UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network
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What’s with the UK being a totalitarian shithole? Like…they tout bs about democracy and freedom all day long. So what gives their agenda over the past couple decades?
In my experience as an European who went to live there for over a decade, there are a ton of very subtle elements which we can't really spot from the outside, not knowing the details of how that country works and its culture, especially because they're culturally extremelly big on image management (which I talk about below), which extends to managing the image that the country projects abroad (both via things like the Media they produce - for example their series and movies about Britain in the Victorian era vastly beautify the reality and almost like clockwork ever couple of years out comes a "Britain won WWII" movie - and their politicians practices both internally and on the international stage of grand symbolic announcements of objectives with in practice either no concrete action ever or even actions which do the very opposite).
Britain is has long been setup to preserve the power of the old wealth and always had Fascist tendencies (for example, there are pictures of the old queen when she was young being taught by her uncle, the then King, to do a Nazi salute) and British elites always sided with Fascists and White Colonialists, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Afrikaaner Apartheid government in South Africa and the Genocidal Zionists in Israel, plus they themselves commited several Genocides in their Empire and historically even relentlessly exploited the local lower classes (with things like Indentured Servitude - which replaced Chatel Slavery but you'll only ever hear from the British that they were the first to "end" Slavery and nobody mentions Indentured Servitude - and Workhouses).
At the same time this is a country with an extreme cultural tendency to put managing appearances above all else (upside: they have the best Theatre in the World) which is worse the higher the social class one is from, so for example the children of the wealthy are taught to tell people what they want to hear and always show a positive image (not positive cheerful, but rather "flawless" and "impeccable") and are shunned and emotionally attacked by their peers if they display any kind of weakness (can't let others see that they're sad or even sick) and even attend private schools (curiously called "Public schools" over there because supposedly "anybody who can afford the [very high] fees can send their children there" though even that is de facto false for many such schools) which amongst other things teach them discourse techniques (basically how to deceive without outright lying), so most of them as adults have only one mode of relating with other human beings - an unemotional, highly managed posh façade were empathy, in both diretions, is suppressed and they were they manage what others think of them through subtle deceit that avoids direct lying.
To preserve this Power structure whilst avoiding rebelions by the masses their "Democracy" is more Theatre than a system for the masses to control how the country is run, set up from the very start to be "managed" via multiple "backdoors", such as the Monarchy having real power (the King can bring down Laws, but traditionally does not use that power directly but rather quietly threatens to use it to get concessions), the voting system is First Past The Post to guaranteed that only two parties can ever govern (hence capturing the top politicians in those parties guarantees control of government), the country has an unelected 2nd chamber of Parliament which has seats which are literally inherited and it has no written constitution so it works entirelly on Laws passed in Parliament by a simple majority (and given their FPTP votting system, a mere 30% of the vote is enought to get a simple parliamentary majority) and legal precedent as established by higher courts (and almost 100% of High Court Judges in Britain are people who attended the previously described, expensive "Public" Schools that only the children of the elites attend).
In such a system, control of whatever little Power is left in the hands of the "lower" classes is done in two ways:
- Constant, relentless but subtle Propaganda backed by direct and indirect control of the whole Press by the elites (for example, the board of the supposedly independent BBC is entirelly made up of people who attended "Public" Schools). You can see this in action in how, for example, the BBC will give over 30 times more attention to Israeli deaths than Palestinians deaths or how certain words, such as "brutish" are only ever used for Israeli deaths and various other very negative words are used hundreds of times more often for Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths - the British Press was Manufacturing Consent long before the American Press started doing it.
- Surveillance to detect and stop any civil society movement that might become an independent Power based on the power of large numbers, together with incredibly ill-defined and of broad interpretation laws, and biased Judges (who as I pointed out, pretty much all hail from the elites as shown by them having attended exclusive expensive schools as children) that are used to, using State Violence, crack down on and stop those movements under the cover of "Justice". This is how for example Environmentalists who were planning to do a demonstration which would block the main London ring road were given 10 year prision sentences and how the leadership of the Green Party (a small party which is maybe the only left-of-center party over there) has been under surveillance since at least the 80s.
There was a period when the UK wasn't as bad in this sense following WWII, since in the post-War period millions of the "plebes" had military training and managed to claw a lot of power from the elites to the masses (creating things like the National Health Service and Social Security, and even causing a golden age of the Arts in Britain as working class children such as Michael Cain and David Bowie actually had real opportunities to go into things like Music and Theatre) but that has been progressivelly reversed since Thatcher went into power hence why nowadays elements of the Surveilance state have become so extreme that even the highly managed British Media is starting to discretly question it (though they would never, ever, ever treat it a a structural problem in how Power is approportioned in Britain and will always portray it as a single instance of mismanagement in the Police, which is mainly a middle and working class institution)
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The Nectar project offers 'advanced data analysis' using a wide range of sensitive personal information
A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.
Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.
Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.
The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.
Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.
Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.
Yeah, and people keep on buying stocks of the company that creates a digital concentration camp around them and their kids...
Same for "big pharma", Microsoft who turned product W11 into a pure malware (key logging and screenshot taker that stores and analyzes everything in the "cloud")...Yeah, the humanity really deserves what it gets. It really has to be depopulated. Soon enough will start watering plants with Gatorade like in Idiocracy.
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The Nectar project offers 'advanced data analysis' using a wide range of sensitive personal information
A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.
Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.
Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.
The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.
Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.
Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.
So. We are sheeple after all. Because in supposedly free and democratic countries such mechanisms, which will kill freedom and democracy, are being erected with very good speed.
Also I think the ancap idea that everyone should own a bag of killer drones might seem more attractive.
That Ulysses' pact of people not carrying weapons and expecting the police to defend them, it naturally doesn't limit those who don't take it.
Like elites who use every weapon they can get their hands on to change the world.
The good part is that this thing being built now, it's unstable. It kills itself on the next stage. The solution will have to be found.
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What if we developed an open federated system to track cops and politicians?
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What if we developed an open federated system to track cops and politicians?
Unfortunately they can block services in the Internet, and this federation will consist of Internet services that can be blocked. There's no need to go a level above that.
It's like in the olden days kings couldn't eavesdrop on everyone, so many people could conspire in secret against them. But with time recording devices, listening devices (including some very smart ones not requiring electricity), secret police organization methods emerged.
You can't say that an open federated system will help, just like you can't say that street gossip will help.
What we might need is a resilient multimodal communication system for revolutions of the future. Making weapons is now a bit more accessible than in 1917 or 1813 or ... , but the coordination of any kind of revolutionaries is less competitive against states than then.
With functionality including tracking cops and politicians.
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James bond movies have always predicted the future to a certain extent. In car GPS, Self-Driving vehicles, really sharp hats, the media's abuse of power for political gain, obnoxious tech Bros building mansions in stupid places.
I mean, when popular movies started getting stupid and neutered, someone should have realized that we're in the stage of bringing the interesting things from older movies to the real world.
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The Nectar project offers 'advanced data analysis' using a wide range of sensitive personal information
A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.
Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.
Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.
The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.
Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.
Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.
People have been talking for years about how the UK has become increasingly authoritarian with their use of mass surveillance and restrictive speech laws but they were called right wing nutjobs...
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In my experience as an European who went to live there for over a decade, there are a ton of very subtle elements which we can't really spot from the outside, not knowing the details of how that country works and its culture, especially because they're culturally extremelly big on image management (which I talk about below), which extends to managing the image that the country projects abroad (both via things like the Media they produce - for example their series and movies about Britain in the Victorian era vastly beautify the reality and almost like clockwork ever couple of years out comes a "Britain won WWII" movie - and their politicians practices both internally and on the international stage of grand symbolic announcements of objectives with in practice either no concrete action ever or even actions which do the very opposite).
Britain is has long been setup to preserve the power of the old wealth and always had Fascist tendencies (for example, there are pictures of the old queen when she was young being taught by her uncle, the then King, to do a Nazi salute) and British elites always sided with Fascists and White Colonialists, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Afrikaaner Apartheid government in South Africa and the Genocidal Zionists in Israel, plus they themselves commited several Genocides in their Empire and historically even relentlessly exploited the local lower classes (with things like Indentured Servitude - which replaced Chatel Slavery but you'll only ever hear from the British that they were the first to "end" Slavery and nobody mentions Indentured Servitude - and Workhouses).
At the same time this is a country with an extreme cultural tendency to put managing appearances above all else (upside: they have the best Theatre in the World) which is worse the higher the social class one is from, so for example the children of the wealthy are taught to tell people what they want to hear and always show a positive image (not positive cheerful, but rather "flawless" and "impeccable") and are shunned and emotionally attacked by their peers if they display any kind of weakness (can't let others see that they're sad or even sick) and even attend private schools (curiously called "Public schools" over there because supposedly "anybody who can afford the [very high] fees can send their children there" though even that is de facto false for many such schools) which amongst other things teach them discourse techniques (basically how to deceive without outright lying), so most of them as adults have only one mode of relating with other human beings - an unemotional, highly managed posh façade were empathy, in both diretions, is suppressed and they were they manage what others think of them through subtle deceit that avoids direct lying.
To preserve this Power structure whilst avoiding rebelions by the masses their "Democracy" is more Theatre than a system for the masses to control how the country is run, set up from the very start to be "managed" via multiple "backdoors", such as the Monarchy having real power (the King can bring down Laws, but traditionally does not use that power directly but rather quietly threatens to use it to get concessions), the voting system is First Past The Post to guaranteed that only two parties can ever govern (hence capturing the top politicians in those parties guarantees control of government), the country has an unelected 2nd chamber of Parliament which has seats which are literally inherited and it has no written constitution so it works entirelly on Laws passed in Parliament by a simple majority (and given their FPTP votting system, a mere 30% of the vote is enought to get a simple parliamentary majority) and legal precedent as established by higher courts (and almost 100% of High Court Judges in Britain are people who attended the previously described, expensive "Public" Schools that only the children of the elites attend).
In such a system, control of whatever little Power is left in the hands of the "lower" classes is done in two ways:
- Constant, relentless but subtle Propaganda backed by direct and indirect control of the whole Press by the elites (for example, the board of the supposedly independent BBC is entirelly made up of people who attended "Public" Schools). You can see this in action in how, for example, the BBC will give over 30 times more attention to Israeli deaths than Palestinians deaths or how certain words, such as "brutish" are only ever used for Israeli deaths and various other very negative words are used hundreds of times more often for Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths - the British Press was Manufacturing Consent long before the American Press started doing it.
- Surveillance to detect and stop any civil society movement that might become an independent Power based on the power of large numbers, together with incredibly ill-defined and of broad interpretation laws, and biased Judges (who as I pointed out, pretty much all hail from the elites as shown by them having attended exclusive expensive schools as children) that are used to, using State Violence, crack down on and stop those movements under the cover of "Justice". This is how for example Environmentalists who were planning to do a demonstration which would block the main London ring road were given 10 year prision sentences and how the leadership of the Green Party (a small party which is maybe the only left-of-center party over there) has been under surveillance since at least the 80s.
There was a period when the UK wasn't as bad in this sense following WWII, since in the post-War period millions of the "plebes" had military training and managed to claw a lot of power from the elites to the masses (creating things like the National Health Service and Social Security, and even causing a golden age of the Arts in Britain as working class children such as Michael Cain and David Bowie actually had real opportunities to go into things like Music and Theatre) but that has been progressivelly reversed since Thatcher went into power hence why nowadays elements of the Surveilance state have become so extreme that even the highly managed British Media is starting to discretly question it (though they would never, ever, ever treat it a a structural problem in how Power is approportioned in Britain and will always portray it as a single instance of mismanagement in the Police, which is mainly a middle and working class institution)
About appearances there's also that everybody has what you're describing in their stereotype of Britain (if not itself, then the Harry Potter universe at least), but feels that there's something "true", "real", "deep", "magical" about it.
It's the feeling that "yes, that's ghoulish, but maybe in the end that's for the better, how do we even know?".
A lot of cheap fantasy books in Russia in the 00s had that feeling too communicated, it's probably one of the things that prevented the Russian society from being alarmed about the regime we have now.
The worst propaganda tool in my opinion, because it makes a person look at mafia and think "it's mafia, but maybe I shouldn't judge it like mafia, what if they're secretly beneficial", or look at jihadist bandits and think the same, or look at a fascist dictatorship and think the same. And worst of all, because in such it exploits openness of mind, as opposed to most other propaganda.
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Unfortunately they can block services in the Internet, and this federation will consist of Internet services that can be blocked. There's no need to go a level above that.
It's like in the olden days kings couldn't eavesdrop on everyone, so many people could conspire in secret against them. But with time recording devices, listening devices (including some very smart ones not requiring electricity), secret police organization methods emerged.
You can't say that an open federated system will help, just like you can't say that street gossip will help.
What we might need is a resilient multimodal communication system for revolutions of the future. Making weapons is now a bit more accessible than in 1917 or 1813 or ... , but the coordination of any kind of revolutionaries is less competitive against states than then.
With functionality including tracking cops and politicians.
Unfortunately they can block services in the Internet, and this federation will consist of Internet services that can be blocked. There’s no need to go a level above that.
Technically it is possible to have a system that is not based on Internet but with bluetooth. The problem is that it would be effective only if widely used. And probably would have a many more problems.
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The Nectar project offers 'advanced data analysis' using a wide range of sensitive personal information
A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.
Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.
Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.
The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.
Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.
Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.
If you work with palantir, you're evil. I don't care if you only asked it for a coffee, you're evil.
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About appearances there's also that everybody has what you're describing in their stereotype of Britain (if not itself, then the Harry Potter universe at least), but feels that there's something "true", "real", "deep", "magical" about it.
It's the feeling that "yes, that's ghoulish, but maybe in the end that's for the better, how do we even know?".
A lot of cheap fantasy books in Russia in the 00s had that feeling too communicated, it's probably one of the things that prevented the Russian society from being alarmed about the regime we have now.
The worst propaganda tool in my opinion, because it makes a person look at mafia and think "it's mafia, but maybe I shouldn't judge it like mafia, what if they're secretly beneficial", or look at jihadist bandits and think the same, or look at a fascist dictatorship and think the same. And worst of all, because in such it exploits openness of mind, as opposed to most other propaganda.
Oh, I don't at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.
In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, "knowing your place" in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.
(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you'll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)
In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they're Working Class) rather than blue collar.
(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it's funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)
Most don't really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that's all that they've known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it's only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.
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Oh, I don't at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.
In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, "knowing your place" in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.
(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you'll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)
In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they're Working Class) rather than blue collar.
(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it's funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)
Most don't really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that's all that they've known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it's only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.
From the inside - yes, what I meant is that British society is often seen favorably from the outside.
And the comparison to Russia is maybe because this was one of the pictures imagined when thinking "how does a society look when fixed", and the Russian society sees itself as broken, that feels recent, but isn't.
And that picture still affects other societies.
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So. We are sheeple after all. Because in supposedly free and democratic countries such mechanisms, which will kill freedom and democracy, are being erected with very good speed.
Also I think the ancap idea that everyone should own a bag of killer drones might seem more attractive.
That Ulysses' pact of people not carrying weapons and expecting the police to defend them, it naturally doesn't limit those who don't take it.
Like elites who use every weapon they can get their hands on to change the world.
The good part is that this thing being built now, it's unstable. It kills itself on the next stage. The solution will have to be found.
Shut down electricity and the criminal organization (aka your government) becomes blind and deaf since neither cameras, nor microphones or AI will work.
Destroy all these cameras that have been installed to monitor you. In UK guys have been doing it for years. Burn all the cameras that scan your biometric with high power laser.Make this world brighter!!!
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From the inside - yes, what I meant is that British society is often seen favorably from the outside.
And the comparison to Russia is maybe because this was one of the pictures imagined when thinking "how does a society look when fixed", and the Russian society sees itself as broken, that feels recent, but isn't.
And that picture still affects other societies.
Yeah, I think I get what you mean.
My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it's a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,
People look up to Britain, copy what's done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the "success" of Britain isn't the product of what they do now, it's just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.
That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.
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NO KINGS! Tomorrow on Trump's birthday, we protest across the entire nation. Check the website for No Kings events near you!
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Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa urge UK Prime Minister to rethink his AI copyright plans. A new law could soon allow AI companies to use copyrighted material without permission.
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