PALANTIR & ORACLE IN THE NHS

Our Take

This video, from the channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, digs into how Palantir and Oracle have embedded themselves in NHS data systems — the same Palantir that builds predictive policing tools and data-fusion platforms used by ICE and law enforcement agencies here in the US. We can't verify every claim in the video, but the broader pattern it's pointing at is one we track closely: once a surveillance contractor gets a foothold in "back office" infrastructure, that access rarely stays narrow. Health records, license plate data, biometric scans — it's all the same business model of normalizing total visibility into people's lives under the banner of efficiency.

That's exactly the playbook Flock Safety has run in American towns. A company sells city councils on a tidy pitch — faster investigations, safer streets — and quietly builds a nationwide network of plate-reader cameras that feeds into databases accessible far beyond the original purpose. Few residents ever get a real vote on whether that tradeoff was worth it, and fewer still know how far their movements are being logged. The NHS/Palantir story and the Flock story are cousins: both show how fast "public-private partnership" can become a euphemism for outsourcing surveillance to firms with little accountability to the people they're watching.

If you want to see this pattern mapped in your own backyard, check out our camera map to find Flock installations near you, and visit take action for concrete steps to push back at the local level. Credit to the creator for keeping an eye on the UK side of this fight — the infrastructure may differ, but the stakes are the same everywhere these systems take root.