Thread by @allthecitizens

Continuing our investigation into the expanding reach of US data analytics giant Palantir into UK public institutions, @allthecitizens have mapped £91m+ awarded to them across government. Below we outline the work they’re doing for the Cabinet Office:

https://twitter.com/allthecitizens/status/1346883482971222024?s=20

The Cabinet Office are the 3rd highest UK gov awarders of contracts to Palantir, with £22m+ given since 2015. The oldest is a joint contract with Global Digital Services (GDS): £734,834 spent on an “Enterprise Analytical Platform and Intelligence Service”. contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/c731846…

In 2016, the Cabinet Office also listed 4 separate G-Cloud spends on Palantir totalling some £1.4 million.

When @allthecitizens contacted the Cabinet Office under FOI for information about these programmes, it took the Cabinet Office 145 days and a complaint from the Information Commissioner’s Office to reply...

The eventual response showed that, as part of the GDS contract, Palantir had been hired to ‘analyse and learn from security attacks across government’ by ‘monitoring solutions across the public sector and analyse it for patterns’.

The additional payments listed are extensions of this project, nearly doubling it’s cost, indicate that either the project may have run for longer than expected or that additional expenses may have been incurred, something not uncommon with Palantir.
wired.com/story/how-pete…

Additionally, the FOI refers to Palantir providing ‘a three-month proof of concept to develop tools to assist with situational awareness of flow of freight’, preparing for a No-Deal break from the EU, a precursor to Palantir's latest Cabinet Office "border flow" contract.

Prior to the discussed “border flow service”, representatives from Palantir met with Michael Gove in Sep 2019 to “discuss Brexit readiness”, and in Sep 2020 won £20m to monitor UK’s borders post-Brexit - to run until Aug 2021. opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra…

Under that agreement Palantir is set to create a tool to collect combined Home Office, HM Revenue and Customs, and other departmental data to analyse the flow of goods and customs into the UK.
bylinetimes.com/2020/10/30/con…

As with the GDS agreement, it focuses on combining internal data sets under the Cabinet Office.

Phase one states that data will be shared across "participating departments" including; HMRC, Defra, Department for Transport, DVSA, Highways England, and Port Health Authorities.

@allthecitizens can reveal that some departments such as Defra have already started using them.

As stated in their recent SEC filing to go public, Palantir's aim is to become; "the default operating system [for data] across government", and, in the UK, while heavily embedded within the NHS, the Cabinet Office contracts maybe more than any other help them achieve this.