Media Storm - Surveillance nation: Palantir, facial recognition and the UK

Episode Date: June 11, 2026

China, Russia, and... the UK? We’re talking about mass surveillance. Did you know the UK is in the 5 most surveilled countries in the world? AI facial recognition technology is causing alarm for its recent deployment at protests. It’s being rolled out across the UK at a pace outstripping the rules designed to govern it. More than 6.6 million faces have been scanned since 2023. And guess what? Black and Asian people are most likely to be mismatched and criminally pursued in error. But surveillance these days isn’t always as obvious as cameras on police vans. In today’s world, it’s about data. And governments aren’t collecting it on their own – they’re contracting private corporations to do it: via shady contracts that pay these companies not just in multimillion pound deals, but goldmines of our private information. Palantir is at the top of that list – and the US tech firm that’s been providing ICE agents with private health data to help them target migrant communities has now got its claws in the NHS. Social media platforms are surveillance companies in their own right. And the media that’s supposed to hold them to account often functions as a tool in the data-gathering industry. How are we supposed to navigate this minefield?! To help us through the maze, we’re joined by Jasleen Chaggar, Senior Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch, and investigative tech reporter Jade Ruyu-Yan. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This Father's Day start with a question, like where did Dad's story begin? Ancestry DNA now has up to $75 off on our Father's Day sale, so Dad can explore his roots across more than 3,600 regions and discover the places and cultures that shaped his story. Save now, give Ancestry DNA from only $69. Offer ends June 21st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply.

This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. Media Storm is brought to you in partnership with Open,

Britain. A grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. Hi, Matilda and hi, media stormers. Your voice is back. I know. I mean, for the first time in like three days, I can talk. I was almost going to have to do this episode mute. Like, I've been a bit ill and my voice just disappeared like it was stolen by Ursula the Sea Witch. Well, I was always going to have to do this episode blind. Sorry, what? Last night, glass went in my eye. Oh my gosh.

Wait, was this you being clumsy again? No. No. Okay, so for anyone listening who doesn't already know, I'm the clumsiest person in the world. But this time, it wasn't my fault. I was being taken out for a lovely dinner by one of my friends, and she smashed her glass. She was sitting opposite me.

Smashed her glass by knocking it forward. And obviously, she was, like, in horror. and basically on the brink of tears the entire evening. But it hadn't done damage. I could just feel that it was in there. Stop it. I instantly just like grab my eye and I'm holding it open. And everyone in the restaurant sort of looking because you hear a glass smash, you look,

but then you see the person cradling their eye and you think, oh God, I'm witnessing one of those horror scenes. Anyway, it was totally fine. I just had to run it under a tap for like 15 minutes until it came out. I was more concerned about getting pink eye from the like restaurant tap I was literally grazing my eye for 15 minutes. But conclusion was just like that can actually happen. Someone can knock over a glass and a shot of it can just fly in your eye so easily.

We're so fragile. We're so fragile. Well, with two voices between us and four working eyes, shall we get on with the show? That's. I walked into my local Sainsbury's the other day and something had changed. There were a few more posters up. I didn't really notice it at first because there's always posters up,

special offers, nectar point deals, but then I noticed a new TV screen and a new camera. The poster below read, your safety is our priority. Live facial recognition cameras had been installed in the store, quietly scanning every customer as we go about our shopping. Don't worry, the bottom of the poster reads, it's only being used to identify shoplifters. On the surface, an effective way to catch people, committing a crime, but under the surface, it is risking everyone's privacy getting invaded

and affecting some already minorised groups even more. Facial recognition technology is being rolled out across the UK at a pace that appears to be outstripping the rules designed to govern it. Retailers are certainly not the only ones. Police forces are increasingly using live systems to scan members of the public in real time. The simplest systems check faces captured on CCTV, mobile phones, dash cams, social media and doorbell cameras against mugshots held on the police national database. This tech is used during investigations and is available to all police forces in England and Wales. But more recently, we have seen surveillance cameras in town centres and at large events. This lets police scan every passing face, capture its biometric data and use any.

AI-powered software at a remote operations centre to compare it in real time with watch lists. If there's a match, the two photos, the suspect's name and alleged crime are sent to mobile devices held by police officers waiting near the cameras. Their job is to instantly judge if the match is good and if so, confront or arrest the person. 13 police forces in England and Wales have or are using LFR. The Met in London is the biggest user. To explain just how much the use of this technology has grown, it started in 2020, but data since April 2023 shows more than 6.6 million faces have been scanned. In the last two years, use has accelerated dramatically. In 26, so far, the Metropolitan Police has scanned more than

1.7 million faces, up 87% on the same period in 2025. 1.6.5. 1.7.5. 1.7. Seven million faces and 44 arrests. And herein lies part of the problem. The statistics call into question the effectiveness and perhaps ulterior motives of this technology. For example, at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 2023, nearly one million faces were scanned over just a few days by Northamptonshire Police. But this mass surveillance triggered zero alerts.

And sometimes when alerts are triggered, they're not for the right people. A report initiated by the UK's data protection watchdog found that facial recognition tech is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts. As scary as that is, I may have something even scarier for you. It's one thing the states watching you,

but what about the corporations contracted to watch us for them? At least the government is elected, the same cannot be said for big tech. Mass surveillance is an issue that cuts to the core of democracy and not just in the traditional sort of stasi-gastapo sense of being watched by the state, but because of the technocracy or techno feudalism or the broligarchy, these are terms coined by various alarmed academics, experts,

and whistleblowers which we'll be getting into. First, though, I need to introduce you to the frontrunner in the field of big tech surveillance. Helena, when you think of the big tech bros, who comes to mind? Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah, that's totally right. They have their hands on minds of personal data. And social media is a form of surveillance in that way.

But when it comes to surveillance, there's another name you need to add to that list. The company is Palantir, the man behind it is Peter Thiel. Yes, Palantir, an infamous name now over in the US. Exactly. But what many people don't know is that over the past years, this company has also quietly bettered itself into the vital organs of the UK state. Oh no. Okay, give us the background. Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, early Facebook investor,

massive Trump donor. The name Palantir actually comes from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Okay, nerd alert. Well, maybe if everyone knew, we'd be better off today. The Palantieri are the all-seeing stones in the Lord of the Rings. That should tell you something. Exactly. I should tell you about what Palantir does. It should. And yet, I'm none the wiser really. What does Palantir actually do? It's a great question. And a lot of Palantir employees actually struggle to explain it. What they do is data integration and surveillance at an industrial scale. They build platforms that take enormous, fragmented, messy data sets from different government agencies, departments, subcontractors. and they weave them together into a single, searchable, analysable whole.

Their two flagship products are called Gotham, which is used by defence and law enforcement, and foundry used by governments and corporations. And I know what you're thinking. That it sounds like it's quite useful, actually? It does, and that's what Palantir's defenders always say. But to understand what this company is truly capable of and what it is willing to do,

you have to look at what it's doing right now in the United States, because Britain is signing contracts with a company that is actively building a mass deportation machine for the Trump administration. The ICE raids. Yes, Palantir built a tool for immigration and customs enforcement called Elite, enhanced leads identification and targeting for enforcement.

What that means is it populates a map with deportation targets, generates a dossier on each person, and gives a confidence score on their current address, and it draws down. including, according to sworn testimony in Oregon, Medicaid health records. Health records to find people to deport. Health records to deport people. Amnesty International is actually calling on Palantir to immediately cease that work under UN human rights principles. And before anyone says that

would never happen here, in 2021, it emerged that the NHS had been sharing patient data with the Home Office to track undocumented migrants, not criminals, people who are who had fled war, sought medical care, and had their records quietly handed to immigration enforcement. That is horrifying. So how exactly is Palantir embedded in the UK already? Well, it started with a £1 contract. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the NHS needed to build a COVID data store urgently. Palantir generously offered to help for just £1. My, how altruistic of them. there was no competitive tender because there was no time. And that pound for them would pay off

more than a million fold. That pound was a foot in the door. By 2023, that one pound contract had become a 330 million pound deal, the NHS federated data platform, connecting data across up to 240 NHS organisations, waiting lists, patient records, staff rosters, and look. NHS England says it's enabled 11,000 additional operations and a 6.8% increase in cancer diagnoses. Real benefits. But when the contract was published, 417 of its 586 pages were completely blanked out.

Those were the sections on personal data protection almost entirely hidden. I know about this because of the Good Law Project who we've platformed on MediaStorm before because they took them to court over that, didn't they? They did. This forced NHS England to quietly admit that Palantir will in fact collect and process confidential patient information. Now, health data is anonymised, but lawyers have warned that patients are very easy to re-identify from this data,

because medical data is incredibly intimate. It tells you a lot about a person. And let me guess, Palantir's takeover hasn't stopped with the NHS. Not remotely. In December 2025, the Ministry of Defence signed a £240 million contract with Palantir, again, without competitive tender, that was for live operational decision making. They work with the Metropolitan Police, Bedfordshire Police, the Cabinet Office, GCHQ, the Financial Conduct Authority, Coventry City Council has a deal.

The documented total of UK public contracts now exceeds £900 million. And that's just the ones we know about. Palantir has announced it wants to make the UK its European defence headquarters. Also, they're suing London Mayor Sadiq Khan for blocking a £50 million £50,000 Metropolitan Police. contract. 900 million pounds. This is lucrative work. And there's the bigger picture. Mass surveillance is a mass market and it's shifting huge shares of economic and political power, not just towards the state, but towards private corporations. Some of these corporations are already arguably

more powerful than states. The five largest US tech companies have a combined market cap larger than the GDP of every country except the US and China. Data is... fueling this massive wealth inequality. And the billionaires who built these fortunes are buying politicians, funding political movements, and in some cases running governments directly. No one elects them. No one can appeal their decisions.

And when an algorithm decides who gets universal credit, or which asylum claim gets fast-tracked, or which street gets more policing... And that algorithm is owned by a private company, then the question of who actually governs us becomes very difficult to answer. It is, without exaggeration, one of the defining political questions of our time. Today, our facial recognition systems racist.

What's the price of our privacy? What happens to a free press under mass surveillance? And can regulation keep up with rapid technological change? The NHS is giving some Palantir contractors access to patient data. What could possibly go wrong with handing Palantir access to people's medical data? ICE officials are going to be granted access to personal health information that includes addresses and ethnicity. There's special reports on the increasing use of controversial facial recognition technology in policing. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last.

I'm Matilda Mallinson and I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storm is the UK a surveillance nation. Welcome to the Media Storm studio. Our first guest today is the senior legal and policy. officer at Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties campaign group fighting to defend freedoms at the time of enormous technological change. Welcome to the studio, Jasmine Chaka. It's great to speak with you. Our second guest is an investigative tech reporter for Open Democracy and Tech Policy Press. She has a particular interest in corporate influence and complains about it on her substack PR disaster. Welcome to Media Storm, Jade Riu Yen. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Let's start with one example of

technology is transforming surveillance. The cart has gone before the horse. That's what Professor William Webster, the Biometrics Commissioner for England and Wales, said about AI-powered face scanning. National oversight of facial recognition is lagging far behind the technology's rapid growth, he said. Now, several bodies have oversight of the technology, including the Information Commissioner's Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but it's all a bit confusing. Jasmine, who is really in charge of this regulatory system for this tech and what are its biggest challenges? Well, the problem is no one's really in charge. There is absolutely no law that mentions the words facial recognition in this country. And therefore, there's a patchwork of different

laws that the police are relying on at the moment to deploy this technology. In practice, that means that the police have essentially been allowed to write their own rules when it comes to this tech and have been experimenting on the public and treating us like guinea pigs for almost a decade in rolling out live facial recognition on our streets and using databases to run retrospective facial recognition checks to investigate crimes. What that means is that when the police take a facial recognition ban and deploy it on a high street, millions of people have often without even realizing had their faces biometrily scanned. And that is an identity check that's intrusive as having your fingerprints taken or your DNA swamps from your cheek,

just to try and help the police find who they're looking for. And it's really an inversion of how police normally takes space in this country, because normally suspicion precedes surveillance. You have to actually suspect someone of doing something wrong before you can ask them for their identity or subject them to surveillance. And this is turning that on his head, because it's saying, We're going to ask you who you are and uniquely identify you just in case you're who we're looking for. And it's completely disproportionate. And it's not just regulatory systems that can't seem to keep up with the effects of surveillance technology.

Neither can our media. Jade Rue, let's bring you in here. Are journalists keeping up with the pace of surveillance technology and successfully keeping the public informed in this field? What I would say is first and foremost, when you think, think of surveillance tech, you tend to think a lot about cameras and being surveilled in that way, much as Jusleen was saying. I've come to realize that it extends way further. It's to do with aggregating data systems that kind of efficiently gather people's data and draw conclusions

from that. And I think that people tend to see that less as surveillance. And so just getting to those basic understandings, I think, is difficult. but in terms of whether the media is keeping up, it's difficult because there's such a blurriness around what's going on in terms of commercial contracts, in terms of actually getting into the nitty-gritty of what the technology does. And I personally see that as a lot of the media's job, first and foremost, untangling the facts,

which actually not necessarily all the time are obscured on purpose by companies, but rather just a huge mass of information that people simply don't have the time to sort through in their daily lives. We're going to get into all of those issues and look at that data form of surveillance as well. Let's get into some of the nitty gritties here. So when it comes to facial recognition surveillance tech, major surveys, including research conducted by the Home Office itself, shows public approval of facial recognition technology is very contextual. Catching criminals, people feel more comfortable with, finding missing people, sure, tracking one's daily movements, not so comfortable.

Jaseline, one of the biggest arguments for facial recognition technology is, if you've got nothing tied, you know, then you shouldn't have anything to be worried about. But if we put aside mistaken identity, because we'll come to that shortly, what is your response to this argument? I think we all have something to fear from building a mass surveillance infrastructure. which you have to remember is not only going to last for this government, which you may or may not like, but all future governments that might not be so rights respecting. And we see in places around the world, like, for example,

in the US at the moment where ICE agents are using facial recognition in their mobile phones to identify people on the streets who they think might be undocumented migrants, but also US citizens in real time, how quickly the sort of slippery slope argument comes in. Facial recognition that can ID and track down anyone being used without any regulatory safeguards is not going to affect everyone equally, though. Last year, after testing of the UK's police, facial recognition technology, it was revealed that the tech is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts. In January this year, Thames Valley Police arrested Alvi Chowdry, who is of Bangladeshi heritage.

for a burglary he did not commit in a city he had never visited a hundred miles from his home. Alvi, a 26-year-old software engineer, was working from home in Southampton when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours. His mugshot was on police record from 2021 when he was falsely arrested for the first time. In 2021 he was not charged and he was told his data would be wiped from the system. But seemingly, police still had his mugshot, a mixed. him up with another brown man who didn't even look like Alvi. I spoke to him earlier this week about the ordeal.

When it first happened, I opened the door and I thought they were going to ask my ring door footage or something similar. But then, yeah, I was told I was under arrest for burglary. I was very shocked, but I wasn't really too concerned because I thought this was a very easy misunderstanding to resolve. I was a bit shaky. I was a bit concerned because the people. police, as soon as he tells me I'm under arrest, he's like holding me quite tightly, like,

I'm going to run away or something. Then I'm like, oh my God, like, there's another police officer searching my room. I want, what if this is a set up? Like, he's going to plant some evidence. So you're all these thoughts are kind of racing around because obviously I'm just expecting someone regular to knock on a, you're not expecting to get arrested. So yeah, is they catch you by surprise, I would say, you know, I complied. They wanted to search. the property. I said, yeah, fine. Search through a day. I gave them full access to my phones. I gave them my PIN and everything, but they said, hey, you'll be able to give all of that interview. But yeah, I didn't, I don't think it would be 11 or 10 hours later. So you were

kept in custody for 11 hours. Can you describe your state of mind and what effect that actually has on a person? Yeah, it's, you're very isolated straight away. Like, you're in a massive room. You've just got this blue kind of like mattress if you can, a mat, let's call it. And then you have a toilet in the corner. You don't have access to anything of the outside world. You don't have a window. So whenever someone would walk past and I'll check on you, they'd like slide this thing on the door and that's like your only access to the outside world. The first thing you'd ask is what the time is because you have no sense of time or anything. And obviously the first five hours, I was still, you know, relatively calm. But then after five,

hours you're just there and you're with your thoughts and you're not really with anything else you don't know you have no clue what's going on you you're not even allowed to like tell i couldn't tell my parents why i had been arrested i wish i could have because then they would have put their hearts at ease because all they know is i've been arrested i could have ran someone over i could have got into um you know an accident or something like that but they don't know and i'm not allowed to tell them so you have all these thoughts and then after five hours no one's coming to speak to you No one's giving you any information. So then you're just like, oh, maybe I genuinely thought that they were trying to keep me here as long as possible so they could mentally break me. And then I'd confess to something I didn't do or it would be some kind of psychological tactic they're using.

When did you see the photo of the person that you had been mistaken for? And what did it look like? It wasn't a photo. It was full footage. It was a video with very good quality, by the way. This happened at about 10 past midnight the next morning you'd say. This was during the interview and it was, you know, it was a good couple minutes of footage and the worst thing was the suspect. You can see him very clearly. I was assuming it's a grainy picture.

Like he's not hiding his face whatsoever and that just frustrated me even more because the suspect, he looked 10 years younger than me. He didn't have any facial hair whatsoever. He looked about 16 to 18 years of age. everyone else in the interview realised that straight away so then yeah you're just a bit frustrated really you know because before this I had assumed the suspect would have looked

very similar to me but he just didn't this interview lasted no longer than 10 minutes and five of those minutes was me ranting to the requesting officer like how much this affects me but they just they said as soon as they saw the image of the suspect and they saw my custody photo

they already knew beforehand they they put the wrong person but they have to carry at the interview process anyway. I had to wait for Thames Valley police officers to come to Hampshire, Southampton and interview me. So in this case, AI matched the two photos, but the police still had to look at them and then decide whether or not AI had got it right.

So a human had also looked at these photos. How does that make you feel? To be honest, I'm just surprised that they would actually admit that because now it's a whole other thing. Now you could say it's just negligence, lack of professionalism, discrimination, maybe racism. They didn't do any type of detective work. When I came up as a match, they had my name, my date of birth, my address. They had access to every type of information they could have.

If they did any type of background research into me, could have found my career history. And the amount that was stolen was £3,000. Now, are you going to do a risk assessment? Has this person ever committed a crime before? Has he been around anyone that's committed a crime before? Is he likely to risk his career for £3,000? The answer is always going to be no.

And I've actually got more security clearance than the average person as a software engineer. So they've got detailed information on me that they could have easily accessed, but they just chose not to. They just looked at two images of two guys that are clearly different people and we're like, oh, we're not sure, but let's just arrest them anyway. Did the police ever apologise? No, they didn't. not. I told them in my complaint, can you get the requesting officer who requested my arrest

to please contact me and explain to me why she's requested my arrest and to have the decency to apologise? She never did contact me. She never did reach out, never had the decency to apologise. So I think that really says it all. A lot of people might hear of these false arrests and say, oh well, you get arrested, but then you get let out, you know, no harm done. But I wonder if you could tell us what is the harm, both on that day itself, but also in the time that has passed since. First thing, we need to make sure the false positives are very low. Now, with South Asian males, it's 4%. And that might not sound like a lot, but that's one in 25 arrests using this technology that would be false. With black females, that's 9%. That's almost 1 in 10. So those error rates are

way too high. Within any type of software engineering, any type of tech company, if you're If an error rate of 4% came, that would be considered a major bargain. That would need to be fixed. Now, for the individual, if we're going through this process of all these ethnic minorities having to deal with these false arrests, it's obviously going to affect them. Every false arrest that they go through is a type of record that they wouldn't like. So for my situation, the direct thing in my career, I need to apply for security clearance with the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police.

Every time I apply for that, I need to declare how many times I've been arrested, even if I get a no further action. Obviously, I've been falsely arrested one time before. Now, next year, when I apply for it again, I'm going to have to declare I've been arrested a second time. Now, no matter even if the police falsely arrest you, when it keeps adding up, it's obviously going to make it look more suspicious each time. So there's that kind of stuff, and this is before the psychological effects can have on a person. The problem is with the police, they never believe what you say. you're always, you know, it's the psychology they use, make it out, like, they're fully in control. And even if you want to make a complaint, nothing will happen.

They uphold the law. But my response to that is if you're an organisation that's, you have the authority and the responsibility of upholding the law, you should be scrutinized even more than the average organisation in person. But seems to be the other way around. Jesleen, why does surveillance tech disproportionately affect communities of colour? there are two things going on. So the fairness is the algorithm and how it's trained. Normally it's trained on data, which is generally white faces and men. And so it's less accurate in picking up people of colour and women. And that means if you belong to one of those cohorts,

as you're walking down the street, you're more likely to be incorrectly identified, pulled over by the police, questioned, asked to prove that you're not through the machine saying you are. The second thing that's going on is where these deployments take place. So if you put your life social recognition deployment in a socioeconomic deprived area or an area which is predominantly made up with ethnic minorities, you're going to find more of those people. And there's also the question of who's on the watch list. So if you have other watch this with predominantly young black men on there,

of course those are the people who are going to pick up. So the capacity for bias to creep into the system is on several different layers. And it's not just racial minorities. For example, Jasmine, you recently gave evidence in Parliament about mass financial surveillance powers and how they would disproportionately impact those on the poverty line. Can you explain what these powers are and why they might affect those in the welfare system in the UK? Yeah, so this was the bag spying bill that has now become law. in this country. And essentially what it allows the Department for Working Pensions, the

welfare department, to do is to ask banks to run an algorithm on their data sets and look for anyone who's receiving benefits and then identify from that cohort of people, anyone who it looks like are receiving an overpayment of benefits. Because of the way the law is set up and the algorithm is going to be set up, it requires the banks to scan to every single for one of our bank accounts first to identify if you are receiving benefits. And so it's a massive intrusion, again, without suspicion. And I think it's helpful to think about these kinds of surveillance powers as reducing individuals to data points. So you suddenly become a number or a piece of data. And if you sit outside of the norm, if you're a minority, it suddenly looks like you're

receiving too many benefits. If you're outside of the sort of average, you may then be picked up by these systems. And so suddenly any sort of difference becomes dangerous. And that's the sort of decumalization that comes with these sorts of surveillance checks. Yeah. Let's take a break. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement.

And nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker. AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac.

Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive

a Tim Horan scholarship award. Ready for what's next? Apply today at Careers.com. Timhorans.ca. Welcome back to MediaStorm. We've discussed the UK's latest state surveillance technology. What happens when it goes wrong? Now, let's talk about money.

Who is getting rich off mass surveillance? In the introduction to this episode, we outlined the state's secretive and very lucrative surveillance contracts. And we're not just paying in taxes. We're coughing up gold mines of our own personal data. Some tech firms pay for our data. Others are paid to get. our data. Mass surveillance is a lucrative field. Jade Rui, which international corporations are getting

rich of mass surveillance? Yeah, I think what we're driving at here is surveillance capitalism in part, which is how valuable our data has become all of our personal interactions and how that motivates a collection of data that goes beyond what companies need to provide good services for us. But I think one part of this is Palantir, which I have been reporting on a lot, this software company that has essentially become embedded in the UK's government. And there's been a lot of outcry pushback from civilians, but also people working in government, a huge range of people. And I think that it's worth looking at what is essentially

an industry and a philosophy behind Panenteer, and that goes back to Silicon Valley. Palantir is essentially representing a broader cohort of these loosely connected companies that are funded by very similar venture capital circles. And in many cases, united by this philosophy of what they're calling American dynamism, which is essentially the idea that the way that the way, we have been funding and creating government services, particularly in the defense industry, is too slow, it's too archaic, and we need to move faster with a sort of startup culture. So venture capital firms like Andresen Horowitz, which really spearheaded and actually

created this American dynamism philosophy, are pushing for a privatization of, essentially, of the defense industry in the U.S. And so in the U.S. you see. We see Palantier and other players be very involved in the defense side of things and the sort of more military-type surveillance. But yet in the UK, we see it become very embedded in our government and getting hundreds of millions in government contracts across not just military endeavors, but rather a broad swath of anything from healthcare to financial regulation. Can you explain why that's happening? Because since its first £1 COVID deal with the UK government, it has been awarded contract after contract, not just for the NHS and the military,

the police, the Cabinet Office, GCHQ, the financial conduct authority. And the question I keep returning to is, why Palantir specifically? There are other data analytics company. There are NHS-led consortia. And often Palantir is getting these contracts with no competitive tender.

Why does contract after contract keep going to this particular firm? That is a complicated question that on the surface can seem quite cut and dry, where we know that there have been associations with a lobbying firm linked to Peter Mandelson. And I think that that's really what people go to, the kind of lobbying side of things. And that is also not to even get started on people's concerns about vendor lock-in and how Pallantir perhaps is able to keep its contracts with these departments. And I'll bring up Coventry City Council as an example where they came under a lot of criticism for renewing a 500K contract. And now it's worth 750K if I'm not misspeaking. But many people are seeing that as vendor-locking in a...

very worried about that. So Palantir has been contracted to streamline NHS data management. NHS staff also push back, despite contracts being signed by the end of 2024, fewer than a quarter of England's 215 hospital trusts were actively using the NHS federated data platform. But the NHS clearly needs structural updates. So if we give the government the benefit of the doubt for a moment, which I know it's hard to do.

Jade for you, what are the genuine pros of bringing Palantir into our data management? Yeah, the thing is, I don't find it hard to give the government the benefit of the doubt on this, because when we look at the NHS, which is such a beloved institution, we can see that it's really in desperate need of a data reform. And the way that the FDP, the federated data platform, which is what Palantir is helping to build, is because, framed is it allows people who need to access the data on the front line to get it immediately so that, for example, people who are in an ambulance with a patient, they can, at that point,

plug data into the system and send it to the hospital they're going to, which might be an hour away. And I bring that up as an example that really hit home for me. But it's sort of the the balance between this kind of operational efficiency, which in many cases, I anticipate can save many lives versus democratic risk because there are just so many concerns with how this platform, which I think many people agree is really necessary, how that can propose a risk. And I think what my reporting has focused on

is the fact that we don't know. It's not clear to us what data is going into this. system and it's also not clear to us whether the government has come up with any safeguards around what we see is a huge risk from our reporting. But the issue there is, is trust and trust is so important in healthcare. So I was recently being treated at the NHS and they asked me, would I be happy for my anonymised data to be available for research purposes? And I always, always, always want to say yes, I believe in science, I believe in research, I want to help the advancements of health. But I suddenly found myself actually very stressed out because I know

Palantir is involved in that database. And I had to really toss up. Am I prepared to do that? The thing is, if everyone pulls out, then health doesn't get anywhere. Research can't go anywhere. And so it feels as though the government is sort of gambling with trust in healthcare. And I'm not alone. like polling shows that if UK citizens actually knew what was happening to their NHS data, half of them would opt out. And I think the main reason for this is, as you say, Palantir has this reputation of being comically evil. That's because of ICE, I think.

And ICE has actually used healthcare data to track and deport and detain people. So many companies are therefore keeping Palantir out of their databases. Switzerland, which Palantir has also attempted to penetrate, has had at least nine federal agencies refuse or decline Palantir products over seven years. Britain has gone in precisely the opposite direction. And now we're being warned by campaigners from Med Act, the Good Law Project, Privacy International, that Palantir's presence could actually enable US-style ice raids. Jasseline, is that a realistic fear or is that fearmongering? I don't think it's fearmongering at all. And another area where we saw this sort of idea of the government collecting all of our

data sets was the digital ID. If you remember, it had a massive backlash amongst the public, almost 3 million people signed a petition saying, we don't want this in our systems. And that's because what the digital ID would have done is connect different arms of government up on your record. So that means, potentially, that you could end up in a situation where the government as a whole has access to an individual's health records and police records. And, you know, and education records and welfare records and tax records all at once. And so you end up in a situation where you have an incredibly comprehensive picture of an individual's life, which takes the power away from you and transfers it over to the government.

And as we've been speaking about, where AI then is added on top of those datasets and you can derive insights about people, you end up in a sort of, instead of a surveillance, capitalism model, a state surveillance capitalism model. In the same way that Facebook takes your data and mines it for insights to sell it back to you, the government could take your data and mine it for insights and use it to make decisions about your life. For example, which communities get more surveillance, whether you as an individual need an intervention when it comes to your child's schooling.

And so very quickly, you can see the ways in which your data, can be used against you if you don't understand where it's going and who has access to it. And that's the sort of problem with, as we've been talking about, these aggregated data sets that have very little transparency and we have very little control over, despite them being our data. So what I would add to that is that in the UK, the federated data platform is coming at what some might see is an excellent time for reform who have said that they want to create some kind of immigration surveillance system. And the UK CEO of Palantir has said that they will go forward with whatever an incoming

party says. So I think that the writing really is on the wall in that way. I mean, the intent has been spoken. These democratic threats are real. And in an era of modern surveillance, it's not just states watching us that we need to worry about. I hope you don't mind a little schooling session, listeners from me and Helena, quickly, about something that scholars and economists have started calling techno feudalism.

The idea was popularised most recently by the Greek economist and former finance minister, Janice Varifakis, in his 2024 book, Technofudalism, What Killed Capitalism? The argument in brief is this. We tend to think we live in a capitalist economy where power is exercised through competitive markets. But increasingly, the economy is organized around a handful of digital platforms, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, that don't compete in markets so much as own the markets. They are the new feudal lords and the rest of us are serfs. The thing is, these digital giants don't just harvest our data for economic power.

They harvest it for political power. Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, documents how surveillance companies are actively trying to replace democratic institutions with platform governance, where the rules are set not by elected governments, but by tech billionaires. And so the democratic danger of modern mass surveillance is not just growing state power, it's also growing corporate power. Jade Ruyu, how much political power is shifting to big tech and it's big buyers with this corporate surveillance industry? The Competition of Markets Authority came under fire recently, basically for electing a former Amazon executive as its new chair. The symbolic message that it sends to big tech specifically saying that we will most likely go easy on you when it comes to regulation of your platforms of what you are doing.

So that is really the landscape that we're working with when it comes to. to these kinds of systemic power shifts. And then another side to this is the idea of sovereignty, which has talked about a lot when it comes to data, and people, particularly in the UK right now, are talking a lot about how do we keep the power in the UK rather than outsourcing to these US tech giants. Jasmine, well, let's bring you back in here.

what do you think are the biggest democratic dangers of modern surveillance tech? Yeah, I think one of the biggest implications of all this surveillance tech is, like we've already mentioned, the shrinking of the sphere of democracy engagement. And so when you have life facial recognition on every street corner, paired with digital ID, which is linking up all the data systems, stacked on top of restrictions on protest rights that we've been seeing and mask bans. In addition to heavily restricted social media bans, which means you have to use your ID just to go online, suddenly the space in which we can express things like dissent towards

the government, things like heterodox views, things that go against the grain of society becomes so much smaller. In any liberal society, you need those things to progress conversations and change ideas. You need people to be able to challenge the ideas of any time in order to move forward as a society. And so when you have the surveillance tech, if everyone suddenly becomes afraid of expressing dissenting views,

you have a chilling effect over all of society. And another sort of area where these kinds of algorithms and technologies are eroding our rights to citizens is through automated decision-making. And so the government has recently liberalised the law when it comes to automated decision-making before it was essentially prohibited except in extremely rare circumstances. And now, unless they're processing what they call special category data, which is the most sensitive data, any government agency can essentially make automated decisions about you based on things like your postcode, your gender.

And so I think we're going to start seeing a lot more things being done to us on the basis of algorithms without realizing what has gone into the decision making. And as a citizen, you then lose a whole load of agency. This is already happening. Our data carries massive democratic currency. And having access to it leads to a direct power asymmetry. in political campaigning. We remember Cambridge Analytica.

That was like a decade ago now. The British political consultancy firm harvested the data of 87 million Facebook users without their consent and weaponized this in the Trump campaign, potentially other campaigns. This was just a preview of a technology that has now developed another 10 years and we haven't really talked that much more about it.

But in the 2024 US elections, the Trump campaign again spent hundreds of million dollars on data-driven micro-targeting. Ordinary citizens don't have the tools to understand, let alone contest how we are being profiled and influenced. And when that happens in political campaigns, that is a massive corruption of democracy. To end, let's examine what measures does the surveillance sector take to prevent itself from being surveilled. Some big tech companies have waged a war on truth and on trust in journalists. Mark Zuckerberg dismantled Mehta's independent fact-checking program in a direct attempt to

re-engratiate himself with Trump when he re-entered the White House. Elon Musk exploits his ownership of X to sow seeds of discord and race-based misinformation. We are really struggling with that in the UK at the moment. He's fueled multiple racist riots on X. He's, he's, literally posted civil war is inevitable in Britain from his own account. Jade Ruyu, to what extent is this war on truth enabling these companies to get away with encroaching on our privacy and our rights without due scrutiny and accountability? I think what we're seeing is an extreme version of what's been happening for a long time when it comes to the weaponisation of secrecy. And with that, I'm specifically referring to commercial confidentiality and the barrier that that poses to transparency.

I'm talking about redacted contracts with these Palantir deals with the government. The NHS contract with Palantir for the federated data platform, I believe 70% of that was redacted. And I believe that the Good Law Project, which is an organization here in the UK, fought to get some of that unredacted, but it was still very hardgoing. And that commercial confidentiality is something that journalists and others have been fighting against for a long time when it comes to freedom of information requests. And that is a big reason why some requests will be denied. What I hear from what everyone is saying is that there is a sense of secrecy and blurriness that is just really hard for the media to understand or uncover or keep up with. And there's one

example that really springs to my mind where coverage is found wanting. Last series, Media Storm did an episode about the rapidly encroaching social media ban for under 16s. Now, plenty has been said in the press about the ban. Those for the ban, say the social media use can put young people in danger, as they're being exposed to inappropriate content too young. Those against the ban say that social media is a necessary part of living in the digital age. Some people say, well, we should be regulating the content on social media, not the people using it.

But behind the proposals of the ban is something much bigger that in order to verify people's ages on social media, it means that there would be digital ID checks for everyone. Now, Jasmine, Big Brother, has been fighting to get this side of the story out. How well do you think the media has covered or not covered this part of the story? I think barely at all. You mentioned the sort of free expression implications of a social media bound where children,

you know, many of them use online spaces to explore their identities and engage with each other. And there are obvious free expression implications if you shut those spaces off for them. But a huge part of the debate that hasn't been covered is the privacy implications of having to give your identity away to some unknown company. We don't really understand the processing that happens when that takes place just to get online. And we've already seen what that looks like in when it comes to surveillance capitalism, when that's then used to sell things back to you. What does it look like when there's a sort of record of everything you've ever done online attached to your name? it's incredibly scary. I think I'll add that the problem is also the piecemeal way that the media has been reporting on it.

And I know that everyone needs to get out of the article every day. I know that struggle. But it just means that, so I'm reporting on that right now in a sort of longer view about the risks. And it's really hard to understand what the hell is going on broader scale when you're reading these like day-to-day updates about what Kia Dama is saying, it's very confusing. Even recent news is extremely confusing. So that confusion just adds to that blurriness. You don't think it's just the media's fault, though, because I don't think the government know really where they're going with a lot of this stuff. And so it's like they're trying, they want an outcome, but they haven't actually figured out the technical solution

to get there. And so it's like, the tech companies, you need to figure it out, or we're just going to outsource this to ID companies and get them to figure out the details. We just have an idea at the moment. So it is probably pretty tricky to follow the thread because it's not clear that there is. And when it comes to the media and surveillance, I think that we also have to remember that the media can be an instrument of surveillance. It's not just holding massive corporations to account. Often it is owned by not dissimilar corporations. News Corp, that was Rupert Murdoch's previous news company which used illegal phone hacking systematically for years against politicians, celebrities, crime victims, royal family.

They were doing this even as they were publishing editorials complaining about government overreach. And now the media landscape is even more complex. People get most of their news on social media. These are surveillance companies, as we've discussed. So every article you read on Facebook generates data, Facebook sells, every YouTube clip you watch, trains an algorithm that decides what you see next. The idea that you can meaningfully separate media consumption from surveillance at

this point is sadly quaint. So then I think we should move on to solutions. For anyone who is listening and is worried, what practical steps can ordinary people take to protect their data and their privacy? Jasseline, let's start with you. I think the main way that I would suggest is by engaging with what's going on in Parliament, which I appreciate is really tricky for people who, like we mentioned, have their own jobs and things going on, but organizations like ours are watching bills as they go through Parliament and have ways in which members of the public can get involved. So we will be calling on our supporters when the government finally introduces

after almost a decade of campaigning a bill later this year, which will regulate the use of facial recognition by the police. what's the risk is that we end up with a law that's incredibly permissive and it just legitimizes what's already going on. And so we really need the public's help to push their MPs and parliamentarians to making sure that the law is as restrictive as it can be and safeguards our rights. And so essentially we need the public to alongside us add their voices and say this is actually not something we're willing to put up within a democratic society. and you're not doing this in our name. And the same goes for the Digital ID Bill, which will be coming up later this year as well.

Thank you so much. And J. Drew, what about you? What practical steps can people take? Public engagement is really important, but I've been thinking a lot about how to do it because people have lives. And also it's just a fundamentally scary, simultaneously scary, depressing and boring topic.

And one that you just really think, okay, I'll get on that later. along with voting, et cetera. But I think that the one thing I'll say that is helpful is if you find something that really fascinates you about this topic, get involved in that way. And I'm talking about resistance because I think it's seeing so many unlikely bedfellows get together from, by the way, the Met Police,

who are upset at being surveilled themselves with Palantir's technology, which I think is hugely ironic, but really interesting, to healthcare workers in the NHS, and to FCE, to financial conduct authority employees. So we're seeing these hugely different groups of people get together around this cause. So I think that seeing how it affects your individual life and seeing where you can get involved in a way that interests you,

crucially, is key. Thank you both so much. You've shared so many terrifying insights with us today. Just before we lose you, can you tell listeners, A, if you have anything to plug, and be where they can follow you. Jasleen, starting with you. I have to plug the Big Brother Watch website,

which has all our campaigns and the ways you can get involved. And please do sign up to our newsletter to hear the latest scary developments and what you can do about it as well. Thank you. And Jadry, you can follow my substack PR disaster, which is just a lot of me bitching.

But you can also follow Open Democracy. We have a newsletter. where we publish a lot of our articles about tech accountability and also tech policy press. I work for both in a joint fellowship. And you can follow me on Blue Sky at Fongong Kong Chong. Thank you for listening. Now next week follows on well from this week's episode and it falls on World Refugee Week. Why?

Because immigration is an issue that allows governments around the world to cut corners on civil liberties. And few people complain. So in the name of border security, a great deal of damage has been done to privacy rights, legal rights and basic human dignity. Much like mass surveillance, the hostile environment has gone digital and also profitable. So we'll be looking at the global industry of deportation. If you want to support MediaStorm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much.

If you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends and leave us a five-star rating and a review. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helena Wadia, and follow the show via at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awodia and Matilda Mallinson.

It was edited by Toka Omar. The music is by Samfair. Performance Auto Group's 37th annual sale event is back. Now for three days. Pleaseer finance from 0% plus. loyalty incentives and maximum trade in value. Shop thousands of in-stock new, pre-owned, and demonstrator vehicles. June 11th to 13th across all Performance Auto Group retailers.

Make your move this summer. Performance Auto Group's three-day sale. 72 hours of savings. Shop now at performance.ca slash three-day sale. Driven by Performance Auto Group. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up?

That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no wayfair. What if? Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.