[Plura-list] How Palantir will steal the NHS
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Sat Oct 1 13:18:29 EDT 2022
Read today's issue online at: https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/
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Next Monday (Oct 3) at 9hPT, I'm on a panel ("Regulatory Requirements and Necessary Standards") for Columbia University's "Regulating the Online Public Sphere: From Decentralized Networks to Public Regulation":
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/events/regulating-the-online-public-sphere-from-decentralized-networks-to-public-regulation/
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Today's links
* How Palantir will steal the NHS: Stealth privatisation was always the endgame for public-private-partnerships.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* This day in history: 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
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💇🏻♀️ How Palantir will steal the NHS
Britons are divided on many matters, but one uniting force that cuts across regional, party and class lines is jealous pride for the NHS and fierce resistance to its privatisation and the importation of America's grisly omnishambolic health care "system."
But while the British *people* oppose privatisation, the British *investor class* are slavering for it. Oligarchs *love* to loot public services, which is why the IMF is so adamant that the countries it "helps" sell off their public water, housing, even their roads and schools and museums.
Normally, the corrupting, immiserating effects of privatisation happen so slowly that they can feel like a natural phenomenon, a gradual change in the weather that makes everyone a little colder, a little more uncomfortable every day, until one day, the situation is unbearable.
But there have been moments of "big bang" privatisation where governments and oligarchs speed-ran the process of looting the public coffers and transferring them to private hands - think of the sell-off of ex-Soviet state industries to connected insiders.
Or think of Thatcher's sell-off of council homes, an airdrop that converted shelter from a human right to an asset, in which "market forces" were allowed to "optimise" the housing system, with the result that everyday people can't afford a home, while wealthy speculators trousered billions.
Thatcher had a supermajority, and she understood how to play different economic blocs against each other, resulting in the "shock therapy" of the 1980s. Her successors - both Tories and New Labour - had to move more slowly:
https://jacobin.com/2022/10/liz-truss-mini-budget-imf-boe-government-debt-brexit
Back to the NHS. It has been subject to the death of a thousand literal cuts, as Tories and Labour alike have starved it of resources. More importantly, both parties have turned ever-larger chunks of the NHS over to private-sector looters who have taken over hospitals, services, record-keeping and more.
These "public-private partnerships" were billed as a "third way," combining the strengths of both the public and private sectors. In reality, they were a way to transfer a ever-larger sums from the public purse to private investors.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition. When a private sector manager takes over a public service and extracts so much profit from the system that it risks collapse, the public sector is blamed for undersubsidising the service, and the looter can demand *more* money.
Lather, rinse, repeat. After decades of this, everyone understands how PPPs can be used to siphon endless sums out of the public coffers. But there's a more sinister aspect to PPPs that is only just coming to light, exemplified by Palantir's leaked plans to take over the NHS.
Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America's most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir's products to monitor protest movements.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417725865#articleCitationDownloadContainer
Palantir's clients also include the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency who rely on Palantir's products for their ethnic cleansing:
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigration/
Palantir also sells to the CIA:
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/
One of Palantir's best markets is the UK, where it has insinuated itself into numerous public services:
https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/All%20roads%20lead%20to%20Palantir%20with%20Palantir%20response%20v3.pdf
That includes the NHS, where Palantir has been jockeying for an ever-larger slice of the health service's private procurements. But the company's reputation has preceded it, and even NHS commissioners understand that they risk public outrage if they sign over the NHS to a notorious private-sector surveillance company.
Palantir has a solution. The company has effectively unlimited access to the capital markets, as well as to its deep-pocketed founder Peter Thiel, a cartoon villain who's written that women shouldn't be allowed to vote and that democracy and freedom are incompatible.
All that liquid capital means that Palantir doesn't have to win NHS contracts - it can simply buy up *other* companies that have won them. Palantir's strategy leaked to *Bloomberg*, and Olivia Solon lays it out:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-30/palantir-had-plan-to-crack-uk-health-system-buying-our-way-in
In a Sept 2021 email with the subject line "Buying our way in…!" Palantir regional boss Louis Mosley describes a plan to go around "hoovering up" NHS contractors, to "take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance."
(A Palantir spokesman said the email was "regrettable" and "not an accurate characterization of our relationship with the NHS")
Palantir's Mosley said he'd target NHS software suppliers with "credible leadership" and revenue between £5-50m, offering their founders "v. generous buyout schedule (say 10x, especially if all stock)," adding "(we might even be their only real exit option)."
Palantir also urged the lobbying group TechUK to pressurise the NHS and other government departments to buy commercial, proprietary systems rather than building their own.
Palantir ran their own separate lobbying as well, hiring Indra Joshi and Harjeet Dhaliwal away from the NHS to push their agenda in Westminster:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-21/palantir-hires-ai-chief-from-nhs-in-u-k-as-it-bids-to-expand
For backup, they retained Global Counsel, a lobbying firm run by the Blairite archvillain Peter Mandelson, to push Palantir to the UK government. Mandelson is one of the great monsters of New Labour, masterminding a plan to permanenly disconnect British households from the internet if any member of the family was accused - without proof - of illegaly downloading music:
https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/19/breaking-leaked-uk-government-plan-to-create-pirate-finder-general-with-power-to-appoint-militias-create-laws/
Palantir's plans are bearing fruit. In Dec 2020, the company won a £23.5 no-bid contract to manage NHS patient data:
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-24/revealed-data-giant-given-emergency-covid-contract-had-been-wooing-nhs-for-months
The deal was successfully challenged by Foxglove, who represented *Opendemocracy* in a suit to force the government to make future Palantir deals subject to public tender:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/weve-won-our-lawsuit-over-matt-hancocks-23m-nhs-data-deal-with-palantir/
The real prize isn't a mere £23.5 contract, though: the NHS is about to open to bids for a massive, £360m IT project. That's where Palantir's plan to buy out its rivals for the deal could bear real fruit.
That's not a bug in PPP, it's a feature. The point of PPP is to apply market dynamics to public service provision. Foremost among these market dynamics is the right of company owners to sell their businesses to other companies.
The UK - along with the rest of the west - has spent 40 years waving through anticompetitive mergers, under a doctrine that holds that monopolies are "efficient" (Thiel agrees: according to him, "competition is for losers").
The combination of lax merger scrutiny and PPP inevitably leads to this kind of play: one deep-pocketed company can "hoover up" all the contractors to the NHS and form a single entity that can hold the NHS to ransom.
Palantir's commitment to proprietary, secretive software development methodologies makes it utterly unsuitable for NHS service provision. Compare the NHS to Ben Goldacre's landmark "Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis":
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis
Goldacre argues that the only way to unlock the medical insights in aggregate NHS patient data is with *public* software: an open and free "trusted research platform" that anyone can audit and verify.
While the code for this platform would be public, NHS patient data would never leave it. Instead, researchers who wanted to investigate hypotheses about the effectiveness of different interventions would send queries to the platform and get results back - without ever touching the data.
This is a system that only works if it's hosted by democratically accountable public services - not by private actors accountable to their shareholders, and certainly not secretive companies whose primary expertise is in helping spy agencies conduct mass surveillance.
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💇🏻♀️ Hey look at this
* hark ye oakland county https://mcmansionhell.com/post/696589275826946048/hark-ye-oakland-county
* HDD Clicker https://www.retrokits.de/index.php/hdd-clicker-hdd-sound-simulator-v0-1/ (h/t Slashdot)
* ‘We can continue Pratchett’s efforts’: the gamers keeping Discworld alive https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/28/we-can-continue-pratchetts-efforts-the-gamers-keeping-discworld-alive (h/t Waxy)
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💇🏻♀️ This day in history
#20yrsago Danger Hiptop reviewed https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Likable-Sidekick-is-priced-right-2765968.php
#20yrsago Distributed.net cracks the RC5-64 cipher https://web.archive.org/web/20030710002806/https://www.distributed.net/pressroom/news-20020926
#20yrsago Kevin Mitnick’s laptop, signed by Woz, on eBay https://forums.atariage.com/topic/14593-own-a-piece-of-hacking-history/#comment-145970
#20yrsago Record industry defends practices to Senate https://web.archive.org/web/20021018162342/http://www.musicdish.com/mag/?id=6675
#20yrsago Dan Gillmor responds to Jack Valenti https://web.archive.org/web/20021012222914/https://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4175607.htm
#20yrsago 2000+ year old Greek computer reinterpreted https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2002/09/19/the-clockwork-computer
#15yrsago Keep Your Copyrights: helping creators beat abusive contracts https://web.law.columbia.edu/kernochan/keep-your-copyrights
#15yrsago Disney kills its spy-on-your-kids phones https://web.archive.org/web/20071019152903/http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9786517-7.html
#15yrsago Nokia taunts Apple lockware phone with posters for “open” N-series https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/timely-advertising-nokia-poster-hot-off-the-press.362519/
#15yrsago Archibishop of Mozambique: condoms and HIV cocktails will give you AIDS https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7014335.stm
#15yrsago Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular: Wheenk! https://memex.craphound.com/2007/10/01/rudy-ruckers-postsingular-wheenk/
#15yrsgo Copyright and censorship https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/oct/02/censorship
#15yrsago Things you shouldn’t do in science fiction/fantasy writing https://eeknight.livejournal.com/283350.html
#15yrsago Guerrilla librarians free the $86k Library of Congress copyright database https://web.archive.org/web/20071011005126/http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/
#15yrsago Scott Westerfeld’s Extras – a superb volume in the Uglies series https://memex.craphound.com/2007/09/30/scott-westerfelds-extras-a-superb-volume-in-the-uglies-series/
#10yrsago Quant: leaving finance made me happy, you should try it https://mathbabe.org/2012/09/30/telling-people-to-leave-finance/
#10yrsago How Frederik Pohl became a pulp literary agent, and saved himself 8¢ per story in postage https://web.archive.org/web/20121005010255/https://thewaythefutureblogs.com/2012/10/early-editors/
#10yrsago Replacement ear grown on an arm https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/hopkins-doctors-give-woman-a-new-ear/
#5yrsago Troops fire rubber bullets to prevent Catalan independence vote, injure at least 465 https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2017/oct/01/catalan-independence-referendum-spain-catalonia-vote-live
#5yrsago Equifax blames hack on state actors, but breach followed spat with security contractor https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-29/the-equifax-hack-has-all-the-hallmarks-of-state-sponsored-pros
#5yrsago China’s massive property bubble creates mad scramble to take on decades of debt https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2112873/chinas-household-debts-soars-it-being-stalked-subprime-spectre
#5yrsago Republican Senator caught making up fake news about fake news doubles down https://web.archive.org/web/20170930210228/https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/taibbi-latest-fake-news-panic-appears-to-be-fake-news-w506396
#5yrsago Hamilton: the My Little Pony edition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96nPe1BfAzI
#5yrsago DRM could kill game emulators and erase the history of an artform https://www.techdirt.com/2017/09/29/how-can-video-game-company-dmca-patreon-page-emulator-dmca-1201-strikes-again/
#1yrago Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation": They'd rather be evil than incompetent https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities
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💇🏻♀️ Colophon
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
* The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. Friday's progress: 599 words (45053 words total)
* The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a nonfiction book about interoperability for Verso. Friday's progress: 516 words (41474 words total)
* Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. (92849 words total) - ON PAUSE
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
* Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EXPERT REVIEW
* Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION
* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE
* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause." FINISHED
* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." FINISHED
Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.
Latest podcast: Sound Money https://craphound.com/news/2022/09/11/sound-money/
Upcoming appearances:
* Regulating the Online Public Sphere: From Decentralized Networks to Public Regulation, Oct 3
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/events/regulating-the-online-public-sphere-from-decentralized-networks-to-public-regulation/
* Chokepoint Capitalism event, Books and Books (Miami), Oct 12
https://www.booksandbooks.com/event/in-person-chokepoint-capitalism-an-evening-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow/
* Reboot Conference, Lincoln Network (Miami), Oct 13
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/reboot-2022-a-conference-exploring-technology-culture-and-politics-tickets-322718568927
* Library Journal Day of Dialog (Zoom), Oct 20
https://www.libraryjournal.com/event/library-journal-day-of-dialog-2022-fall#program
* Surviving Apocalyptic Economics, with Douglas Rushkoff and Rebecca Giblin, Ottawa Writers Festival, Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/events/fall-2022-in-person-events/surviving-apocalyptic-economics
* World Ethical Data Forum, Oct 26-28
https://worldethicaldataforum.org/
* Arthur C Clarke Award (DC), Nov 16
https://mailchi.mp/2e2b8a01e992/save-the-date-9142941
Recent appearances:
* Triangulation: Chokepoint Capitalism
https://twit.tv/shows/twit-events/episodes/13
* Cultural Capture by Chokepoint Capitalism (This Machine Kills)
https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/194-cultural-capture-by-chokepoint-capitalism-ft-rebecca-giblin-cory-doctorow
* Billionaires As Policy Failure Factories (Macro N Cheese)
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-190-billionaires-as-policy-failure-factories-with-cory-doctorow
Latest book:
* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books:
* Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics, Beacon Press, September 2022
* Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023
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