> 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?
It has to be something more valuable than a 'fee', What could that possibly be? I'll give you a huge hint.
We can recall what happened when DeepMind got involved with the NHS ~3 years ago and the result was illegal [0] and now Google is taking over their contracts [1]. There is only one thing that Palantir wants from this which is more than just money.
Like Max Mosley..."former racing motor boss"...okay, that is what he is known for :)
But we should probably call it what it is: corruption. For someone that is supposedly assisting the govt, they seem to employ a hell of a lot of civil servants from that inefficient govt...wonder why?
(This kind of corruption has completely exploded in the UK. It actually isn't politicians either, it is mostly civil servants...as in, the "Nudge Unit" that was spun out of govt and then won lots of contracts to do the exact same work for double the price).
TBF, Max Mosley isn't really involved in this, it is his nephew who is the focus of the story.
The Telegraph just likes to pitch the idea that who your parents are is important, if the story was in the Daily Mail it would tell you how much the houses of anyone mentioned were worth.
The grandfather is also notable. Sir Oswald Mosley led the BUF party -- the British Union of Fascists -- was imprisoned, politically disgraced, and lived much of the rest of his postwar life outside Britain.
Some flavour of the utter repellence of his character comes through in a famous exchange with Bertrand Russell, in which the latter elegantly but unequivocally rejects an invitation to debate:
Max Mosley worked for his father's political party. He's also well known for a salacious S&M sexual scandal (Mosley denied allegations it was Nazi-themed). One outcome was a successful lawsuit against Google suppressing search results associated with the case.
'Some believe that it is access to NHS data, among the most lucrative data sets in the world, that is the real attraction here'.
...“We must beware Palantir – and any other data mining company – bearing gifts during a pandemic,” says Ioannis Kouvakas, legal officer at Privacy International.
Yeah the bigger issue is similar to US Health and Human Services, where the basic consulting model was to take ownership of the core data pipelines & tools and ultimately own the org's data future. We basically don't engage with any org where palantir bought out the decision making. IMO most CIO/CTOs are losing the long-term relevance of their parents org if they give away their data future.
Not just a problem with Palantir; the biggest consulting orgs all lobby hard to displace internal ownership with themselves. Nowadays often a revolving door. Where NHS is on that journey, no idea.
Some of it is, but unfortunately, not what I'm talking about.
I'm less worried about spying (funny enough, I bet Palantir has better data privacy than most orgs) and FOIAs and more about IT collapse based on the digital transformation strategy lobbying.
US gov data pipelines are often managed by big private contractors, and in cases like Palantir, build them as well. The result is lock-in that's way worse than say Oracle DB's: both the DB + SW + projects end up owned by the contractor. Ex: a gov team once had to sue Palantir for the ability to get interop across some data/projects. Having been involved in seeing how sw gets selected, once a big consulting firm (and worse, one with custom sw) gets in, they grow and its hard to do anything that's not them. They bring in quick digital transform, but with the side-effect of slowly suffocating the org.
Most if not all of the useful data is publicly available.
It’s just painful to collect, organize, and make use out of.
Which is why there are always startups and companies like palantir that come along once in a while before the us realizes they are a waste and moves on.
They may have access to it, but how can they monitize it beyond services directly for the NHS?
Is it wrong to assume that just having access to the data does not mean Planatir can use it to benefit parties other than the NHS?
Based on the parties involved here, it’ll be used to control the outcome of elections to ensure the Tories keep in power forever. The guy running it, Mosley, is the grandson of Oswald Mosley - founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists - “Hooray for the blackshirts” and all that. He’s a “Tory activist”, which basically means he would like to see a fascist white ethnostate. I’m not exaggerating. This is who the Tories have become - the party of brexit, of isolationism, of eugenics, of corrupt in-dealing, arbitrary justice, and “hostile environments”.
Literally every name in there is someone associated with the far right.
There’s also prior form to this end - see the as yet unresolved and probably never to be resolved hoo-hah over Cambridge analytica.
I'm a lefty so perfectly open to believe bad things about the Tories, but this criticism is ridiculous.
> The guy running it, Mosley, is the grandson of Oswald Mosley
Sharing about a quarter of your genes with a leading fascist from two generations previously in a very different social and cultural time doesn't mean you're a fascist yourself. To say that who your grandfather was defines your views is a kind of genetic fascism itself.
A quick look at his Twitter feed shows retweets of Guardian articles and Labour MPs' posts. Hardly definitive, but he doesn't look like an extremist.
> He’s a “Tory activist”, which basically means he would like to see a fascist white ethnostate.
I'm sure there are a great many Tory activists with unpleasant views, but this doesn't follow at all.
No. I went to school with plenty of the clade now in power - one is a cabinet minister, another just an MP, others are Tory activists or were Tory MPs until the last election. The cabinet minister was the most profoundly racist and bigoted person in my year. I won’t repeat the kind of slurs he routinely came out with here, but I will say that he was kicked out of history, repeatedly, for saying “they got what they deserved”, when discussing the holocaust. The MP was suspended for a term for sexual assault. Yes, that’s anecdotal, but it speaks of the character of the type of person attracted to their ideology.
In more concrete terms, if you look at what is being said, privately and publicly, what is becoming policy, which dead cats are being thrown at the press, it is extremely worrying.
My godfather spoke out against them a few years ago when told to preside over a secret court. They destroyed him through the press. Cameron went on national TV to condemn him for being a paedophile apologist, when he’s absolutely no such thing, and the court transcripts from the supposed incident clearly show that the remarks ascribed to him were actually made by a police constable. His wife committed suicide in the aftermath, and his children fled the country as they were being threatened by the public and hounded by the gutter press. He is a shadow of the man he was.
I can't find any relevant comment by cameron accusing/condemning anyone for being a 'paedophile apologist'. Or anyone being a godfather so accused. It's difficult to evaluate such accusations without more info, but it's equally important to know this stuff if what you say is accurate. These are very serious claims indeed.
That incident, putting aside for a second whether it was right or wrong to so publicly and forcefully condemn him - there certainly would not have made much difference if Cameron would have mentioned it or not.
The prosecutors wording and presentation was ill-advised and he would have get gotten a lot of flak regardless.
Having access to NHS data could potentially help you do things like;
- build lists of potential customers to target with insurance - combined with their medical histories you can assess who the profitable customers might be - that you could sell nicely to insurance companies
- identify how drugs and treatments are being priced and used - useful market data if you want to launch drugs on the UK market that might be competing
- identify which parts of the NHS are valuable / profitable as part of selective privatisation - what's worth buying in other words. Leave the unprofitable parts un-privatised...
I'm sure there's plenty of money to be made selling that kind of data.
The notion that anyone is steering the UK towards the quirky US model is simple fear-mongering.
Even the partisan article you cite only talks about privatisation of elements of the NHS.
A mixed public/private health care model can be effective policy. The Australian system serves as an example of this.
The NHS is an inefficient mess, despite the efforts of so many of its staff. It is reasonable that we should be able to debate policy models. The tone of the Guardian article does not assist reasonable debate.
It's true. They work for free, because they really want to help you fix your problem. Until you depend on them. The you'll have to pay as much as they think you can pay.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that the “free” work is absolutely not free. You pay in several ways: giving them data, giving them knowledge of how you approach data and analytics problem solving for your organization, giving political connections and sunk cost hooks for them to gain a future contract.
And worst of all, reputation laundering. They can brag about “charitable” work for a prestigious client, and try to whitewash the reality of how utterly deplorable and morally sickening they are.
As someone that actually used palantir, they don't do magick. Splunk beats them in every category for conventional data analysis.
They do however have an excellent grasp on ML. Let's say you have billions of images,document images and documents (of any kind) they will search it better than google can. They obviously do a lot more but the thing that makes them shine is the UX. If you're a cop for example you put in a license plate and it shows you all you need about the car,driver,history,correlations and analysis of all entities and much more without the user being expected to know anything technical at all(you can imagine what can be seen when someone puts in your IP or phone#). They do a good job at linking documents and data points. I'm afraid I don't know enough about off the shelf ML to make a good comparison.
I don't agree with Mr.Thiel but his logic is "if we don't do it,someone will". And that's the idea behind in-q-tel (I'm sure HNers and the VC scene know that name well).
Thiel was also wrong about Trump, things are now worse off foe everyone. America has just about lost her grasp on keeping the world order,many trust relationships that kept peace and order since ww2 have been ruined.
As far as their work, I don't think "someone else" would have done it,because even if they did the quality may have been poorer. But I do agree the problem is far more deep-rooted and sinister than it appears.
For a long time you could safely trust the IC to know and respect democracy and the rule of law. But in recent times, they have violated every core tenants of a legitimate rule of law and civil liberty. Keeping the nation secure is not an excuse, if it is then any coup or subversion of elections can be justified this way. Are they helping their country or hurting it?
The existence of palantir and in-q-tel is very natural. The problem is how the IC and LEO communities as a whole have collectively lost sense of how everything they do is by consent of the people. But moreover, they should be on the people's side protecting rights and liberties. They stand as enemies of our liberties, sophisticated stalkers that will break any law to stalk you and control you all for your own good.
I think Mr. Thiel will regret his place in history. But it's very hard to blame him or pala tir. It's like blaming the sharpness of a knife when someone stabs you.
I agree with your general take but I'm surprised by your last line.
> I think Mr. Thiel will regret his place in history. But it's very hard to blame him or Palantir. It's like blaming the sharpness of a knife when someone stabs you.
If Thiel actually wanted to help the problem, there are surely much better ways than making Palantir. I think the "someone else will" logic is a thinly veiled excuse to justify what he wants to do, for other reasons. I think he 100% made the world worse with what was done here, and deserves according blame for that.
To replace your analogy, I would say he saw a stabbing about to happen and instead of attempting to stop it, he decided to stab the person with a slightly blunter knife. The analogy breaks here, but this could have been thought on for years, and he couldn't think up any other solution to it, or spend his time somewhere more worthwhile instead? Even a failed attempt to stop the stabbing would have at least been understandable.
I wasn't saying he was right but that ultimate cause and blame is not pointed at him. Much like the role IBM and BMW played when helping the Nazis. (Not that I think the US IC is anywhere near as bad).
fundamental difference between a business being co-opted by an autocratic state (do x or we take you over/arrest your families/...) and a business choosing to create a certain product that they could simply not have created.
A better analogy might be a weapons company that chooses to make cluster grenades or chemical weapons knowing that they are not ethical even as far as weapons (machine learning) go, but it pays well..
> in-q-tel (I'm sure HNers and the VC scene know that name well)
I'd bet dollars to donuts that most people, including HN, don't know that. Ditto for ARPA/DARPA.
In-q is the CIA's DARPA (formerly ARPA). They're all essentially startup incubators -- In-q sounds a lot like incu -- for technology that the government thinks would be useful. DARPA, as the name implies, is for Defense (military) projects, while In-q is more concerned with things the CIA cares about (whatever that is). They don't incubate startups in the YC sense, but find people doing research that they're interested in and give them money -- with strings attached, of course. Sometimes these are professors, or maybe small businesses, sometimes it's reaching out to big blue chip companies or defense contractors.
> I don't agree with Mr.Thiel but his logic is "if we don't do it,someone will".
In his interview with Dave Rubin he explained it differently (or at least I understood it differently) - he said that if they don't do it - it being prevent terrorist attacks - with technology + current assaults on civil liberties (i.e. the PATRIOT Act), then after new terrorist attacks, even more legislation will be passed, eroding civil liberties even further. He based this on US political response in wake of the 9/11 attacks.
>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.
>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.
Is this really true? We've been absolutely shambolic in the UK, and seem to be heading to have the worst performance against the virus in the world - we still seem to have a lot of cases each day, whereas Spain and Italy have tailed off greatly. Either Palantir's help hasn't been much use, or we would have been even worse off (and I'd be genuinely interested to know which, although I know we'll never know what pies Palantir now has fingers into).
I'm afraid that our leaders have been shown up to mostly be completely out of their depth, and we're going to pay a massive price as a result - as if the looming of Brexit wasn't bad enough.
The scale of ineptitude from this government is off the scale. Will this government ever get its rekoning over its handling over the Coranavirus? Alas no - our nasty, mostly right-wing national press will never subject the ruling Conservative party to sufficient scrutiny to expose their failings.
This comedy video of Health Secretary Matt Hancok has gone viral, but you can't laugh - it's painful to watch. These are the people in charge.
It has to be something more valuable than a 'fee', What could that possibly be? I'll give you a huge hint.
We can recall what happened when DeepMind got involved with the NHS ~3 years ago and the result was illegal [0] and now Google is taking over their contracts [1]. There is only one thing that Palantir wants from this which is more than just money.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2139395-google-deepmind...
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2217939-google-is-takin...