The Nectar project offers ‘advanced data analysis’ using a wide range of sensitive personal information
A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.
Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.
Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.
The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.
Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.
Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.
Back when the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK turned out to have even more pervasive civil society surveillance than the US, and whist in the US the result of the revelations was some walking back of the surveillance, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, quietly kicked out the editor of the newspaper who brought out the story and the Press never talked about the gigantic surveillance aparatus in the UK ever again.
So I have zero surprise that they’re doing this and this is probably not even the whole tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the tip of the iceberg given the scale of surveillance over there.
Simply a way to pump public tax money into the private sector and will quietly be dropped when the well runs dry in the way the National Programme for IT pumped £12bn into an NHS patient record system that was not even close to fit for purpose and ignored by staff.
So Palantir will be the irl Umbrella Corp.
Im sure USA is already watching every nation in real time.
Snowden bro. He already showed that the five eyes countries all spy on their citizens.
They can’t, that’s why they ask their neighbor to send them their surveillance data of yours.
It’s sad everyone just lets it go on.
I presume that, up until this point, the UK wasn’t intentionally paying them for the privilege
