{"id":2122,"date":"2022-11-09T09:01:05","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T16:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=2122"},"modified":"2024-07-21T06:56:47","modified_gmt":"2024-07-21T13:56:47","slug":"nhs-hires-us-spy-tech-firm-palantir-to-extract-patient-data-without-patient-consent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2022\/11\/09\/nhs-hires-us-spy-tech-firm-palantir-to-extract-patient-data-without-patient-consent\/","title":{"rendered":"NHS Hires US \u201cSpy-Tech\u201d Firm Palantir to Extract Patient Data Without Patient Consent"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Peter Thiel’s Palantir<\/a> which is a globalist elite operation linked to intelligence and surveillance is in the works to have and manage all the medical data of the UK. This is a technocrat play for data and what they would like to do everyhwere and with everything, as technocracy is about using data to have technological elite manage everything, including you citizen. Consequently, when the data is locked down you won’t be able to avoid the future gene therapy injections, as the UK was pretty aggressive going door to door<\/a> on the current experimental gene therapy. As a side note, Peter Thiel’s venture capitalist firm supposedly received money from In-Q-Tel (CIA venture capital arm) to invest in Facebook as they didn’t want a direct link. So keep that in mind as you read about the data analysis firm Palantir connected to intelligence and the US military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Named after the \u201cseeing stones\u201d used in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>, Palantir was set up in 2003 with seed money from the CIA\u2019s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel (IQT). It is one of the darkest companies in the tech sphere. While it is making significant inroads in the corporate world, its main line of business is to provide data-mining technology to support US military operations, mass surveillance, and predictive policing. Its technology is also used by ICE to identify illegal migrants before detaining and deporting them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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As Cory Doctorow notes in his excellent post last month, How Palantir Will Steal the NHS, Palantir has essentially unfettered access to the capital markets, as well as the deep pockets of its founder, the \u201ccartoon villain\u201d Peter Thiel. While it is clear that good data management has a crucial role to play in the future of health and social care provision, Palantir\u2019s unshakeable commitment to proprietary, secretive software development methodologies makes it woefully ill-suited for NHS service provision:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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We have to judge our governments on their actions. And their actions to date \u2014 including NHS England\u2019s decision to grant custodianship of NHS patients\u2019 hospital data to Palantir without even informing patients, the US State Department\u2019s decision to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies unfettered access to more than 145 million Americans\u2019 personal data, and the US government\u2019s plans to share the biometric data of its citizens with dozens of other governments \u2014 speak of a whole different reality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/2022\/11\/nhs-hires-cia-linked-spy-tech-firm-palantir-to-extract-patient-data-without-patient-consent.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

By Nick Corbishley<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Palantir, with intimate ties to defense, intelligence and security industries around the world, seems set to play an even larger role in the UK\u2019s crisis-ridden National Health System (NHS).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last summer, as readers may recall<\/a>, executives at NHS England \u2014 the non-departmental government body that runs the National Health Service in England \u2014 came up with an ingenious plan to digitally scrape the general practice data of up to 55 million patients and share it with any private third parties willing to pay for it. NHS England allowed patients to opt out of the scheme; they just didn\u2019t bother telling them about it until three weeks before the deadline, presumably because if they had, millions of patients would have opted out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the FT finally broke the story, a scandal erupted. NHS England officials responded by shelving the scheme, saying they needed to focus on reaching out to patients and reassuring them their data is safe. But that hasn\u2019t happened. Instead, they have waited for the scandal to die down before embarking on an even more egregious scheme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time it is patient data from UK hospitals that is up for grabs. And patients will have no opt-out option. In fact, without even consulting patients, NHS England has instructed NHS Digital \u2014 which will soon be merged with NHS England as part of the UK\u2019s governments accelerated reforms<\/a> to the NHS\u2019 \u201ctech agenda\u201d \u2014 to gather patient data from NHS hospitals and extract it to its data platform, which is based on Palantir\u2019s Foundry enterprise data management platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pretext for taking such a step is that researching and analyzing patients\u2019 hospital data will help the NHS better understand and tackle the crisis in treatment waiting times resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. But the result will be yet more private-sector involvement in essential NHS processes. And in this case, the company being involved in those processes is one of the darkest in the tech universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Highly Coveted Prize<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NHS is the world\u2019s seventh largest employer. And it is home to one of the richest repositories of patient data on the planet. \u201cOne of the great requirements for health tech is a single health database,\u201d Damindu Jayaweera, head of technology research at UK investment bank Peel Hunt told<\/a> Investors\u2019 Chronicle<\/em>. \u201cThere are only two places as far as I know that digitise the data of the whole population from birth to death\u2026 China and the UK.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the FT<\/em> reported<\/a> earlier this year, Palantir aspires to become the<\/em> underlying data operating system for the NHS. To that end, it has already lured two senior NHS managers to its executive suites, including the former chief of artificial intelligence. It now has its sights set on the ultimate prize: a five-year, \u00a3360 million contract to manage the personal health data of millions of patients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Palantir\u2019s latest encroachment into NHS operations came to light thanks to the publication of board paper\u2019s just hours before NHS Digital\u2019s latest board meeting, on November 1. Those papers no longer seem to be accessible so I am relying on a report<\/a> published on Friday 4 by The Register<\/em>, a British technology news website, as well as a heavily detailed twitter thread<\/a> by Phil Booth of MedConfidential, a group campaigning for confidentiality and consent in health and social care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Booth, on page 158 of the board papers NHS England instructs NHS Digital to use Palantir Tech\u2019s Foundry platform to \u201ccollect patient-level identifiable [hospital] data pertaining to admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity from acute care settings on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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First, beginning on page 158, are some Directions that @NHSEngland<\/a> must know will be HIGHLY controversial \u2013 given they are telling @NHSDigital<\/a> to use @PalantirTech<\/a>‘s #Foundry<\/a> to collect *patient level identifiable data* from hospitals\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/PM4mEl5z2e<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Phil Booth (@EinsteinsAttic) November 1, 2022<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Following previous data debacles, both the NHS and UK government ministers had pledged that in future any patient data shared for research and analysis purposes would be anonymized. But now they are talking about using \u201cpseudonymized\u201d data, which is completely different. In 2014, the Information Commissioner\u2019s Office (ICO), the UK\u2019s independent regulatory office (national data protection authority) dealing with the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation, said the following<\/a> about pseudonymized data:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Pseudonymising personal data can reduce the risks to the data subjects and help you meet your data protection obligations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, pseudonymisation is effectively only a security measure. It does not change the status of the data as personal data. Recital 26 makes it clear that pseudonymised personal data remains personal data and within the scope of the UK GDPR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2026Personal data which have undergone pseudonymisation, which could be attributed to a natural person by the use of additional information should be considered to be information on an identifiable natural person\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In other words, says<\/a> Booth, \u201cwhile NHS England may want to ignore people\u2019s opt-outs from Research & Planning uses, and contorts itself to say their data\u2019s not \u2018confidential patient information\u2019, the law(s) says otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are also serious questions about who exactly will be doing the pseudonymisation, and who will hold the keys, says Booth: \u201cThere\u2019s a world of difference between an independent statutory Safe Haven (i.e. NHS Digital), NHS England which wants ALL the data to use for whatever it wants, and Palantir.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Dark Company<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Named after the \u201cseeing stones\u201d used in The Lord of the Rings<\/em>, Palantir was set up in 2003 with seed money from the CIA\u2019s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel (IQT). It is one of the darkest companies in the tech sphere. While it is making significant inroads in the corporate world, its main line of business is to provide data-mining technology to support US military operations, mass surveillance, and predictive policing. Its technology is also used by ICE to identify illegal migrants before detaining and deporting them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When, in 2018, thousands of Google employees refused to participate<\/a> in Project Maven, a secret Pentagon-funded AI pilot program aimed at the unmanned operation of aerial vehicles, the project was taken up by<\/a> Palantir. Critics warn that the technology could pave the way to autonomous weapons that decide who to target without human input. In February 2021, Palantir\u2019s chief operating officer boasted to investors that Palantir was driving towards being \u201cinside of every missile, inside of every drone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a company that deals in death on a daily basis but is also rapidly building a stake in the health and life services sector. During the early months of the pandemic it was one of a number of companies chosen to help collect, store, process and share data for the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) \u2014 a project that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned poses \u201ca grave threat to the data privacy of all Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other side of the pond, the UK Government signed a deal in March 2020 with an assortment of private tech firms, including Palantir, to help run the NHS\u2019s massive COVID-19 \u201cdata store\u201d. The company charged a mere \u00a31 for its services, but that was enough to get its foot in the floor. What was supposed to be a short-term arranged blossomed into a two year contract with the Department of Health and Social Care, worth up to \u00a323 million, to help run the NHS\u2019 massive database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Palantir\u2019s gathering takeover of NHS data services has met strong resistance. In September 2021, the UK\u2019s Department for Health and Social Care was forced to terminate a contract with Palantir over the management of social care data, following a massive protest campaign involving more than 50 groups. The move was taken as a tentative sign that the UK government may finally be pivoting away from using Palantir\u2019s services, at least in the healthcare sector. That is clearly not the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even if the UK government had made that pivot, Palantir had a back-up plan in place, as Bloomberg<\/em> reported<\/a> in late September. That plan was laid out by Palantir\u2019s regional head Louis Mosley in a Sept. 24 email entitled \u201cBuying our way in\u2026!\u201d, and it essentially involved \u201choovering up\u201d small businesses serving the NHS to \u201ctake a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Cory Doctorow notes in his excellent post last month, How Palantir Will Steal the NHS<\/a>, Palantir has essentially unfettered access to the capital markets, as well as the deep pockets of its founder, the \u201ccartoon villain\u201d Peter Thiel. While it is clear that good data management has a crucial role to play in the future of health and social care provision, Palantir\u2019s unshakeable commitment to proprietary, secretive software development methodologies makes it woefully ill-suited for NHS service provision:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Compare the NHS to Ben Goldacre\u2019s landmark \u201cBetter, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.gov.uk\/government\/publications\/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis\/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goldacre argues that the only way to unlock the medical insights in aggregate NHS patient data is with public software: an open and free \u201ctrusted research platform\u201d that anyone can audit and verify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the code for this platform would be public, NHS patient data would never leave it. Instead, researchers who wanted to investigate hypotheses about the effectiveness of different interventions would send queries to the platform and get results back \u2014 without ever touching the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a system that only works if it\u2019s hosted by democratically accountable public services \u2014 not by private actors accountable to their shareholders, and certainly not secretive companies whose primary expertise is in helping spy agencies conduct mass surveillance.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As Doctorow notes, most people in the UK do not want the NHS to be privatised. For them the NHS, founded in 1948 on the principles of free and equal access to medical treatment, is sacrosanct:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But while the British people oppose privatisation, the British investor class are slavering for it. Oligarchs love to loot public services, which is why the IMF is so adamant that the countries it \u201chelps\u201d sell off their public water, housing, even their roads and schools and museums\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[The NHS] has been subject to the death of a thousand literal cuts, as Tories and Labour alike have starved it of resources. More importantly, both parties have turned ever-larger chunks of the NHS over to private-sector looters who have taken over hospitals, services, record-keeping and more.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

An Even Bigger Picture<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is not just about the NHS. It is about our governments\u2019 role as guardians of our most precious data, including our health and biometric information. As governments, central banks and global corporations trip over each other to rush into existence digital identity programs and central bank digital currencies, that role is set to grow exponentially (unless, of course, we can stop them in their tracks).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the new digital age that is rapidly forming around us, citizens will be custodians of our own data. We will be the ones who get to decide which parts of our data get shared and with whom. At least that is what we are being told. But these are just words, and words can be hollow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have to judge our governments on their actions. And their actions to date \u2014 including NHS England\u2019s decision to grant custodianship of NHS patients\u2019 hospital data to Palantir without even informing patients, the US State Department\u2019s decision<\/a> to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies unfettered access to more than 145 million Americans\u2019 personal data, and the US government\u2019s plans<\/a> to share the biometric data of its citizens with dozens of other governments \u2014 speak of a whole different reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Thiel’s Palantir which is a globalist elite operation linked to intelligence and surveillance is in the works to have and manage all the medical data of the UK. This is a technocrat play for data and what they would like to do everyhwere and with everything, as technocracy is about using data to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-tech","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":6}},"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2122"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7981,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions\/7981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}