Tag Archives: #BritCard

This Isn’t a Drill. This is Your Guide to Resisting the Brit Card.

Feeling powerless is part of the plan. They want you to believe this is all too big, too technical, and too inevitable to fight. They are counting on your resignation as they assemble the cage around you, piece by piece, hoping you’ll be too tired or distracted to notice. But their entire, multi-billion-pound system has a fatal flaw, a single point of failure. That single point of failure is you.

We have options. They require effort, courage, and a refusal to be intimidated. Here’s a breakdown of the response options we have as citizens, from the simple to the deeply committed.

1. The Information War: Know Your Enemy and Spread the Word

First, don’t be a passive consumer of this. The primary battleground right now is awareness.

  • Educate Yourself and Others: Read everything you can. Understand the technology (Foundry, Gotham), the key players (Palantir, Peter Thiel), and the political machinations. When you talk about it, be informed. Use the facts.
  • Share Intelligently: Don’t just scream into the social media void. Share the articles and the evidence with people in your life who might listen. Send it to your family WhatsApp group. Talk about it with friends. The aim is to break this story out of the ‘conspiracy’ box and into the mainstream conversation.
  • Frame the Debate Correctly: When you talk about it, don’t let them frame it as “convenience vs. privacy.” Frame it correctly: Freedom vs. Control. It’s not about faster logins; it’s about the state’s ability to switch you off.

2. Political Pressure: Rattle the Cage

The system might feel rigged, but it’s not soundproof. They still need a veneer of public consent.

  • Your MP is Your Employee: Write to your MP. Don’t send a generic email; send a pointed one with specific questions. “Have you read Palantir’s contracts with the NHS?” “What are your specific concerns about linking a Digital ID to their software?” “Will you publicly pledge to vote against any mandatory Digital ID scheme?” Go to their local surgery and ask them face-to-face. Record their answer.
  • Support Advocacy Groups: Organisations like Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group, and others are fighting this at a policy level. Support them. Amplify their work. They have the resources to launch legal challenges and lobby Parliament effectively.
  • Sign and Share Petitions: While they can sometimes feel like shouting into the wind, official parliamentary petitions that reach a certain threshold must be debated. It forces the issue onto the official record.

3. Economic Resistance: Starve the Beast

This is a big one, and it’s where we have more power than we think.

  • Use Cash: This is the single most powerful act of passive resistance. Every note you spend is a small vote for privacy, for anonymity, and against a fully traceable digital currency. When shops ask you to pay by card, politely refuse where you can. Make cash a visible, normal part of daily life.
  • Scrutinise Your Services: Look at the companies you do business with. Is your bank a partner in the new identity frameworks? Does your tech provider have a record of collaboration with state surveillance? Where possible, move your money and your data away from those who are building the cage.
  • Support Privacy-First Technology: Use encrypted messaging apps like Signal. Use privacy-respecting search engines. Ditch services that harvest your data as their business model. The more of us who do this, the more we normalise privacy.

4. The Final Line of Defence: Non-Compliance

This is the sharp end of it, and it requires real resolve.

  • Refuse to Volunteer: When the Digital ID is first rolled out, it will be “optional.” Do not opt-in. Do not download the app. Do not be a guinea pig for your own cage. The lower the initial uptake, the harder it is for them to claim it has public support and the more difficult it becomes to make it mandatory.
  • Public Protest: If and when the time comes, be prepared to take to the streets. Peaceful, mass protest is a fundamental British right and a powerful part of our history. It shows the government that public anger is real and cannot be ignored.
  • Build Local Resilience: The more we rely on centralised state and corporate systems, the more power they have over us. Support local businesses. Start community skill-sharing networks. Build relationships with your neighbours. The more resilient and self-sufficient our communities are, the less we need their systems.

None of these is a magic bullet. But they are not mutually exclusive. We can do all of them. It’s about creating a multi-fronted resistance: informational, political, economic, and social.

They are counting on us to be too tired, too distracted, and too divided to fight back. Let’s disappoint them.

The easiest thing to do is sign the petition
Do not introduce Digital ID cards
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

If you are an investor you could move holdings from the following funds to more ethical ones:

Top 10 Largest Institutional Holders of shares in Palentir. The following table lists the top holders by shares outstanding, including shares held, percentage of total shares, and approximate value (based on recent market prices around $177–$180 per share).

RankInstitution /
Fund Name		Shares Held% of Shares OutstandingValue (USD)
1Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund69.13M3.17%$12.28B
2Vanguard 500 Index Fund60.38M2.77%$10.72B
3Invesco QQQ Trust, Series 146.48M2.13%$8.25B
4Fidelity 500 Index Fund26.96M1.24%$4.79B
5SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust26.02M1.19%$4.62B
6iShares Core S&P 500 ETF25.41M1.17%$4.51B
7Vanguard Growth Index Fund22.38M1.03%$3.97B
8The Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund17.13M0.79%$3.04B
9Vanguard Information Technology Index Fund13.37M0.61%$2.37B
10Vanguard Institutional Index Fund13.04M0.60%$2.32B

Palantir & Brit Card: The Final Piece of the Surveillance State.

To understand what’s coming with the mandatory “Brit Card,” you first have to understand who is already here. The scheme isn’t appearing out of thin air; it’s the logical capstone on an infrastructure that has been quietly and deliberately assembled over years by a single, dominant player: Palantir. Their involvement isn’t just possible—it’s the probable, planned outcome of a strategy that serves both their corporate interests and the UK government’s long-held ambitions.

Let’s be clear about the facts. Palantir isn’t some new bidder for a government contract; they are already embedded, their surveillance tentacles wrapped around the core functions of the British state. They have over two dozen contracts, including with the NHS to analyse patient data, the Ministry of Defence for military intelligence, and police forces for “predictive policing.” They are in the Cabinet Office, they are in local government. They are, in essence, the state’s private intelligence agency.

This is a company forged in the crucible of the CIA and the NSA, whose entire business model is to turn citizen data into surveillance gold. Their track record is one of mass surveillance, racial profiling algorithms, and profiting from border control and deportations. To believe that this company would be hired to build a simple, privacy-respecting ID system is to willfully ignore everything they are and everything they do. The “Brit Card” is not a separate project for them. It is the keystone—the final piece that will allow them to link all their disparate data streams into one terrifyingly complete surveillance engine, with every UK adult forced onto its database.

But to grasp the scale of the threat, you have to ask why this is happening here, in the UK, and not anywhere else in Europe. This isn’t a happy accident; it’s a deliberate strategy. Palantir has chosen the UK for its European Defence HQ for a very simple reason: post-Brexit Britain is actively marketing itself as a deregulated safe harbour.

The UK government is offering what the EU, with its precautionary principles and landmark AI Act, cannot: regulatory flexibility. For a company like Palantir, whose business thrives in the grey areas of ethics and law, the EU is a minefield of compliance. The UK, by contrast, is signalling that it’s willing to write the rules in collaboration with them. The government’s refusal to sign the Paris AI declaration over “national security” concerns was not a minor diplomatic snub; it was the smoking gun. It was a clear signal to Silicon Valley that Britain is open for a different kind of business, one where restrictive governance will not get in the way of profit or state power.

This brings us to the core of the arrangement: a deeply symbiotic relationship. The UK government offers a favourable legal environment and waves a giant chequebook, with an industrial policy explicitly geared towards making the country a hub for AI and defence tech. The MoD contracts and R&D funding are a direct financial lure for predatory American corporations like Palantir, Blackrock, and Blackstone, inviting them to make deep, strategic incursions into our critical public infrastructure.

This isn’t charity, of course. In return, Palantir offers the government the tools for mass surveillance under the plausible deniability of a private contract. By establishing its HQ here, Palantir satisfies all the sovereign risk and security concerns, making them the perfect “trusted” partner. It’s a perfect feedback loop: the government signals its deregulatory intent, the money flows into defence and AI, and a company like Palantir responds by embedding itself ever deeper into the fabric of the state.

This isn’t about controlling immigration. It’s about building the infrastructure to control citizens. We are sacrificing our regulatory sovereignty for a perceived edge in security and technology, and in doing so, we are rolling out the red carpet for the very companies that specialise in monitoring us. When the firm that helps the CIA track its targets is hired to build your national ID card, you’re not getting documentation. You’re getting monitored.

Your New Digital ID Isn’t For Convenience. It’s For Control.

The Digital Back Door: Why a National ID is the End of a Free Society

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

Lyric George Sumner – The Police

There’s a pitch being sold to the British public, dressed up in the language of convenience and national security. It’s the idea of a Digital ID for every adult, a neat, modern solution to complex problems like illegal migration.

I can tell you this isn’t progress. It’s the architecture of a control system, a Trojan horse that smuggles a surveillance state in under the guise of efficiency. It is the end of a free society, and we are sleepwalking towards it.

Let’s start by dismantling the primary justification: fixing the border. The claim that a Digital ID will stop the boats is, to put it plainly, bollocks. It will not stop trafficking gangs, nor will it fix a fundamentally broken system. Criminals and their networks are, by their very nature, experts at working around systems; they adapt faster than bureaucracies can legislate. The ones who will pay the price for this vast, expensive, and dangerous infrastructure will not be the criminals, but the honest, law-abiding citizens of this country.

The fundamental flaw lies in a concept I deal with daily: centralised risk. We spend hundreds of billions a year on cybersecurity, yet the volume and severity of data breaches are breaking records. The threat grows faster than the spend. From Jaguar Land Rover to major airports, no centralised system has proven impenetrable. Now, imagine that vulnerability scaled up to a national level, with a single database linking your identity to every checkpoint of daily life: where you go, what you buy, what you read, and who you speak to.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit. A sophisticated ransomware attack, seeded quietly through a compromised supplier or a disgruntled insider, lies dormant for months. It slowly rolls through the backups, undetected. Then, on trigger day, the live registry and every recovery set are encrypted simultaneously. The country grinds to a halt. Payments fail. Health and benefits systems stall. Borders slow to a crawl. Citizens are frozen out of their own lives until a ransom is paid or the state is forced to rebuild the nation’s identity from scratch. To centralise identity is to centralise failure.

This, however, is only the technical risk. The greater political and social danger lies in the certainty of function creep. It will begin as an optional, convenient way to log in or prove your age. But it will not end there. It will inevitably become a mandatory prerequisite for accessing money, travel, employment, and essential public services. Our fundamental rights will be turned into permissions, granted or revoked by the state and its chosen corporate contractors.

This isn’t a theoretical dystopian future; it’s a documented reality. India’s Aadhaar system, initially for welfare, now underpins everything from banking to mobile phones and has been plagued by data leaks exposing millions to fraud. We are seeing the groundwork laid in the UK with the Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework (DIATF), a federated model reliant on a network of private suppliers like Yoti, Hippo Digital, and IDEMIA. This multi-vendor approach doesn’t eliminate risk; it multiplies the potential points of failure through a web of interconnected APIs, each a potential back door for attackers.

Furthermore, this system is built on a foundation of exclusion. The assumption of universal digital literacy is a dangerous fiction. With a significant percentage of UK adults lacking basic digital skills, a mandatory Digital ID will create a two-tier society. The elderly, the poor, and the vulnerable—those who cannot or will not comply—risk being locked out of the services they need most, deepening inequality and fuelling social unrest.

The gravest danger, however, emerges when this infrastructure is placed in the context of a crisis. Economic collapse, social unrest, or an environmental emergency often serves as the justification for an expansion of state power. A Digital ID system provides the ready-made tool for authoritarianism. In a crisis, it could be repurposed to monitor dissent, freeze the bank accounts of protesters, or restrict the movement of individuals deemed a threat. It builds, by stealth, the machinery for a social credit system.

And this brings us to the corporate engine waiting to power this machine: Palantir. The US data-mining firm is already deeply embedded within the UK state, with contracts spanning the NHS and the Ministry of Defence. Palantir doesn’t need a specific contract for the “Brit Card”; its platforms, Foundry and Gotham, are designed to do precisely what a Digital ID enables on a mass scale: fuse disparate datasets into a single, all-encompassing profile for every citizen.

The Digital ID would be the “golden record” that connects your health data, your financial transactions, your movements, and your communications. In a crisis, Palantir’s AI could be used for predictive surveillance—flagging individuals who enter a “protest zone” or transactions to “undesirable” organisations. This isn’t just a British system; with Palantir’s deep ties to US intelligence, it becomes a system subject to foreign demands under legislation like the CLOUD Act. We would be outsourcing our national sovereignty.

The entire premise is flawed. If the government were serious about the border, it would enforce current laws, properly resource patrols and processing, and close existing loopholes. You do not need to build a panopticon to do that. We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason, recognising their threat to our fundamental liberties. Reintroducing them through the digital back door, outsourced to a network of private contractors and data-mining firms, is a monumental error.

There are better ways. Decentralised alternatives using cryptographic methods like zero-knowledge proofs can verify status or identity without creating a central honeypot of data. But these privacy-first solutions lack government traction because the true, unstated goal is not security or convenience. It is control. We must not fall for the pitch. This is a system that will centralise risk and outsource blame. It will punish the vulnerable while failing to stop the criminals it targets. It is the foundation for a future where our rights are contingent on our compliance. The choice is simple: yes to privacy-first proofs, no to a database state.

Beware the all-seeing eye!