Re: <nettime> Becoming Infrastructure, Grabbing Power

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

[And here, same story in the UK. Not surprisingly the UK and the US are
the most enthusiastic in transferring money and data to the private
sector, but I guess continental Europe is not far behind. Thanks to Pit
for the work-around.]


On 11.05.20 20:54, Felix Stalder wrote:
> 
> I'm sure many of you have noted the co-incidence of Google's closing
>  down its smart city project in Toronto [1] and Andrew Cumo
> announcing a major partnership with Google to reinvent the state of
> New York post-Covid [2].



The inside story of how CIA-backed Palantir embedded itself in the NH…
By Margi Murphy, US Technology Reporter, San Francisco

archive.is /9DpTM

Britain’s battle against coronavirus has had plenty of heroes. Peter
Thiel may be the most unlikely one of all. The Trump-supporting Silicon
Valley billionaire is the founder of Palantir, a data crunching company
better known for its shadowy work for intelligence agencies including
MI5 and the CIA – and helping track down Osama bin Laden.

Palantir’s technology is used by BP to boost efficiency and by the US
and UK armed forces to wage war.

So when the NHS revealed that Palantir was building emergency data
mining tools to help Britain cope with the pandemic – for no fee – there
were understandable reservations. What might be expected in return?

“Palantir has a lot of toxic baggage with its contracts with Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the way in which its software is being
used,” says Phil Booth, founder of Med Confidential, a campaign group
focused on heath data privacy.

In reality, Palantir’s offer of help for the NHS should probably not
have come as a surprise.

The company has been courting the UK health service – and its £120bn
annual budget – for years and its software has already won a place on
the Government’s online catalogue for civil servants to pick from.

Until now, however, despite lucrative contracts with other government
departments and lengthy discussions, there had never been an NHS project
which Whitehall felt required Palantir’s software.

In the past few weeks, that has changed – in what Mr Thiel must view as
a victory for the chief of Palantir’s UK business: Louis Mosley.

The UK boss of the secretive CIA-backed data company which is helping
the NHS tackle coronavirus is Louis Mosley, the nephew of the former
motor racing boss Max Mosley and grandson of Sir Oswald Mosley, the
Telegraph understands.

With no official title on the website or social media presence, Mosley,
36,  who has previously been pictured in Tatler, has been leading the UK
office of the Silicon Valley company for almost three years.

The former Tory activist worked in academia and finance before taking
the reins at Palantir, which was founded by early Facebook-backer Peter
Thiel.

Mr Mosley is not listed on the company's most recent documents filed to
Companies House, which name as directors the former Foreign Office
advisor Sir Daniel Bethlehem, who is understood to have an independent
role overlooking corporate governance, and Alexander Carp, Palantir's
chief executive.

Software engineering companies often have a flat hierarchical structure
owing to the nature of collaborative, project-based work, however it is
unusual for a company of Palantir’s size not to announce who is running
its European hub and London office with 600 employees and is in control
of most of the research and development of its premier data mining
platform, Foundry.

It all began with an invitation from Boris Johnson in March. As the
pandemic hit, about two dozen leaders from the UK technology industry
were invited to No 10 to be asked to help.

Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary and mastermind of NHSX – the health
services’s technology arm – and Johnson’s adviser, Dominic Cummings,
have made no secret of their wish to boost the UK health system’s use of
cutting edge tools.

Cummings is a long-standing fan of Thiel’s, praising him on a blog back
in 2017. One of the least sexy, yet most critical, challenges was
integrating bits of data from hospitals, laboratories and factories so
that the Cabinet could get a better grasp of how the virus was spreading
– and make better decisions.

Also on the wishlist was better contact tracing and modelling to help
predict how the disease would evolve.

The companies pitched and within days Google, AWS, Microsoft, Palantir
and Faculty AI were asked to start work immediately.

For Palantir, that meant putting 40 engineers to work – for a nominal
fee of £1. For just over a month, the NHS has been using Palantir’s
Foundry software to bring together lab test results, hospital and supply
chain data to see which hospitals need beds, gear or ventilators.

It is possible that the contact tracing data from the NHS app being
trialled on the Isle of Wight could also be integrated, leading to
earlier predictions.

It’s fair to assume Palantir won’t keep offering its services for free
forever. After all, there are wages to be paid. And with its employees
receiving an average £220,000 per year according to records from 2019,
they do not come cheap.

Some believe that it is access to NHS data, among the most lucrative
data sets in the world, that is the real attraction here.

“Palantir is asking for £1 to send tens of software engineers,” says
Eerke Boiten, director of Cyber Technology Institute at De Montfort
University.

“If you look at their behaviour in the US they clearly do not see
themselves as a charity and they do not act like they have a social
conscience. So what’s the reason behind it?”

Palantir now has 600 employees in its London office. Foundry is largely
engineered here.

In the past, the political views of Thiel and Alexander Karp, the US
chief executive, who has described himself as a socialist, have proven
divisive. The company says politics is left at the door.

With winter coming – when the NHS is under maximum pressure – and the
threat of a second wave, UK health chiefs may need all the help they can
get. Just as Palantir saw coronavirus coming by calling in employees
from different countries, it might have predicted that it will be
embedded into our health system for the foreseeable future.

But it won’t be without a fight. “We must beware Palantir – and any
other data mining company – bearing gifts during a pandemic,” says
Ioannis Kouvakas, legal officer at Privacy International.

“Palantir’s welcome assurances must be verified once the pandemic is
over. This is the only way we can make sure that a public health crisis
will not turn into an opportunistic power grab.”

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