At the end of December last year, the Ministry of Defence quietly announced that it had awarded a £240m contract to the US tech company Palantir, for the provision of ‘data analytics capabilities’ over a period of three years. This contract was more than three times higher than a previous contract that the MoD gave the company in 2022, and was directly awarded to Palantir – that is, without competitive tender.
Even at the best of times, the MoD handing over millions of pounds of public money and access to its data to an American company close to the Trump administration and with ties to the CIA would be concerning, but when the US is illegally trying to overthrow the governments of Venezuela and Iran, and threatening moreover to invade Greenland (more about which to follow), the move appears distinctly alarming.
Linking across distance and time
Palantir was started in 2003 by Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, alongside Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp (who remains the CEO) and Stephen Cohen, with early investors including In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. It was named after the palantíri, the seven seeing stones of the kings of Númenor in JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga. At the end of the Second Age of Middle Earth, these stones were strategically located across the Númenorean kingdoms. They could link with one another and allow users to see far across distance or time.
Palantir today works with many public and private clients in the US and around the world to gather, integrate and analyse data. It has contracts with US police departments, and with the increasingly notorious Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which uses Palantir software to track targets for its harassment and deportations.
Further afield, Palantir has been working with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), providing AI tools that have allegedly been used to select targets during the ongoing genocide in Gaza; Karp has been open about Palantir’s technology being used to kill people. Apparently Lonsdale, another of the co-founders, is keen on blowing up ‘commies’ as well as Palestinians.
Palantir has now wormed its way firmly into the UK public sector. It has had contracts with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government and with multiple police forces, despite a disturbing track record of secrecy and mishandling of data in US police departments, and its ‘predictive policing’ tools being found to reinforce systemic biases in poor and racially diverse communities. The company also lobbied a Tory Disabilities Minister to encourage the Department of Work and Pensions to adopt its technology for cracking down on benefit fraud.
Britain’s affection for the NHS is Stockholm syndrome, says Thiel
It is of particular note how, in 2023, Palantir was awarded a £330m contract by NHS England to create a Federated Data Platform that would integrate all the disparate stores of NHS data. Palantir first began working with the NHS in 2020 to build a platform for storing COVID data. Despite enthusiastic backing from current Health Secretary Wes Streeting the 2023 contract has been resolutely opposed by the British Medical Association, the trade union representing doctors, due to concerns over how data will be handled. Peter Thiel has made no secret of his disdain for the NHS and his desire to see it privatised.
Thiel is also cause for alarm when it comes to Palantir’s contracts with the MoD. A long-time Trump backer, mentor of Vice-President JD Vance and old colleague of Elon Musk, Thiel’s libertarian conservative politics have gravitated towards the so-called ‘dark enlightenment’ movement, which essentially seeks to break free of democratic constraints and create a system of privately run, tax-free city-states, governed by CEO-kings. Thiel is an investor in Praxis, an organisation aiming to make this oligarchic fantasy a reality; and looking at Greenland as a promising place to start. This is likely one of several factors that has pushed the Trump administration to the brink of annexing Greenland from Denmark.
While many in Britain are now wondering how far our government would be willing to go to defend a NATO ally from a US attack, a more appropriate question might be to what extent it would even be capable of doing so, if a CIA-backed US company with ties to Trump and the far-right is embedded within the MoD. Indeed, a 2024 report by the Swiss army raised concerns that Palantir would be risky to have as a contractor due to fears that it may pass on army data to US intelligence agencies. Apparently, the MoD isn’t so scrupulous.
Inside the Middle Earth legendarium
I find myself speculating on what Tolkien would make of this company, named after one of his ideas inveigling itself into the British state. Granted, Tolkien was no fan of democracy, would never have called himself ‘British’, was a religious ultra-conservative and there’s plenty of racism permeating the Middle Earth legendarium. But he was a very different kind of racist religious conservative to somebody like Thiel or the far-right groups that have latterly embraced his work – he despised the boorishness of the fascists and National Socialists that were his contemporaries, and had a broader contempt for modernity and industrial capitalism. I doubt whether he’d approve of an American tech company allied to the most boorishly fascistic president in history.
At any rate, Palantir’s growing influence over public data and institutions, including our military, looks highly threatening to UK sovereignty and security. While our country is largely a US controlled vassal already, a company like Palantir could make us totally incapable of independence from American capital or the US security state.
It must be expunged from our NHS and our government.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
