Tag Archives: #No2ID

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.

Flipping the Switch: The Digital Pound in the Wrong Hands

The Digital Pound: A Tyrant’s Dream Come True.

You’ve heard all the promises about the Digital Pound. That it’s safe. That your privacy is guaranteed. But you have to ask yourself one brutal question: what happens when the people making those promises are gone? Because in the hands of an authoritarian regime, the system they are building today becomes the perfect weapon for controlling you tomorrow. This isn’t an academic exercise; it’s a warning. The infrastructure of a digital cage is being assembled right now, and what matters isn’t the current design, but what it will become in the wrong hands.

This isn’t just an academic exercise. History is littered with democracies that faltered. To build this infrastructure without considering the worst-case scenario is not just naive; it is reckless. In the event of an authoritarian takeover, the digital pound, linked to a Digital ID, would not be a tool of convenience. It would be the most perfect instrument of state control ever conceived.

The first and most immediate change would be the weaponisation of surveillance. All the current safeguards—GDPR, promises of data privacy, the separation between the Bank and private wallet providers—would be swept away overnight. An authoritarian state would rewrite the laws, bypass regulations, or simply coerce private companies to hand over the data. The system is already designed for traceability; a new regime would just have to point it in the right direction. Every transaction, every donation, every purchase would become an open book to the state, revealing your networks, your beliefs, and your loyalties. Financial privacy would cease to exist.

This leads directly to the next implication: conditional access to your own life. Today, they promise it’s a choice. Under an authoritarian regime, that choice would vanish. The digital pound would become mandatory, and cash, the last bastion of anonymity, would be aggressively phased out. We’ve seen how quickly existing financial systems can be turned against citizens. During the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, the government froze the bank accounts of thousands of suspected dissidents. A digital pound would make this process frictionless and absolute.

Your access to money, and therefore your ability to buy food, pay rent, or travel, would be tied directly to your compliance. A centralised Digital ID would become the linchpin of a social credit system, where your right to participate in the economy is granted or denied based on your loyalty to the regime. Step out of line, and you could be switched off. Not arrested, not charged, just silently and efficiently excluded.

With this power, our fundamental civil liberties would be dismantled. The right to protest, to assemble, and to speak freely would be neutered. An authoritarian state could reprogramme the digital pound in an instant. It could block donations to opposition groups, restrict travel to protest locations, or even limit what you are allowed to purchase. The “silent denial of a transaction” would become the state’s most effective tool for suppressing dissent, creating a chilling effect that would silence opposition far more effectively than any police force.

And in a final, devastating step, such a regime could use the digital pound to manipulate the economy for its own ends. It could issue “helicopter money” directly into citizens’ wallets to shore up loyalty, but with strings attached—programmable funds that can only be spent on state-approved goods. It could even revalue the currency overnight, forcing everyone into the new system and wiping out the savings of those who resist.

The democratic checks and balances we rely on today are fragile. They can be eroded or dismantled. The infrastructure we build, however, is permanent. To create a centralised system that fuses identity and money is to build a cage. We may be promised that the door will remain unlocked, but in the hands of an authoritarian ruler, that door would be slammed shut and bolted. The Digital Pound would become the ultimate enforcer, turning every citizen into a subject, their freedom contingent on the flick of a switch.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/the-digital-pound

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!