A late spring outbreak of righteous indignation is affecting the United Kingdom. It’s yet another variant of Palantir Derangement Syndrome. Virologists tracked this smug neurosis as it jumped across the Atlantic from the American left to British Labour. Symptoms include selective blindness, performative anguish, a hilarious inability to grasp the facts and Tourette’s-level outbursts of repetitive left-wing clichés.
Earlier this month, a committee dominated by British Labour MPs who are infected by PDS called for Palantir to be stripped of its £330 million deal to help British hospitals save the lives of patients. The House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee accused the American tech giant of having a “clear mismatch” with British values. It seems the ghost of fascism can be found in simple efficiency gains.
British values apparently mean letting patients die while waiting for care and making sure crime pays
Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, showed chronic symptoms of PDS just a few weeks earlier. He blocked a £50 million Metropolitan Police contract with Palantir that would have helped its investigators solve crimes. Khan has said he only wants to see public money going to companies which “share the values of our city.”
British values apparently mean letting patients die while waiting for care and making sure that crime pays. The Guardian has accused Palantir of turning America into a dictatorship, of being a “supervillain” and “the Big Tobacco of the tech world.” Other British commentators, meanwhile, denounce the “Palantirization” of the British state, warning of “technofascism” and cronyism.
If only it were just hysterical journalists. The leader of the Green party, Zack Polanski, recently snarked about the sartorial choices of Louis Mosley, Palantir’s CEO in Europe: “He insists on wearing a black shirt every time he is on TV.” Mosley’s grandfather was indeed the fascist fool who led his blackshirts through the streets of London. Louis, however, has consistently championed freedom, open democratic debate and universal tolerance. But in the left’s theory of hereditary politics, the Mosley genome carries all the fascism markers.
What alarms Polanski et al. is the thought of a private American company fiddling with their precious socialized health system. But the National Health Service has been grappling with its most severe crisis in decades, characterized by record waiting lists and chronic operational gridlock. An antiquated system for keeping track of patient information has pushed the health system to the brink, forcing millions to wait months for routine care. Basic data – beds, notes, surgery schedules, tests, prescriptions – had been scattered about like dandelion seeds no human could gather. Many patients had undergone tests, then never told the results.
To combat this, the NHS decided to create the Federated Data Platform and, after an 18-month open competition, Palantir won the contract to build it. Every major tech company made a bid and 30 independent evaluators assessed the field.
Tom Bartlett, who was a deputy director for data engineering at NHS England, led the team that oversaw the creation of the platform. According to Bartlett, it has already pulled more than 110,000 surgeries out of the waiting-list abyss: these patients would otherwise have been left wasting away for eternity. “Nearly 300,000 have been discharged faster,” he writes. “Cancer diagnosis times have improved.”
Meanwhile, an early-warning algorithm from Palantir has reduced deaths from sepsis at Tampa General Hospital in Florida by 68 percent, while reducing hospitalization time by a third. Sepsis is one of Britain’s most common killers.
The fact of the matter is that the platform works and saves lives. But Palantir Derangement Syndrome means ignoring all that and focusing instead on concerns about patient privacy. The fear is that consolidating confidential medical data on software run by a US tech giant might create a dangerous vulnerability ripe for abuse. But where were the protests and petitions against the previous IT system that led to these problems in the first place? The one that used Microsoft and Databricks, both American companies?
An audit by Bartlett’s team found that jerry-rigged system to be full of problems: patients’ names in records without password-protection, whiteboards listing patient details left in discharge lounges and unprotected emails coordinating surgery schedules. If this isn’t a breach of privacy, I don’t know what is. There was no audit trail (as there is with Palantir), no central control of the system (as there is with Palantir) and no way of knowing whether the information is current (as there is with Palantir). Under Palantir, patient data is better protected and outcomes have improved. It is an NHS miracle – but no one dares speak its name.
What Palantir does is poorly understood. The most severe presentation of PDS leads people to believe it’s some kind of private spy agency run for its billionaire founder Peter Thiel’s benefit (trigger warning for the paranoid: I co-founded the Thiel Fellowship, but that has nothing to do with this article).
Milder symptoms still lead to wild distortions and fantasies. Last month, the Financial Times published a story containing claims that Palantir had “unlimited access” to patient data. This is false. Further rumors began to spread that the company is “monetizing” the data. This is also false. Palantir builds data integration software; it doesn’t sell ads, it doesn’t use data to help others sell ads and it doesn’t use NHS data to train AI models. It does not collect, store or sell data. Its tech ingests vast quantities of information of different types and quality and then it identifies patterns and connections that aid decision-makers. That data sits on servers Palantir doesn’t own, on servers it doesn’t control, inside the UK. Its employees are clearly subject to the laws of the land and are tracked by access controls and audit trails.
Boeing sells jets to Israel, Microsoft provides computer power. Yet Palantir is the singular villain
“Convenience is not a basis for undermining medical confidentiality,” a Guardian editorial recently intoned. But Palantir doesn’t have the keys to NHS data. The implication is that contractors can freely browse sensitive patient files. Again, this is not true. In reality, having administrative access to where the data is stored is not the same as looking up patient records with clinical notes and histories. The data has been cleaned and pseudonymized. As Bartlett notes in another blog post, it is equivalent to “having the keys to a warehouse where the goods are still in sealed, unlabeled boxes.” By using Palantir, the NHS has replaced a fragmented, sloppy process full of security holes with a system that is structured, fully audited and highly secure. Alas, that news is lost to the convenience of monetizing rage with media clickbait. We are left with the insane logic of Labour MPs saying they are saving lives by not saving them and respecting privacy by leaving everything in full view.
Which brings us to the other real source of PDS, which is not a misguided fear of an Orwellian, tech-led superstate. It is that Palantir has a partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense for “war-related missions,” signed amid real threats and violence against the country. So now the keffiyeh-wearing Palestine activists, campus radicals funded by Gulf money and the British media all fixate on Palantir as if it were the central nervous system of the IDF.
You have to squint hard to see the scale of the company’s involvement and disregard so much else. Palantir’s total revenue runs into the low billions annually, with US government business making more than half of that. Any revenue from Israel is a tiny fraction – some estimates hit the tens of millions – nowhere near the top of any ranking of defense suppliers to the Jewish state.
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, cloud providers and dozens of others move far more hardware, F-35s, F-15s, munitions and services. Where is the outrage against them? Will the UK announce Microsoft is out of alignment with British values and seek to cancel contracts? There is little evidence to support this image of Palantir as Israel’s master war engine. Boeing sells them jets and munitions. Microsoft provides far more of the computing power. Yet Palantir has become the singular villain. Boycott Palantir and only Palantir, the PDS logic runs, and purity will be restored.
In truth, ripping analytics tools from allies weakens deterrence, prolongs and escalates conflicts and ultimately costs innocent human lives. Protesters shouldn’t take issue with the tools of analysis and detection, but instead with their government’s decisions on the geopolitical scale.
The criticisms of Palantir’s role in US immigration enforcement is even more absurd. It may be hard for the deranged to grasp, but Palantir’s work with US immigration began under the Obama administration in 2014, with a $41 million contract for case management systems to track records. Under subsequent administrations, Republican and Democrat, Palantir’s work simply continued.
Obama deported record numbers. In 2015, he even awarded Tom Homan, now Donald Trump’s “border czar,” the prestigious Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service. Homan was recognized for his leadership as the chief executive for removal operations at ICE. Trump ramped up rhetoric and priorities, but he hired Homan – and the tools in use predated even his first presidency. Palantir does not set deportation quotas, invent tactics or override elected officials. Governments do.
Palantir cannot pick and choose which parts of the US government to serve without being ejected from all of them. Just look at Anthropic, which tried to boycott certain Pentagon actions by withdrawing its technology. Now the US administration may ban Anthropic from all government contracts, given that such demands jeopardize national security. How can governments carry out high-risk operations if their partners might withdraw support at any moment?
It is for the State Department and US Congress to decide what is in the interest of citizens. And it is for citizens to decide who represents them in government. Whatever the outcome of that democratic process, companies should not try to supersede the decisions of elected officials. That way lies total anarchy. In fact, if we’re wary of overreach, our attention should be on governments. The state has mistreated and killed far more people than corporations have throughout history. It’s not even close; the ratio is likely millions to one.
Let us focus on the question of whether government is doing the right thing, not the phantasmagoria of fascist threats lurking in server farms. If we do that, we can be confident in the tools our governments use. Palantir’s role is to help make complicated systems run more efficiently. In doing so, it has saved the lives of thousands while helping the government to uphold the law. Only the truly deranged fail to see that.
Comments