Palantir. IT’S WORSE Than You Think

It is absurd and insane that we have a rogue US military contractor handling our most sensitive personal data.Your devices are going to be monitored 24 hours a day.Palantir's had a very secretive contract with GCHQ.Palantir has a contract running our nuclear missile programme.We have no national security.This company should be nowhere near the NHS.

We have entered into a kind of colonial contract with this superpower.Peter Thiel is an incredibly dangerous individual.The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.JD Vance is a sort of wholly owned product of Peter Thiel.Jeffrey Epstein, he was a co -investor in an Israeli surveillance company.The thing I find most alarming about this and most worrisome is that...

Eight years ago, Carol Cadwalader hit the headlines when she exposed the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal in the UK Sunday newspaper The Observer.Last year she left The Observer to set up The Nerve, an independent journalist's collective.Much of her early work at The Nerve has focused on Palantir, the controversial US company which supplies data to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, the US military and the Israeli military.

Mostly terrorists, that's true.

My bias is to defer to Israel.The IDF gets to decide what it wants to do and that they're broadly in the right.

It's now hoovering up enormous contracts in the UK public sector.I invited Carol into the studio to ask just how frightened should we be of Silicon Valley?So Carol Cudwallader, thank you very much for joining us.Richard Sanders, thank you for inviting me.You obviously in your career in recent years anyway have focused a great deal on Silicon Valley, on the tech industry and so on, particularly on Palantir, which is why I want to talk about.I want first of all to show you a clip of Alex Karp, who is the CEO and co -founder of Palantir.

We are dedicating our company.We have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we're super proud of the role we play, especially in places we can't talk about.And we love our success in the U .S.and globally.Also, you know, we are doing well in the United Kingdom and many other places.

Palantir is here to stay.to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.

The day that happened my tweet was, I think I did all cap letters, this company should be nowhere near the NHS.I mean it is absurd and insane that we have a rogue US military contractor handling our most sensitive personal data.I think anybody who watches that clip and thinks about this is not okay with it.Britain is very important to Palantir.We're its second biggest customer and they have This quite extraordinary CEO, the guy who they've appointed CEO in Britain, Louis Moseley, he's very plausible.He's, you know, very English.

He's very English.He's your classic English kind of public school educated, you know, quite genteel, sort of gentlemanly, but in I think it's in the biography of Alex Karp, which was published last year, there's an anecdote in there about how LouisMoseley was recruited to the job.And he was headhunted for that job.It wasn't like he applied for it.And in the job interview, so it's reported, Alex Karp quoted sections of Oswald Mosley's speeches to him.

Oswald Mosley, of course, being his grandfather, the fascist leader.

Oswald Mosley being Louis Mosley's grandfather and Britain's most famous fascist.The optics of it, at some level, appear to have attracted Palantir.

Regularly invited on Laura Kunzberg's Sunday show as a sort of disinterested pundit.So what attracts Laura Kunzberg to him?

Well, we did an article, we've done a series of articles in The Nerve about the Palantir revolving door, and in which we found dozens of government employees, and former ministers, members of the House of Lords, who have gone to work for Palantir.

Extraordinary, it's a revolving door.

It's a revolving door.But the thing which was really instructive to me, and made me sort of understand something about their methodology, not just that they'd recruited the head of AI in the MOD, expert in AI was recruited by Palantir, the most senior expert in the NHS in AI, was recruited by Palantir but they also took a senior comms guy from number 10.So the guy who had like been the chief spin doctor for Rishi Sunak, Ben Maskell, he was recruited to be Palantir's head of comms and he's been really effective because his strategy, he doesn't go to technology reporters or with these stories, he goes to political correspondents.He has an existing network of political correspondents, of which Laura Kunzberg would be one, Rachel Sylvester on theObserver is another.This is their contacts.

And this is how, you know, they're getting the sort of positive Palantir spin into the newspaper and onto the broadcasters.

Now, Alex Karp isn't the only rather alarming individual at the top of Palantir.You also have Peter Thiel, who is also a profoundly strange man.He thinks Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.I mean...

Peter Thiel is...an incredibly influential, consequential, and I think dangerous individual.You really have to look at who Peter Thiel is and what he believes in.And one thing he does not believe in is the nation state.He is very explicit about how actually there is a better way of running countries, and that is as a private corporation.

And he's a massive investor in all of these other companies too.Jeffrey Epstein, of course, he was a co -investor in the company, an Israeli surveillance company that at the time of Jeffrey Epstein's death was his most valuable asset.One of the key things about understanding Trump and Silicon Valley and that relationship is understanding the role of Peter Thiel in that relationship.And you can see that very, very clearly in who Trump picked to be his vice president.And it was his pick of J .D.

Vance in the summer of 2020, which really was for me that moment of understanding that this isn't Trump it's not Trump first term, something different is happening here.We have an alliance between the MAGA far right, and you know, Trumpauthoritarian tendencies.and Silicon Valley.Because J .D.

Vance is a wholly owned product of Peter Thiel.J .D.Vance owes his entire career to him.He owes his political career.He owes his financial career.

He owns his fortune.He's kind of Peter Thiel's pet.And this for me was this sort of moment of understanding that this is a kind of new kind of power that we haven't seen before, because we have the Silicon Valley surveillance technologies now being harnessed to the MAGA authoritarian project.And that for me was this sort of wake up call.

What I found out about all of these people, Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, is they're clearly on one level, very, very clever people.But when you actually see them tweeting about politics and things that are sort of outside of their realm, It's like listening to a 13 -year -old boy.I mean, it's extraordinary.

Well, they have very sort of narrow interests.They have vast amounts of money.Nobody ever says no to them.And they're sort of imbued with a certain science fiction fantasies about what they want to happen.So Elon Musk, of course, wants to go to Mars.Peter Thiel wants to defy death.

become a cyborg.I mean, this is it's, it's, it's extreme.It's extreme.And then you have to keep coming back to is this the man?Is it his company who we want handling all of our most private and sensitive health data?

Well, let's just have a look at how they've become in manyin the British state.

The nerve revealed it's £670 million worth of contracts with the NHS, also the MOD, the Ministry of Defence.They're very involved there.

Are they really that good?I mean, aren't there other companies who can do this sort of thing?Why do we keep jumping into bed with them?

Well, this is part of why one has to be quite careful about painting them as the sort of evil geniuses of the tech world, because there's a lot of evidence to suggest they're not necessarily geniuses.I mean, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to look at here is the Swiss Army, who did a really thorough report into an assessment of Palantir's technology offer and declined it because they thought it wasn't very good.And what was so interesting about that is Palantir have gone after the very small independent outlet which got hold of that report and published it.And that seems to be the one thing that they're really sensitive to.It's okay, you can call them fascists, you can say they're evil, that's all fine, but don't say that actually they're you know, they're an overpriced bit of software that's not even that great.

Is there something about the British state that makes it peculiarly susceptible to this sort of corporate capture?Because other European states haven't sort of fallen under the sway of Palantir in the same way?

Yeah, I think well, I think you can see what happened.I mean, Palantir is, you know, they had a they had a very secretive contract with GCHQ for I think well over a decade.And we know very, very little about that contract, how it came about, what exactly they were doing.But that was all they had until 2020.And it was a classic, you know, it was March 2020, when the government tore up itsnormal contracting principles and processes.

And we saw what happened with the crony contracts, the VIP lane came out of that.But it was also an amazing opportunity for tech companies.And we had Dominic Cummings, who is the sort of wannabe tech bro, who'd been a kind of Palantir fanboy.And then Palantir come along and go, hey guys, we're going to help you out.And listen, we'll do it for free.Just give us one pound.

one pound contract.You know, you create a dependency.Once you're in, it's hard to get them out.

It sounds rather like a drug dealer.You sell your product very cheap initially.

Absolutely.It's totally the same.This is what they're doing with the police at the moment.There's a big push with police forces around the country.Look, just try it.You know, try out for free.

Look at our WYSI software.And that's what they did with the Met Police.They were like, look, we can root out the bad apples.We can find corrupt police officers.And And, you know, I talked to a police officer who had been on the call when they announced this, and they were saying, you know, your devices are going to be monitored 24 hours a day.And I think people found that overwhelmingly creepy and disturbing.

I just want to go back slightly, just so people who aren't familiar with this understand.First of all, ICE.the American immigration deportation people who've been in the news so much lately.Now, Palantir works very closely with them, doesn't it?In what way?How does it help ICE?

Palantir is a critical part of the tool that ICE is using to profile and target and locate immigrants for removal in the United States.States, according to this very good reporting and another independent media technology outlet in the US 404 media who've been really on the case with this.And they're using data from all sorts of different sources.That's what's happened in America.This was what Doge was about.What we saw with Doge was it going into all of these different government departments and taking data, and Palantir was part of the system that was being used to centralise that.

So we see Palantir being used by ICE in America, and then we see the US military, they are using AI to find targets to bomb in Iran.

This is why it's so particularly troubling, these contracts with the NHS, where we have Farage, who could quite possibly be prime minister in three or four years time, is planning precisely the same sort of operations against migrants.And we have Palantir inside the NHS.

Farage and reform have been explicit about that.of how that they would use doge -like tactics to go after immigrants in Britain for removal.And Palantir has explicitly said, well, they would work with any democratically elected government.So it is absolutely clear that our data could be weaponised in that way.The thing I find most alarming about this and most worrisome is that it just makes people lose trust and confidence in these systems, which are so vital to us.You know, we trust the NHS, that's a kind of like basis of British belief.

And our trust, you know, is being damaged by the associatedwith this firm.We put our lives into the hands of the NHS, amazing doctors and nurses and other people who work extraordinarily hard for the sake of British people.And to have our trust eroded, for there to be a third party between them and us, and a third party of the likes of Peter Thiel and Palantir, That is just massively, massively a problem.

Enormous contracts as well in the Ministry of Defence.Palance says, this isn't a threat to national security.We don't have the sort of complete picture.But the nerve, again, has done very good work on this, showing that it actually is.They can put sort of things together.And they're basically in possession of state secrets.

So this was Charlie Young and Max Colbert writing in The Nerve.And I mean, I was gobsmacked when one of the things they discovered was that Palantir has a contract running our nuclear missile programme.And this was right at the time, I think we started researching this, right at the time that Trump was threatening Greenland.who's our NATO ally.We have no national security, essentially, is what this means.And, you know, we got some sort of very rote replies from the MoD and from Palantir about this, saying, well, the data remains sovereign to the MoD, you know, but it's that idea, I think, you know, one of the experts said, it's like the idea that you open somebody's love letter, and you close it back again and you hand it on, you know what's in it.

The role of Peter Mandelson and Global Council in these contracts originally, what happened there?

Well, Peter Mandelson, you know, he's been out of government for a long time, in which time he set up Global Council.which is a global lobbying firm.It's had lots of very problematic clients.Global Council was still representing Palantir when Lord Mandelson was appointed to be ambassador to Washington.You know, we know that when Keir Starmer went to visit Trump in Washington as discussed.He took one other meeting with Palantir.

Look at this nexus of senior politicians and tech bros and so on who are sort of working together.A name that obviously springs to mind is Tony Blair, whose institute is massively funded by Larry Ellison and Oracle and so on.

I mean, it's kind of interesting because there's a sort of face -off by two evil data harvesting billionaires.So we've got Larry Ellison with Oracle.They're both obsessed with like living forever.This is the other thing.So Larry Ellison wants to live forever.Peter Thiel wants to live forever.

Larry Ellison has Oracle.He's obsessed with getting his hands on Britain's health data.He's in the NHS as well.And then you've got Palantir, who also obsessed with being in the NHS.And I think one of the things you have to, you know, which to understand why it's so attractive, Britain, is that the NHS data is a really unique data set.In America, there is no centralised system.

In Britain, we have, you know, the entire population from cradle to the grave going back years.You know, I think both Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel can both see how valuable that is.And Blair has thrown his lot in with Ellison.It's kind of interesting.The amount of money, it's more than, you know, more than 300 million, I think, going into to Tony Blair Institute from Larry Ellison, this massive operation.I mean, you can't even compare it to other British think tanks.

It dwarfs any other think tank.

I mean, it's not a think tank.It's a bizarre globalinfluence operation where you can absolutely see the work that it does is also has a commercial value.How we see TBI operating overseas is it goes into countries and sort of sells a technocratic dream, which is guys don't worry about government, we've got these private companies which can kind of do this stuff for you.And it's a corporate capture.We see that has happened overseas.

And we can see that is what has happened in Britain.And we can see that with Kirstarma, it is Tony Blair and his Institute, who's had overwhelming influence on tech policies.You know, I think people are really, really unalive to we have entered into a kind of colonial contracts with this superpower, which we can see in so many ways, is antithetical to Britain's interests.We've created this incredible dependency on in a really short space of time, and our European neighbours have not they are really, really much more awake to the issue of that and really understand why digital sovereignty is so important and that what we need is an entire European tech stack.And that is what's in, I mean, France in particular, but in other European countries, that's what the, there's a real rapid and urgent need.project to build that up.

And in Britain, that's not even in conversation.

So tell me about the NERV.How did the NERV come about?

The NERV really was born on the picket line outside the headquarters of the GuardianAnd that was this moment when the Guardian and Observer journalists united to protest what was happening to the Observer.So this secret confidential negotiation had been entered into without anybody knowing.We only found out about it when Sky News broke the story, and that was to sell the Observer.And the big thing for us was that the Guardian has big letters all over our work saying the Guardian's not for sale.So we just didn't understand what was going on.

And one of our biggest questions was, who were the investors?and you know that's still not been made clear.But basically going on strike was really good fun, it was just like a feeling of solidarity and we'd really had to think about what our journalistic values were and what we stood for and what we wanted to do and actually there was something about standing outside the big corporate glass headquarters which also felt liberating in, and I think this sense of, you know, for better or for worse, The Guardian is a huge multinational now.It's, you know, it's a really big organisation.And its focus is very much outside Britain now.And it's, you know, it's big corporate media.

And that has pros and cons.And, you know, worked there for a long time and can see both.And And I think it was just that, you know, isn't there a way to do journalism differently?Talk to me about the nerve.What's the sort of logic there?

Because there are five of you, essentially, at the core.

There are five of us.

It's very much sort of female -led, isn't it?

Yes.So the core team is five women.And it was three senior editors from the Observer New Review, the creative director, and me.It was the Observer New Review, which was the section, it's the kind of feature section of the Observer, which is where actuallyI published most of my kind of investigative work.The big Cambridge Analytica scandal was, that was the home for it.

And I think that was where this sort of idea of actually bringing back the team together and seeing if there was another way to go.

Well, it's a fascinating website.I'd strongly recommend it.Thank you.

You're doing some really great stuff.

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