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As a Brit, I've never had the sense the UK (specifically the City of London) has any genuine interest in tackling money laundering. I suspect our economy is structurally reliant upon us being extremely good at it.
> Palantir [...] gets access to sensitive FCA data.
Is this the right characterization?
Is Palantir being given access to the data(to do with what they like), or is Palantir software being deployed in the customer private cloud environment?
I am under the impression that Palantir is typically deployed on-premise, or in a private cloud, where the customer can ensure that the data remains sovereign.
Particularly in a military setting, it would be deployed in an airgapped or highly controlled network.
Minor pedantic point: "on-premise" should be "on-premises" — the term comes from "business premises," not a logical premise. IIRC this is one of those battles that's basically lost at this point though. Anyway, yes, the deployment model question is legit and the article is vague on it.
> I am under the impression that Palantir is typically deployed on-premise, or in a private cloud, where the customer can ensure that the data remains sovereign.
I'll believe that when I see a thorough audit report. But anyone competent to do that wouldn't be buying Palantir in the first place.
> Palantir has previously defended its work, saying it has led to about 99,000 extra operations being scheduled in the NHS
No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.
> helped UK police tackle domestic violence
And precisely how was this done?
> Palantir will have to destroy data after completion of the contract
Contractual obligations that are not practically enforceable will not be honored. I don't think these individual administrative agencies have the acumen necessary to correctly negotiate these contracts.
Can't find the article atm, but it was basically pre-crime from Minority Report (without the pre-cogs, obviously). They looked at large datasets and built a predictive model, correlating things like race and prior criminal history to infer who was more likely to re-offend. At scale, this works. Ethical issues abound, however.
We're going to need a definition of "works." The false positive rate seems to be notable since those stories readily percolate into media whenever these schemes are implemented and the damage done from those is absolutely massive.
The idea that criminals are likely to re-offend is not new. What to do about this has always been the challenge. Simply over policing this segment is not any type of solution. Unless, of course, you are invested in the "private prison" industry.
> No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.
That's not their job, that's the governments' job. So much of this (the article and your comment) is putting so much on Palantir when they are just doing the job asked of them. They don't work for the people, the government does.
They likely bribed someone in the government to get that contract though.
Regardless, it is ridiculous to absolve corporations and the people running them from all accountability, just because their aim is ever more money. In fact, that should make you criticize them more, not less.
It’s likely an impossible choice, between inept big four consultancy groups (that charge $$$, deliver little, and run everything through manual excel entry) vs palantir who likely will deliver results. I have no love for Palantir but at least they’re competent.
During covid, palantir had to elbow its way to sell to the UK govt and replaced dilapidated “solutions” from the big four.
It's just the UK state in it's classic rut/local minima. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be solved by simultaneously (a) paying MPs a lot more, and (b) banning all other forms of income. As it is, being an MP is a total dead end for anyone actually talented at getting things done.
Even a middling technical understanding of things precludes getting seduced by Deloitte.
you say this as if massive corporations with extremely well-compensated executives don't regularly employ Deloitite and other worthless consultancies to do all sorts of work ineptly?
Worked alongside a Palantir deployment at a mid-size NHS trust in 2022. The competence gap with the incumbent consultancy was real and embarrassing. The big four team had seventeen people and a SharePoint site; Palantir had three engineers and working software within six weeks.
I work in the maritime domain for the Norwegian gov., where we've had a couple of demos. AFAIK, there's only one agency here that uses Palantir software - the customs service - and that's not any secret info.
But we frequently work with people from adjacent fields (military, law enforcement, aviation, other maritime, etc.), basically the usual suspects as far as Palantir clients go.
My observation has been that there's no strong push or even desire to become a customer. The people I've talked with have either been outright unimpressed, or have already similar systems they've rolled out themselves.
From the demos we've had, it seemed to me that Palantir can do well in countries where all the potential clients are isolated from each others (disorganized even), and do not have and good means of sharing data / communicating with each others.
There's a lot of hype, myth even, around what their tools do - and I can understand why many are just saying "no thanks" when they come knocking. It is sort of underwhelming.
Organizations that are already running well with solid operational processes and data governance won't gain a huge benefit from Palantir. They can only add a lot of value in organizations full of lazy, incompetent people. This describes many government agencies. But not all.
Epstein's friends who had appointments in the WTC on 9/11 mysteriously canceled last minute or had other excuses.
- Lutnick, whose whole Cantor & Fitzgerald was obliterated, brought his son to school after a last minute "argument with his wife".
- Sarah Ferguson was "stuck in traffic" and late.
- Michael Jackson "overslept".
There is another one whom I don't remember. Maybe the Bayesians here can calculate the probability using a control group of all well connected people who miraculously survived. There aren't that many.
Epstein and Maxwell's other friends of course were connected to funding Palantir.
Genuine question to people more knowledgeable: Why are politicians/technocrats doing this?
Also generally speaking e.g. in relation to chat control and so on. Do they think this is what the people actually want because of lobbying or are they aware and believe they know better? Is it literally just corruption? Or are there actual benefits and we are just in the HN bubble where most people think its a bad idea?
Politicians in democracies need a fallback career for when they lose office. Before capital controls were lifted in the 80's, economies were a lot more local: UK politicians would take positions in UK companies or institutions, French in french ones, etc. This did mean a certain amount of corruption, but it did mean politicians were highly interested in the success of national companies and institutions.
Now, most of our senior politicians go to the US after leaving office; so for consistency they adopt the belief that there is no downside to making the UK beholden to foreign companies, or becoming a nation where all the innovative professions end up building capital for foreign owners, instead of building strong UK companies. As a consequence of this, they almost compete to sell out the public. It's impossible for them to believe that what they were doing is a betrayal of their country, because that would go directly against their personal interest.
It depends on what you're referring to when you say 'corruption'.
The public officials involved in signing off on these contracts with Palantir will almost certainly be offered non-executive, board, or consulting positions with one of its subsidiaries. These roles will likely net them £50k-£100k a year for four to five years and conveniently begin a fixed number of months/years after their terms in public office conclude.
This will all be strictly legal and well within the regulations those same officials voted on for themselves (without public consultation, and watered down further by the lobbying efforts of Palantir and similar companies looking for a cut of public funds).
This is an entirely legal and extremely common practice. If you choose to label it 'corruption', that's your call.
Businesses and politicians don't care about (you), the little guy. They want your demographic, the individual outrage you feel is pointless. Nobody is going to throw away their iPhone or protest the internet because NSO Group and Palantir exist. Your outrage is Palantir's commodity.
Even among tech-obsessed ideologues, both sides roll over and accept this because it's less flattering than arguing over CPU specs. Would we really break up with Big Tech over a gold trophy and a few backdoors?
From a purely "how does this happen in practice" view — governments are genuinely understaffed for this kind of technical work. Palantir shows up with working demos and a sales team. The alternative is a 3-year procurement process for something worse. It's not conspiracy, it's just institutional laziness meeting a polished vendor.
I don't think politicians across the board are corrupt. I think they're just surrounded by syncophants and special interest. Also the old absolute power corrupts, absolutely sort of thing.
I can't be convinced people go into politics twiddling their mustaches like a cartoon villain. I think that they go into it either to genuinely help, or because they like the attention. Then the system surrounds then with people who either take small bites of their ethics, or agree with anything for the chance to be powerful as well.
Feelings about Palantir aside, this is a really misleading headline. The FCA has hired Palantir to "investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data", which presumably requires Palantir to have access to that sensitive data.
Saying that Palantir is "reaching" into the British state, and then having the article image be "billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel" literally holding a wad of cash is... not exactly a high standard of reportage.
And that's the most believable thing in the image. From the banknotes, to the rather visible outline on Thiel himself, to what I can only describe as an out-of-focus picture of the supernatural entity from Still Wakes the Deep.
He joked about Palantir killing people. I know Israel and the US have been using some sort of Palantir system for target designation and that speaks for itself.
