FEMA Tells States to Hand Public Health Data Over to Palantir (pizzagateTNT)

submitted ago by MercurysBall2

Excerpts from https://www.thedailybeast.com/fema-tells-states-to-hand-public-health-data-over-to-palantir?ref=home

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency urged health officials in “all states and territories” to provide “daily” updates on ventilator availability for the novel coronavirus directly to the data mining giant Palantir, according to emails shared with The Daily Beast and confirmed by FEMA.

Palantir, co-founded by key Trump ally Peter Thiel, signed government contracts last month worth approximately $24.8 million to provide the Department of Health and Human Services with data-management software to track health-infrastructure deficiencies and forecast where future needs will emerge, through a platform known as HHS Protect. The company’s tools integrate a staggering 187 data sets containing information on everything from hospital inventories, medical supply chains, diagnostic and geographic testing data, demographic stats and more.

Those data sets do not include information from identifiable patients, according to HHS, which experts say keeps the arrangement from running afoul of privacy laws. But information on state capacity to meet COVID-19 hospitalization needs, particularly for the predictive purposes the FEMA administrator references and Palantir specializes in, is a potential goldmine for the secretive company.

“If they’re accessing these rich data sets directly from our public health infrastructure, will they exploit that to add economic value to their core data sets? If their AI learns how to infer and predict the patterns of the disease from our public data, then that becomes a hugely lucrative advantage for a private company, especially now when everyone, in every business sector, wants to know where COVID is going and how hard it’s going to hit,” said Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and a professor emerita at Harvard Business School.

Palantir has suggested that it doesn’t actually touch the data itself and merely helps the government sort through the data that the government, not Palantir, collects. “We are not mining the data, we are giving them the platform, analytical tools, and supporting data pipelines to enable them to do their own modeling,” its privacy officer, Courtney Bowman, told FedScoop on April 2.

But an email sent by FEMA Administrator Peter Gaynor on April 5 to his regional administrators showed Palantir directly receives ventilator information—information necessary for mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak that has killed over 92,000 Americans since February.

...

..Asked if FEMA had requested other data be provided to Palantir, the FEMA spokesperson cited an April 10 letter from HHS Secretary Alex Azar seeking “daily reports on testing, capacity, supplies, utilization, and patient flows” from hospital administrators. The data was “to be submitted to HHS Protect directly or through other specified channels,” the spokesperson continued: “HHS Protect was set up specifically for this response effort by Palantir, a contractor working on consolidating the data.”

The emails were acquired by the watchdog group Accountable.US through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Daily Beast. Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig said the emails raised troubling questions about the private company’s direct access to data with implications for both the public health response and for reopening the economy.

Israel_Did_9_11_ ago

Fight them to the death

4841400209 ago

Amazing Polly did a video last week that mentions Palantir. Seems to me I heard Bill Gates was affiliated with them.

gazillions ago

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was created to manage emergency response. They are paid to know how much equipment is available and where it is, so they can get it where it's needed when it's needed. That's how you manage an emergency. There is no other way to "manage" an emergency. You manage the response, and the response is about equipment.

So are they canceling FEMA and using that money to fund Peter Thiel. No, it was just "extra" money hanging around the office that may as well go to Thiel instead of shitty taxpayers.

virge ago

We have huge fucking problems if Citizens data is going to be handed off to Peter Thiel.

MercurysBall2 ago

Healthcare firm advised by Owen Paterson won £133m coronavirus testing contract unopposed - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/healthcare-firm-advised-by-owen-paterson-won-133m-coronavirus-testing-contract-unopposed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randox_Laboratories

Beginning with a team of six employees, the company now has 1500 employees around the world. It is now moving into the Randox Science Park, a 45-acre R&D and manufacturing site housed on the former Massereene Barracks.

..Randox developed the world's first biochip array technology (BAT) in 2002. BAT is a multi-analyte testing platform which allows simultaneous quantitative or qualitative detection of a wide range of analytes from a single patient sample. It screens biological samples in a rapid, accurate and easy-to-use format. £180 million was invested in research and development of BAT.[citation needed]

With the development of the biochip, analysers were created to handle the biochip in a high throughput routine laboratory. The analyser range expanded from the evidence, to include the evidence evolution, evidence investigator and evidence multistat

..In February 2017, two Randox employees were arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice amid allegations of data tampering within Randox Testing Services, used by many Police Forces in England and Wales for forensic toxicology. Randox acquired this laboratory in Manchester from Trimega laboratories which went into administration in 2014.[17] As of November 2017, around 50 criminal prosecutions for driving offences had been dropped in what BBC home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw, described as "the biggest forensic science scandal in the UK for decades".[18] Police forces have begun reviewing over 10,000 criminal cases that may be affected by the alleged data manipulation, including sexual and violent crimes.

A healthcare firm which employs the prominent Conservative politician Owen Paterson as a paid consultant has been awarded a £133m contract without any other firms being given the opportunity to bid for the work.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has given Randox the contract to produce testing kits to help respond to the coronavirus pandemic. It was awarded “without prior publication of a call for competition”, according to details of the contract seen by the Guardian.

The founder of Randox Laboratories is Peter FitzGerald, a polo-playing multimillionaire Northern Irish doctor who is the UK’s 475th richest person with a £255m personal fortune, according to the Sunday Times rich list.

Matt Hancock’s department awarded the contract last month under fast-track arrangements that enable public bodies dealing with the pandemic to give contracts to commercial companies quickly without the need to ask other firms to bid for them.

MercurysBall2 ago

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/uk-government-using-confidential-patient-data-in-coronavirus-response

Technology firms are processing large volumes of confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation that is part of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Palantir, the US big data firm founded by the rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel, is working with Faculty, a British artificial intelligence startup, to consolidate government databases and help ministers and officials respond to the pandemic.

Data is also being used by Faculty to build predictive computer models around the Covid-19 outbreak. One NHS document suggests that, two weeks ago, Faculty considered running a computer simulation to assess the impact of a policy of “targeted herd immunity”. Lawyers for Faculty said the proposed herd immunity simulation never took place.

NHSX, the digital transformation arm of the National Health Service that has contracted the tech companies to help build the “Covid-19 datastore”, said the technology would give ministers and officials “real-time information about health services, showing where demand is rising and where critical equipment needs to be deployed”.

“The companies involved do not control the data and are not permitted to use or share it for their own purposes,” a spokesperson said. Faculty’s lawyers said the firm only had access to aggregated or anonymised data via NHS systems.