Madness of Palantir being given mass surveillance tracing contract 

ByMartyn Bradbury

US tech firm Palantir held talks with Privacy Commissioner

US data firm Palantir, which is is providing numerous governments with software for tracking Covid-19, has been in talks with the Privacy Commissioner.

What on earth is the NZ Government doing talking to the mass surveillance Nazgul, Peter Thiel?

We aren’t seriously letting him or Palantir anywhere near a mass surveillance tracking idea are we?

PALANTIR OVERSEAS

It’s been widely reported including by the Wall Street Journal and Forbes that Palantir has built an anti-Covid web app that began running at the US Centers for Disease Control in late March.

It looks very similar to the confirmed start-up in the UK of a Palantir platform called Foundry, set up to crunch anonymised data from the NHS – from hospitals, labs and so on – to predict where resources like hospital beds will be needed.

The UK government said Palantir was not in control of the data.

“Foundry is built to protect data by design. A G-cloud data processing contract is in place. Palantir is a data processor, not a data controller, and cannot pass on or use the data for any wider purpose without the permission of NHS England,” it said.

In the US, Palantir’s CDC project has, according to media reports, avoided controversy because it appears not to be ingesting information that could identify individuals.

But Bloomberg reported that Palantir’s pandemic pitch to governments in France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria included a tool called Gotham, best-known for helping intelligence agencies and the police track individuals.

CONTROVERSIAL IN NEW ZEALAND

In New Zealand, Palantir and co-founder Peter Thiel have both been controversial.

Two years ago, eerily prescient reports told how the Silicon Valley billionaire and his friends had begun buying property here – with central Otago a favourite – to use as boltholes in case of a global apocalypse.

Thiel has been a close ally of US President Donald Trump.

His citizenship here was fast tracked in 2011, though he had barely set foot in New Zealand. The previous government was forced to defend that.

As for Palantir, the NZ Herald revealed the company’s links to spy agencies the GCSB and SIS and the intelligence community, including multimillion-dollar defence contracts.

In the US, Palantir’s deep links to the CIA and National Security Agency have been widely reported on.

Just two days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported Palantir got a jump on the virus, recalling its staff from abroad ahead of most companies.

RNZ has approached Palantir for comment, and will keep trying to get more information on this from the Health Ministry.

The GCSB told RNZ it was reviewing Covid-19 contact tracing tools to identify security risks and how to resolve those.

Brothers & Sisters.

We have been compliant with this Police State because we have universally agreed that the  curtailing of our civil liberties was required to defeat the pandemic, however there are limits to our good will and consent.

An Orwellian mass surveillance tracking system run by a company with deep ties to the deep state need to be the lines in the sand we are prepared to draw.

Government assurances today that any digital tracking is voluntary must not be allowed to move tomorrow.

Our consent to a Police State for a virus the vast majority of us won’t die or suffer from is not endless, and to believe otherwise is a grotesque misreading of our compliance.

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12 Comments

  1. “However anxious British intelligence was about Palantir’s self-promotion, the worry must not have lasted very long. Within two years, documents show that at least three members of the “Five Eyes” spy alliance between the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were employing Palantir to help gather and process data from around the world. Palantir excels at making connections between enormous, separate databases, pulling big buckets of information (call records, IP addresses, financial transactions, names, conversations, travel records) into one centralized heap and visualizing them coherently, thus solving one of the persistent problems of modern intelligence gathering: data overload.”
    https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/

  3. Why aren’t we just using the Australian covid app? Why the need to reinvent the wheel? I would have thought it all the more relevant if there is to be a trans Tasman bubble.

  4. Palaintair sounds like it employs a bunch of cheapies, works them long hours but they are grateful because they get a free meal. Wonderful. Sarcasm.

    You have to wonder why NZ spends a fortune on it’s defence and spy agencies when it’s all a bunch of overseas workers who rate the free food as one of the companies biggest benefits…

    Employee reviews from people who work at Palatair.
    https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Palantir-Technologies/reviews?fcountry=ALL

    “Be prepared to work many hours, they don’t have enough personnel & may get overworked depending on the position. Promotion depends on who you know and if favored by upper management.
    Pros
    Catered breakfast/lunch/dinner. Chiro and masseuse on-site.
    Cons
    No 401k company matching. Overworked and underpaid compared to other companies.”

    “Can be a challenging place to work. Large organization, but provides no mentoring, no real path of advancement, and difficult personalities who can’t manage well a large corporation.

    You must play the politics. And as the summary says….Its never good enough.
    Pros
    good food
    Cons
    You must play the politics. Hard works means nothing.”

    “Quite honestly I never knew I could work this hard this long. Working anywhere from 15-20 a Day for weeks, being able to work straight through for 48 hours, working in the CIA & FBI … Is Hard, but it was all MEANINGFUL … and it truly changed me from just being a boy into a TRUE & Real MAN.”

    “I was a contractor at Palantir. The work environment was great and coworkers intelligent! These are productive go-getters that love driving towards a common mission. Politics can be a bit of a problem, or so I’ve heard.
    Pros
    Work environment is what dreams are made of. Bring your pup, you get free meals, the nap rooms are good for a quick refresh…”

  5. Peter Thiel really likes woman too. Sarcasm. It’s great that the NZ government is happy to support those types of views.

    Peter Thiel Once Wrote That Women Getting The Vote Was Bad For Democracy
    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peter-thiel-women-democracy_n_5747079be4b03ede4413f6f5?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAE-Z_64M9yGvmfOUCyNHQDD9myRp6lQm3_0eMkM-bUgFaxRUqQuCS8eiHLLYqdI3qFClH1bOBZwG9nQD0GXm7KvWwynx69XHPmzEBHZhQB3ipCVmsnCx1PMYHi_3psR1ewWWLDQW0Mq2xZTpMxv6mttJ0wgnwx2xFYgcf5Dv8_Gu

    Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and the death of democracy
    The problem with traditional conservatives is that they’re too anti-government to fulfill Thiel’s vision. Fortunately for him, Trump is no traditional conservative
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/peter-thiel-republican-convention-speech

    GUESS WHO’S BEHIND FACEBOOK’S POLITICAL AD POLICY
    Peter Thiel has reportedly been lobbying Mark Zuckerberg to refrain from fact checking political ads on the platform.
    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/12/peter-thiel-behind-facebooks-political-ad-policy

    We love giving citizenship and sweetheart deals to billionaires not available to our own nationals.
    Billionaire Peter Thiel makes fortune after ‘sweetheart’ deal with Government
    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11794020

  6. This is part of the Creepy Dutch woman Queen Beatrix, Daughter of a man who was in the German Government Party in 1943 his name; Prince Rupert Beatrix’s father.

    He put her on the “Digital Project” within the Bilderberg Group, (the highly secret organisation founded in Holland in 1954)

    ‘The Digital Project’ is planing complete global control of everyone’s lives by monitoring our every activity.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bilderberg_participants

  7. Cutting through all the 5G conspiracy theories, there is one fact.
    With 5G every 200 m within your radius, you will be tracked. No matter if you have GPS turned off, or 4G, your position will be known to within millimetres through triangulation from the 5G antennae.
    And if that doesn’t worry you, there will be facial recognition to boot.
    Governments are preparing for the inevitable financial meltdown and ways to quell social disobedience.
    Stay at home.
    Or fight this BS.

  8. Why is this guy floating around the country talking to our officials when the rest of us are under arrest? If he only has a holiday home here then he should go back to his place of residence. And in future Hone should meet Petey at a road or airport checkpoint when he sweeps in to explain the situation and then turn him away.

    PS: Where do we access the full transcript of John and Peter’s korero?

    1. Maybe that’s the reason that you are under “arrest”, building 5g towers, pushing trough controversial’ laws like the abortion laws and go on, since their are no mass protest possible, they can play their Orwellian games. time fo a nation to wake up.

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