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.
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.
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.
People already do this on “low-tech” levels ie community monitoring and alerts, but yes it’s not been done on particularly high-tech levels in a similar manner to the surveillance state
Well clearly that is stalking and harassment and very bad no good illegal.