Apparently winning against no competition has led to even worse things.
Palantir was awarded the FDP contract after winning a succession of pandemic-era deals, worth a combined £60 million, without competition.
How bad? Here’s the no competition winner readout.
Under previously agreed rules, Palantir staff working on the FDP could only access the National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT), a data repository for patient data before it is transferred to the “pseudonymized” analytics system, if they apply to access for specific data sets.
A document released by NHS England says that Palantir staff can get a new “admin” role and access the NDIT and its identifiable patient data. Other consultants working on the FDP will get similar access.
The briefing document, seen by the FT and confirmed by The Register, said granting access to the data to Palantir staff and others could “risk of loss of public confidence” in its assurances about “safeguarding patient data and ensuring appropriate use and access to it.”
What sits inside the NDIT? The medical history of roughly fifty million people, that’s all. And so you might ask why is the body certifying appropriate use doing the opposite, giving away the access it was meant to constrain?
Well, first of all, it’s shocking the UK has anything to do with Palantir. The company posted a manifesto, line-by-line Nazi propaganda, calling for the postwar denazification of Germany to be undone. The position requires treating Allied victory as an overcorrection. Yeah, Palantir is openly saying Hitler should have won and England should be speaking German today. Their CEO boasts that he spends much of his time talking with, in his own words, real Nazis. We can assume he means Peter Thiel.
There’s no reason for anyone to have any confidence in Palantir. None. Their software is a mess of moats to trap customers, as they peddle fear to amass data and seize control over entire nations. Consider that the pandemic procurement that placed Palantir inside the NHS was billed as an emergency, just so they could suspended competition. Palantir hates competition. The suspension allowed expansion of an operational footprint from which the FDP bid was later scored. The FDP contract then supplied the platform inside which a new admin role could be defined. Each authorization reduced public protection from Palantir.
Second, anyone who read Thiel’s bio, childhood in a German enclave with continuing Nazi sympathies into the 1980s, the father’s career building uranium infrastructure for apartheid’s clandestine nuclear weapons program, saw this coming. Public confidence in Palantir shouldn’t be discussed like losing it would change anything. The UK government rammed the most toxic, least transparent, company into their health system without any justification. Officials wrote into the procurement file that the public would object if the public knew, because Palantir, and authorized the harmful state anyway.
Third, the original restriction was a real thing that was meant to be defended instead of handed over to a company whose published manifesto endorses Hitler winning, or at least reversing the postwar denazification of Germany to make Nazism great again. Pseudonymization inside the NDIT existed because access to identifiable patient records is a category Parliament treats differently from access to aggregated statistics. The whole public case for the FDP rested on that restriction. The restriction is gone.