Scrap plans to scan accounts of benefit claimants or risk new scandal, MPs told

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/04/ministers-urged-to-scrap-plans-for-surveillance-of-benefit-claimants-bank-accounts

The DWP is seeking powers to require banks to trawl the accounts of millions of people who receive benefits. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Campaigners say ‘fully automated’ approach risks repeat of Post Office Horizon scandal

Plans for automated surveillance of millions of bank accounts to catch welfare cheats should be scrapped, campaigners have said, warning the approach risks a repeat of the Post Office Horizon scandal.

But campaigners for welfare claimants, disabled people, human rights and privacy warned ministers it represents an “unprecedented and disproportionate invasion of the public’s financial privacy, the effect of which will be felt most sharply by the most vulnerable”.

The net would also trawl the private banking data of people related to welfare claimants including partners, parents and landlords. It would save around £360m a year – less than 5% of the total lost to welfare fraud, according to the government’s best estimate.

In a letter to Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, 42 organisations, from Disability Rights UK to Big Brother Watch, said: “There are approximately 22.6 million individuals in the welfare system, including those who are disabled, sick, caregivers, job seekers, and pensioners. They should not be treated like criminals by default … The Horizon scandal saw hundreds of people wrongfully prosecuted using data from faulty software. The government must learn from this mistake – not replicate it en masse.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/04/ministers-urged-to-scrap-plans-for-surveillance-of-benefit-claimants-bank-accounts

Continue ReadingScrap plans to scan accounts of benefit claimants or risk new scandal, MPs told

NHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm

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Original exclusive article by Lucas Amin and openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Palantir, whose owner claimed the NHS ‘makes people sick’, will ‘collect and process confidential patient information’

Hundreds of NHS hospitals have been ordered to share people’s confidential medical records with an American spy-tech company owned by a billionaire Trump donor, openDemocracy can reveal.

Palantir Technologies – the secretive Silicon Valley firm first funded by the CIA – will collect patient information from all hospitals in England, according to internal NHS documents.

In a letter sent last month, the health service finance chief Julian Kelly gave NHS trusts until the end of March to begin uploading patient information to a new central database that uses Palantir’s Foundry software.

The instruction came despite a government pledge, made after openDemocracy sued the Department of Health and Social Care in 2021, to consult the public before agreeing to work with Palantir again.

The new database, called ‘Faster Data Flows’, collects daily information about hospital patients – including their dates of birth, postcodes and detailed medical histories – that was previously held by individual trusts and shared less frequently.

NHS England told openDemocracy it would alter or remove identifiable personal information before it was passed to Palantir – a process referred to by the health service as “pseudonymisation”. Palantir also insisted that it does not have access to any “identifiable medical records”.

But an NHS document obtained by openDemocracy admits that the company will “collect and process confidential patient information”. It is not clear what, precisely, this processing entails.

Lawyers for three patient advocacy groups said that NHS England had not addressed vital legal and privacy concerns. “Slapping a sticker over your NHS number doesn’t suddenly mean your health record needs no protection,” said Cori Crider, a lawyer at Foxglove Legal. “People are very easy to re-identify from pseudonymised data.”

The news also raises fresh concerns that Palantir is being lined up to win a contentious £480m contract to process unprecedented amounts of NHS data without patient consent.

Palantir was originally funded by the CIA and has been heavily criticised for producing surveillance tech for police forces that allegedly creates “racist feedback loops” and has helped the US government to track and deport undocumented migrants.

The company’s founder, Peter Thiel, donated $1.25m to Donald Trump’s election campaign. Earlier this year he said the NHS “makes people sick” and claimed British affection for the health service was akin to “Stockholm syndrome”.

Tory MP David Davis told openDemocracy he was concerned “by the NHS appearing to be favouring an organisation with the provenance of Palantir”.

“NHS England should not be attempting to do this without explicit approval from Parliament,” he said, calling on the health secretary Steve Barclay to “explain himself” to MPs “before further action is taken”.

‘Faster data’

The pilot to trial Faster Data Flows to “support decision making” by doctors was launched in June 2022, with 21 “early adopters” joining.

The information it captured – including “admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity” as well as personal details – was uploaded daily to a central portal built by Palantir. Palantir itself was described in pilot documents as a “sub-processor” of the data, which is a legal term given to a third party that has permission to process information gathered by others.

NHS execs knew their work with Palantir carried a “reputational risk”. The pilot documents state: “The use of Palantir to collect and process data… is likely to be perceived by some privacy campaigners as contentious and therefore there is a relatively high risk of media coverage and adverse comment about this”.

In November, lawyers working for Foxglove wrote to NHS England on behalf of the National Pensioners’ Convention, Just Treatment and the Doctors Association UK, to raise concerns about the sharing of pseudonymised data.

The lawyers questioned whether consent requirements – which are needed to process pseudonymised data – had been violated, and what safeguards, if any, had been put in place to protect patient privacy.

NHS England has still not sent a substantive reply after more than three months but has now instructed all trusts to implement Faster Data Flows.

‘Rigged’

Palantir is considered a “strong frontrunner” for a controversial new IT contract worth £480m to build a database that is expected to include all health information currently held by the NHS, including GP and social care records.

There are concerns that the rollout of Palantir’s Foundry to hospitals now – during the tendering process – may provide the tech firm with an incumbent advantage.

“Every trust in England will be forced to integrate Foundry into their workflows,” said GP IT consultant and clinical informatics expert Marcus Baw. “This means there has already been significant taxpayer investment in using Foundry.

“Trusts are busy, with limited IT team capacity, so they cannot afford to redo work. To me this means that the system will already have significant momentum towards Palantir and Foundry.”

A Department for Health and Social Care minister stated last month that whoever wins the contract will need to migrate data from Foundry into the new FDP system.

Labour MP Clive Lewis told openDemocracy that “the bid looks rigged… politicians of all parties should be screaming to the rafters about this”.

Revolving door

Palantir was first given an NHS contract in 2020 – without tender – to help manage the Covid-19 vaccine rollout while Matt Hancock was health secretary. Hancock used special ministerial powers to bypass patient confidentiality rules and allow the company to process patient data.

It won a further contract that was neither published nor tendered for – leading openDemocracy to sue the DHSC. After this legal action, the government released its contracts with Palantir and promised to consult the public before making further deals.

But our leaked documents reveal that NHS bosses have now ordered a rollout of Palantir software to hospitals across England, in a seeming breach of that promise.

The firm has also exploited a weakly regulated ‘revolving door’ in the NHS – poaching at least three former NHS data experts – as it chases the “must-win” contract. One of its recent hires, Indra Joshi, served as head of artificial intelligence for the NHS and helped launch the Covid-19 datastore – the first NHS project to use Foundry – before quitting the health service and joining Palantir in April 2022.

Harjeet Dhaliwal, who was previously deputy director of data services at NHS England, joined the firm later that same year.

The two ex-NHS staffers joined Paul Howells at Palantir, the company’s “health and care director”, who previously led a national data programme for NHS Wales.

Palantir did not respond to questions about whether the trio now work on NHS-related projects.

Palantir has lobbied the government extensively, famously entertaining the NHS executive Lord Prior with watermelon cocktails. The company also considered a contentious strategy described as ‘Buying Our Way In’. Emails sent by Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK chief, said the company would try “hoovering up” smaller businesses with NHS contracts to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”, according to Bloomberg News.

NHS England did not respond to openDemocracy’s questions about whether the processing of patient data on Palantir’s Foundry platform was lawful.

A spokesperson said: “By collecting data in a more streamlined way, the NHS is better able to plan and allocate resources to maximise outcomes for patients, while ensuring that their personal data remains protected and within the NHS at all times.

“Ultimately, it will help all NHS organisations to better understand their waiting lists and pressures in near real time, work as systems, and significantly reduce the burden of manual reporting on staff.”

A Palantir Spokesperson said: “Any claim that Palantir has access to identifiable medical records through the Faster Data Flow programme is false – not a single Palantir employee does.

“We have simply built software that is being used to make a programme that already existed work faster – much like our software has been used during Covid to deliver the vaccine rollout and, subsequently, to cut waiting lists and speed up cancer diagnosis.”

Original exclusive article by Lucas Amin and openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

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Continue ReadingNHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm

Commentary on and analysis of recent political events

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Why did Jack Straw try to make it illegal for children at childrens’ homes to speak out about abuse? Was Jack Straw influenced by the fact that some of his friends and fellow politicians were paedophiles? Was this a desperate attempt to stop the truth coming out not only that Labour politiicans are paedophiles but highest level politicians of ALL parties?

Fifty new nuclear plants could be goal in official energy plans

Up to 50 nuclear power stations could be built under plans being looked at by the government. The remarkable figure – 10 times the number the government is openly discussing – is revealed in documents submitted to the Department of Energy and Climate Change by one of its own advisory bodies.

The documents are likely to raise questions as to what extent the government’s energy policy is weighted in favour of nuclear and away from renewables such as wind turbines. It comes as Brussels begins an investigation into whether Britain is providing up to £17bn of potentially illegal public guarantees for the first nuclear power plant in a generation, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, which aims to provide 7% of the country’s electricity.

Image of GCHQ donught building

NSA leaks: UK and US spying targets revealed

More details of people and institutions targeted by UK and US surveillance have been published by The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The papers say that the list of around 1,000 targets includes a European Union commissioner, humanitarian organisations and an Israeli PM.

The Guardian writes that GCHQ targeted the UN development programme, Unicef, German government buildings and the EU Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia.

Latest Snowden revelations expose Obama’s lies on NSA spy programs

Just hours after receiving a report from his hand-picked advisory panel on National Security Agency surveillance operations, President Barack Obama used his end of the year press conference Friday to deliver an Orwellian defense of unrestrained US spying both at home and abroad.

“I have confidence that the NSA is not engaging in domestic surveillance and snooping around,” Obama said, despite the cascade of revelations proving just the opposite. These revelations, including the latest from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, have established that the agency is collecting and storing billions of files recording the phone calls, text messages, emails, Internet searches and even the daily movements of virtually ever US citizen, not to mention those of hundreds of millions of people abroad.

“The United States is a country that abides by rule of law[!], that cares deeply about privacy[!], that cares deeply about civil liberties[!],” he added. Who, at this late juncture, does the American president think he’s fooling? One only has to read the ruling by a Washington, DC Federal District Court judge—which was then stayed in the interest of “national security”—finding the surveillance methods of the NSA to be “almost Orwellian,” and its activities unconstitutional, i.e., criminal.

UK reneges on promised independent inquiry on rendition, torture

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has abandoned its promise to carry out an independent inquiry into Britain’s involvement in “extraordinary rendition”, detention”and torture carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Instead, the inquiry will be undertaken by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), whose record is one of covering up the activities of the intelligence services.

Only last month, the ISC questioned the head of the internal security service MI5, Andrew Parker; the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Sir Iain Lobban; and Sir John Sawers, head of the foreign intelligence department MI6. The hearing was meant to demonstrate unprecedented openness and accountability to Parliament of the secret state apparatus, after revelations by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden that the UK agencies worked with the US to monitor the Internet and phone activity of most of the world’s citizens.

 …

Clare Algar, executive director of the human rights organisation Reprieve, criticised the decision to hand the investigation to the ISC: “If the government takes this course, it will be breaking its promise to hold a genuine, independent inquiry into the UK’s involvement in torture.

‘Megrahi was my friend. He did not kill my daughter’: Lockerbie father says British government is not telling the truth about the bombing

The father of one of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing has asked mourners to pray for the “innocent family” of the only person convicted of the worst mass murder in British history, as the nation marked its 25th anniversary.

In his address to a memorial service at Westminster Abbey yesterday evening attended by relatives of the victims, Dr Jim Swire also accused the British government of failing to tell “all the truth they know about this terrible tragedy”.

Before the service, the UK, US and Libyan governments in a joint statement promised to work together to “reveal the full facts of the case”, saying that they wanted “all those responsible for this most brutal act of terrorism brought to justice, and to understand why it was committed”. [BS: positive identification]

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Labour should “do god” BS …

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