When will the public sector wake up to the risk of private tech?

NESO – The UK’s publicly owned national electrical grid operator since the part renationalisation of the National Grid a few years ago – has admitted that now that it has signed up to a contract with Big Data tech company Palantir, they can’t easily get out of it.

In a report in the Financial Times today, they admit that they are now “too reliant” on Palantir for data services to be able to offer a competitive tender to replace them and have instead extended their contract for another “10 to 22 months” on a £21 million no-bid basis.

You might be surprised to learn that Palantir - a company named for the magical communication device from The Lord of the Rings that was used by the Dark Lord Sauron to extend his vision and presence across Middle Earth and also to corrupt and bend national leaders to his will – are involved in running the UK’s electrical grid. As it turns out, they were hired a year before the renationalisation and kept on after it in a deal that had not been publicly disclosed until now.

In other words, while activists have been mounting an increasingly fraught campaign to keep Palantir out of the NHS, they’ve been dipping into our electricity bills and harvesting our data for some time without us even knowing.

This is Palantir’s entire business model. They explicitly seek to infiltrate the public sector – especially in critical infrastructure like health, energy and the military – and then make themselves too load-bearing to get rid of. A detailed look at their history and business practices can be watched in this documentary.

They are not alone in this practice. Private companies – especially Big Tech – have been exploiting the draw-down of government-run public services for years now and it is to our own cost. Governments used to build social houses, but now say they have to funnel vast amounts of public money at private housing developers to encourage them to build houses for private rent. Local Councils used to provide care, but now hire private care companies to provide worse care in a less transparent way. And these Big Tech companies sneak into our public services and critical infrastructure and make it impossible for them to be removed so that they can soak up ever increasing amounts of public money and harvest the even more valuable public data behind it.

They also use our reliance on them to shape public policy, to reduce regulation on their practices, to allow them to build their data centres, to avoid their billionaire owners having to pay tax. Palantir is not named by accident. They are outright telling us that they want to extend their presence across everything they can and to bend our leaders to their will.

This is the danger of creeping privatisation. It’s not just the private profits that go out in the short term, or the vulnerabilities created when a hostile foreign government can, for instance, shut down our democracy at the flip of a switch. It’s that once our public services are “too reliant” on these services, we lose the ability to get ourselves back out. We’re told that not only would it be too expensive to bring public services back in-house, we’ve simply lost the skills and capability to do it.

Privatisation of public services, especially when it’s done by Big Tech, presents a serious and systemic risk to our services and to our democracy. It should be a policy of national resilience to prevent them entering, to get them out where they are already in and to regulate them to the point that they cannot cause the harm that they keep telling us they want to cause.