxford Union debate, he stated the nation “might rip the entire thing from the bottom and begin over” (versus the gradual demise that successive UK governments have been subjecting it to), and that British individuals wanted to cease considering of the NHS as “essentially the most fantastic factor on the earth.”
This comes from a person who makes a lot of his cash from the nationwide safety state, pens homages to Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and is a member of the Bilderberg Membership’s steering committee. Palantir, the corporate he co-founded and whose board he nonetheless chairs, is likely one of the darkest corporations within the tech sphere, which is saying so much. From my earlier publish, NHS to Use US “Spy-Tech” Agency Palantir’s Platform to Extract Affected person Information With out Affected person Consent:
Named after the “seeing stones” utilized in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir was arrange in 2003 with seed cash from the CIA’s enterprise capital arm, In-Q-Tel (IQT). It is likely one of the darkest corporations within the tech sphere. Whereas it’s making important inroads within the company world, its fundamental line of enterprise is to offer data-mining expertise to help US navy operations, mass surveillance, and predictive policing. Its expertise can also be utilized by ICE to establish unlawful migrants earlier than detaining and deporting them.
When, in 2018, hundreds of Google staff refused to take part in Challenge Maven, a secret Pentagon-funded AI pilot program aimed on the unmanned operation of aerial automobiles, the challenge was taken up by Palantir. Critics warn that the expertise might pave the way in which to autonomous weapons that determine who to focus on with out human enter. In February 2021, Palantir’s chief working officer boasted to buyers that Palantir was driving in the direction of being “inside of each missile, inside of each drone.”
Proper now, the corporate is offering technical and ethical help to Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza, stories Center East Eye:
In a social media publish on 12 October, it stated: “Sure sorts of evil can solely be fought with pressure. Palantir stands with Israel.”
In a letter to shareholders issued on 2 November, the corporate stated: “We’re one of some corporations on the earth to face up and announce our help for Israel, which stays steadfast.”
Saying the corporate’s third-quarter income on the identical day, Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief government and a co-founder of the corporate, stated: “I’m proud that we’re supporting Israel in each method we are able to”…
Talking to Fox Enterprise earlier this month, Joe Lonsdale, one other of Palantir’s co-founders, stated Israel was “doing what it has to do and eliminating the dangerous guys” and “we are attempting to maintain the great guys armed and forward”.
Lonsdale stated: “After we had been constructing Palantir we truly learnt so much from the Israelis. They’re fairly good at what they do and one in every of my proudest moments was when Israel began working with Palantir. So Palantir helps Israel do a number of issues too.”
Center East Eye requested Palantir what expertise or help it was offering to Israel’s armed forces however had not acquired a response on the time of publication.
Sufferers’ Fears
Apart from serving to the “good guys” in Israel get rid of the “dangerous guys” in Gaza, Palantir will quickly be utilizing its Foundry working system to assist deal with the NHS’s existential disaster, or no less than so we’re result in consider. That disaster features a ready listing for elective therapy that has nearly tripled over the previous decade, to 7.7 million. In keeping with NHS England’s Nationwide Director for Transformation Dr Vin Diwakar, the platform will assist “sort out ready instances, be part of up affected person care and make the well being service sustainable for the longer term”.
However it’ll additionally lead to but extra personal sector involvement in important NHS processes — one thing successive British authorities have been encouraging because the Nineties. One of many individuals who started this lengthy strategy of piecemeal privatisation is former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in 2003 informed a gathering of personal healthcare executives that he wished to open the entire of the NHS to outdoors competitors. In July this yr, he urged the federal government to additional develop the position of the personal sector within the NHS whereas encouraging sufferers to take up personal healthcare gives.
The businesses concerned on this newest deal, notably Palantir, Accenture, the disgraced accountancy agency previously often called Arthur Andersen that’s carefully concerned within the World Financial Discussion board’s Digital Transformation Initiative, and the scandal-tarnished massive 4 auditor PwC, hardly encourage belief and confidence. Many NHS sufferers and workers members have critical reservations. A living proof: Dr Latifa Patel, chair of the British Medical Affiliation (BMA), who wrote the next on BMA’s :
The choice to award Palantir, a big US-based multinational, the contract for the Federated Information Platform – software program which is designed to deliver collectively present NHS affected person knowledge programs – is deeply worrying. Having made our issues plain for a number of months on this, and having written to the secretary of state of well being and social care and urged for a rethink, our fears about how affected person data could also be used and dealt with going ahead haven’t diminished.
“This contract is valued at an eye-watering quantity – cash which is desperately wanted for direct care to assist sufferers proper now, and different well being and social care providers which stay in such disaster, to not point out the continued workforce shortages. Going ahead, we can not and should not permit affected person knowledge to be exploited. We have to know simply how confidential affected person knowledge will likely be used inside this knowledge platform and the extent of the position that Palantir, which has industrial curiosity on this determination, will play.
Sufferers aren’t any much less sceptical. NHS England argues that working with Palantir shouldn’t trigger sufferers concern as a result of the knowledge it’ll share is “pseudonymous” or stripped of figuring out particulars. Nevertheless, because the sufferers’ group Sufferers 4 NHS famous in an August communique, “it’s not arduous to piece collectively anonymised well being information in a method that may result in sufferers being recognized.”
In June, a ballot from YouGov discovered that just about half of adults (48%) in England who haven’t but opted out of the information platform are more likely to do so, ought to the platform be launched and run by a non-public firm. In keeping with a report revealed by Medical doctors’ Affiliation UK, “if something like that quantity truly select to train their Nationwide Information Choose–Out, it’ll have a catastrophic influence on the standard of NHS knowledge, a particularly treasured British well being useful resource.”
In gentle of the following trade between Palantir CEO Alex Karp and BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire, you’ll be able to hardly blame the sufferers for desirous to decide out:
Alex Karp: Nearly each different personal firm on the earth moreover my firm will take that knowledge and switch it to any person else. And so in the event you’re in England you assume that when a non-public firm touches your knowledge, they’re going to make use of it for his or her functions.
Victoria Derbyshire: Sure.
AK: Palantir doesn’t do this…
VD: However you would possibly sooner or later.
AK: We’ve by no means finished it in 20 years…
VD: Positive however chances are you’ll sooner or later…
AK: Effectively, to start with we wouldn’t even be capable to… The way in which our product is about up, I don’t even have entry to the information. Our product doesn’t permit us to do this…
VD: What I’m placing to you is that in the event you’ve acquired all that knowledge, as Medical doctors’ Affiliation UK says, a particularly treasured British useful resource in a single place, that opens the door sooner or later to it being bought. Appropriate?
AK: By the UK Authorities, not by me…
VD: You’ll be able to see why individuals are involved, then?
AK: Completely.
The present and former UK Governments have already proven they can’t be trusted with NHS sufferers’ knowledge. In the summertime of 2021, executives at NHS England got here up with an ingenious plan to digitally scrape the final observe knowledge of as much as 55 million sufferers and share it with any personal third events prepared to pay for it. NHS England allowed sufferers to decide out of the scheme; they only didn’t trouble telling them about it till three weeks earlier than the deadline, presumably as a result of if that they had, hundreds of thousands of sufferers would have opted out.
When the FT broke the story, a scandal erupted, particularly when it was revealed that the Authorities had already shared UK hospital knowledge and medical information with over 40 pharmaceutical, consultancy and knowledge corporations worldwide, together with McKinsey & Firm, KPMG, Novavax, AstraZeneca, Experian and firms co-founded by the Sackler household. NHS England officers responded by shelving the scheme, saying they wanted to give attention to reaching out to sufferers and reassuring them their knowledge is secure.
That, in fact, hasn’t occurred. As a substitute, they waited for the scandal to die down earlier than embarking on an much more egregious scheme — specifically, this one! And this time spherical, sufferers is not going to have the choice of opting out. After initially stating that participation can be voluntary in an FAQ in August, NHS England explicitly dominated out the potential of opting out when the doc was up to date in October. “Sufferers can solely decide out of sharing their knowledge for analysis and planning, not for direct affected person care,” it says. Open Democracy:
NHS England has rejected knowledge privateness campaigners’ calls to permit sufferers to decide out of getting their well being knowledge shared on the so-called Federated Information Platform. It claims this isn’t crucial as a result of sufferers’ knowledge will likely be anonymised and the platform will likely be used for “direct care” solely.
Conservative MP David Davis stated “that’s not adequate” and that the choice to award Palantir the contract “will show a mistake”.
“It’s nearly unattainable to anonymise well being knowledge merely due to the density of the information in our well being information and it being all too simple for that knowledge to be re-identified,” he added.
COVID-19 Pandemic: Excellent Entry Level
After making its bones within the navy, intelligence and surveillance trade complexes, Palantir started seeking to diversify its actions throughout a variety of company sectors, notably well being and life sciences. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the proper entry level whereas the NHS, boasting one of many richest centralised repositories of affected person knowledge on the planet, provided the proper prize.
In March 2020, the UK Authorities signed a take care of an assortment of personal tech corporations, together with Palantir, to assist run the NHS’s large COVID-19 “knowledge retailer,” which is now being upgraded into the federated knowledge platform. The corporate charged a mere £1 for its providers, which was sufficient to get its foot within the door. What was alleged to be a short-term association blossomed right into a two yr contract with the Division of Well being and Social Care, value as much as £23 million, to assist run the NHS’ database.
To attain its objectives, the corporate has deployed lobbying techniques honed within the US, because the New York Instances reported final month:
It has enlisted political figures, senior well being executives and a number of consulting corporations, in response to interviews with N.H.S. officers, trade insiders and other people concerned in Palantir’s operations. Final yr, after requests for proposals had been hunted for the £480 million contract, Palantir poached N.H.S. England’s deputy director of information providers and its synthetic intelligence director…
“Palantir’s in depth lobbying efforts within the U.Ok. are an apparent try and whitewash their background on the coronary heart of the world of espionage — with all its implications for moral habits and lack of transparency,” [Conservative MP David David] stated in a press release.
The revolving doorways have been swinging arduous and quick because the pandemic started. In 2021, quite a lot of former Palantir officers went on to work for the federal government. One in all them, Mike Spiers, joined the Division of Well being and Social Care in December 2020, six months after leaving Palantir, and would go on to grow to be the Chief of Employees, Deputy Director, to the COO of Covid Testing. In February this yr, the Mirror reported that Isaac Levido, a lobbyist introduced into Sunak’s interior circle to assist devise his election technique, was additionally lobbying on behalf of Palantir.
Palantir’s takeover of NHS knowledge providers has met sturdy resistance from sure quarters, which is anticipated to proceed within the nation’s courts. Dozens of civil society teams have kicked up a storm concerning the prospect of a lot extremely delicate private knowledge being dealt with by one US firm, particularly one so deeply embedded within the quickly rising mass surveillance trade.
“Is Palantir actually the sort of firm we wish on the very coronary heart of the Nationwide Well being Service?” asks Cori Crider, director of Foxglove, a marketing campaign group devoted to difficult the excesses of tech giants. “This can be a firm who, at the beginning of the pandemic, had no monitor document of working with healthcare workers. They’re not a healthcare firm. They weren’t a well being knowledge firm. They had been basically a tech firm who supported spies, police, the navy and border forces.”
In September 2021, the UK’s Division for Well being and Social Care was pressured to terminate a contract with Palantir over the administration of social care knowledge, following an enormous protest marketing campaign involving greater than 50 stress teams led by Foxglove. The transfer was taken as a tentative signal that the UK authorities could lastly be pivoting away from utilizing Palantir’s providers, no less than within the healthcare sector. That was clearly not the case.
