Project Nectar: Another Palantir Special
A honey-filled database. What could that be used for?
“Perhaps more than any other nation, the United States hero-worships the men and women serving in its security and armed services.”
—Jan Dehn, “The enemy within”
“What is being run right now is a vast experiment to see if modern technology has fixed these problems [of cost] with surveillance and oppressive states. Is [technology] cheap enough to go full Stasi…? The oligarchs are betting that the technology has made that change.”
—Ian Welsh, “The Logic of the Surveillance State”
It’s hard to write too much about what’s happened, and happening, with the National Security State. However much you say, there’s much more to tell that’s just too vital to ignore.
Past Sins
In the past, of course, the security state has subjected us to incidents like this:
Dying declarations (“deathbed confessions”) are normally valued by police investigators, assuming they care about the crime in question.
Or consider this casual, throwaway comment by Tucker Carlson during his recent Epstein rant:
I’ve spent my entire life pretty much in Washington where I knew and loved a number of people, including one very close person, who worked at CIA. That has never prohibited me from saying, I think the CIA has done some horrible things. Murdered a bunch of people, participated in the murder of a sitting U.S. president. It’s got a whole trail of crimes. That doesn’t make me a disloyal American. It doesn’t make me anti-American in any sense. I was born here. My family’s been here for hundreds of years. I love this country. That’s why I live here.
Not proof, of course, but the statement about, obviously, John F. Kennedy’s murder is not even the main point of the remark. His point is something like “Though the CIA has done horrible things, I love my country and my CIA friends.”
This comment, thrown like an afterthought, suggests that “everyone I know” thinks this, in the same way that “everyone I know” thinks Jeffrey Epstein is an Israeli spy and asset. He says just this later in the speech (emphasis mine):
You [Jeffrey Epstein] have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house. You have all this contact with the foreign government. Were you working on behalf of Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government? By the way, every single person in Washington, D.C. thinks that. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t think that.
“By the way” … another throwaway line about a widely understood crime.
Present Crimes
As I said above, offenses by the National Security State against citizens it was created to protect and serve, are spreading throughout the West; and they’re not just past, but present. Let’s look at just one offense, coming I’m sure to a security-soaked nation near you.
Bedford in the UK is a decent smallish town. Its population is about 200,000. It sits north of London, west of Cambridge and halfway between London and Birmingham. Very British in the new cosmopolitan sense. Diverse; nothing terribly special; nothing terribly notable, save to its residents, who may happily love it to death.
Except Bedford now is a testing ground for a new Palantir program called “Nectar” (remember that name). From the Bedford local paper:
Bedfordshire Police using AI tool to profile political views, sex life, race and health data
Got your attention? Read on.
Bedfordshire Police is piloting a controversial AI-powered data system that can access highly sensitive information about individuals, including their race, political views, sex life and health, according to an investigationby Liberty Investigates and The i paper.
The system, named Nectar, has been developed in collaboration with Palantir Technologies, a US tech giant co-founded by Peter Thiel, a donor to Donald Trump and close advisor during his first term as US president.
From the referenced i Paper report:
British police forces have signed contracts with a controversial US tech giant to buy AI-powered software that uses data about an individual’s race, sex life, health and political beliefs, it can be revealed.
An internal police memo obtained by The i Paper and Liberty Investigates confirms an intention to “nationally” apply the “Nectar” intelligence system, currently deployed as a pilot by the Bedfordshire force after being developed with Silicon Valley data analysis group Palantir Technologies.
The document, obtained under freedom of information rules, shows how the Palantir system is designed to bring together dozens of existing law enforcement databases into a single computing platform to draw up detailed profiles of suspects, as well as collate information on victims of crime, witnesses, and vulnerable individuals including children.
The 34-page briefing, which deals with data protection issues related to Nectar and Bedfordshire Police, makes clear the ambition of senior officers for the system to be used across policing, including in the fight against serious organised crime.
It states: “The primary goal is to help Bedfordshire… as well as the Eastern Region Serious Organised Crime Unit… and eventually apply [Nectar] nationally. This will develop tools to better protect vulnerable people by preventing, detecting and investigating crime.”
Project ‘Nectar’
Which brings us back to Epstein and his widely assumed blackmail operation. (Carlson again: “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t think that.”) What else do you think a massive database of “political views, sex life, race and health data” could be used for domestically — except to silence dissent and blackmail compliance?
At this point you may be remembering the program’s name. Nectar: bait for a honey trap. Impressive imagination for a nest of geeks.
Now think more broadly: Is there any doubt at all who the security forces of any Western nation actually protect? Or by now, does everyone know?
It is no secret that the US/UK/Empire rulers see dissent as a feature to be exploited and used as a pretext, not a bug.
I am coming around to Ian Welsh's view of China's CPC. Their surveillance comes with concrete material benefits and a far lower probability for incarceration.
Go East young person!