Yves here. As you will soon learn, Project Nectar is yet another surveillance states scheme being tested in a UK city. These are the data fields it says it will collect:
I am curious as to why many of these are, or are assumed to be, available for most UK citizens.
I can’t imagine where anyone could get for me:
*Religion (last time I was asked was on college applications, One supposes the police are particularly keen to identify Muslims because their own prejudice, but since in many countries outside the Middle East, they do not perform the five daily salats or attend mosque, they likely rely on crude proxies like a Muslim-seeming name or who they follow on social media)
*Genetic data (have not given a DNA sample)
*Sexual orientation (one can assume but I have never been asked to provide it)
*Philosophical beliefs (WTF is that? Do I believe in Hegelian dialectics? Social Darwinism? Animism?)
*Ethnic origin (how do they get a genealogy? I can tell you the Mormon one is inaccurate for my ancestors)
*Sex life (do they install bedroom cameras?)
Does the NHS have far more extensive patient questionnaires and testing than US medical practices?
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
“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.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents escort a detained immigrant into an elevator after he exited an immigration courtroom, Tuesday, June 17, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Olga Fedorova)
Past Sins
In the past, of course, the security state has subjected us to incidents like this:
Deathbed Confession Reveals FBI and NYPD Responsible for Malcolm X Assassination
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, except 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 whom the security forces of any Western nation actually protect? Or by now, does everyone know?
Whatever the true reasons for Project Nectar, the justifications will certainly be “it is for children” and because of the “terrorists” as they were for previous civil rights destroying actions.
And much of the blackmail will not be on the troublesome, but on their friends and family. Will anyone be safe even the elites?
Am reminded of the 2001 UK census where an impressive amount of people wrote “Jedi” for religion
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon
“..preventing, detecting, and investigating crime.” This sounds like “Pre Crime.” Else, why the heavy emphasis on personality traits? One draws up a “personality profile” to predict things, does one not?
This is happening, appropriately enough, in Airstrip One.
Big Data Is Watching!
Political opinions, religion, sexual orientation, philosophical beliefs, can be easily deduced with access to browsing records, which, thanks to Edward Snowden, we know are all being hoovered up along with IP addresses.
Religion, sex life, and health become easy if one is carrying a cell phone around all day.
Biometric data if you have a passport and do any traveling.
Genetic data might be a bit tricky although I recall the UK has a National DNA Database.
Race can be deduced from a combination of some of the above.
The UK indeed has a genetic database. 6 million profiles as of 2020.
I’m on it for once being investigated (and exonerated) for a minor crime. This was not optional.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_National_DNA_Database
6 million out of a population of 65 million. Far less than comprehensive.
Just for religion alone, if a mobile phone is pinged often enough, it would reveal you being at the location of where a church is located how long you were there and how often you are at that location. And of course people have their picture taken at church events too on social media. It would once have been tedious work to collect such data but these days it would be all automated and you would have AIs trained to spot for things like that. Back in the 60s on the TV program “Hawaii Five-O” Detective McGarrett would tell Danno to get him the book on some person. These days Danno would be able to call up all that info in minutes. Our elites demand they know every bit of minutiae of our personal lives with complete disregard for our privacy – while having their lives completely hidden from public view. Just ask Jeffrey Epstein about that.
Rev Kev: Just for religion alone, if a mobile phone is pinged often enough, it would reveal you being at the location of where a church is located how long you were there and how often you are at that location. And of course people have their picture taken at church events too on social media. It would once have been tedious work to collect such data but these days it would be all automated
You’re getting the picture. This from Bruce Schneier will cast some further light —
The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. AI Will Enable Mass Spying.
Spying has always been limited by the need for human labor. AI is going to change that.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2023/12/the-internet-enabled-mass-surveillance-ai-will-enable-mass-spying.html
‘Spying is limited by the need for human labor.
‘AI is about to change that. Summarization is something a modern generative AI system does well. Give it an hourlong meeting, and it will return a one-page summary of what was said. Ask it to search through millions of conversations and organize them by topic, and it’ll do that. Want to know who is talking about what? It’ll tell you …
‘Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target. Tell me where this person was last year. List all the red sedans that drove down this road in the past month. List all of the people who purchased all the ingredients for a pressure cooker bomb in the past year. Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off, then turned themselves on again an hour later while moving away from each other (a sign of a secret meeting).
‘Similarly, mass spying will change the nature of spying. All the data will be saved. It will all be searchable, and understandable, in bulk. Tell me who has talked about a particular topic in the past month, and how discussions about that topic have evolved. Person A did something; check if someone told them to do it. Find everyone who is plotting a crime, or spreading a rumor, or planning to attend a political protest.
‘…To uncover an organizational structure, look for someone who gives similar instructions to a group of people, then all the people they have relayed those instructions to. To find people’s confidants, look at whom they tell secrets to. You can track friendships and alliances as they form and break, in minute detail. In short, you can know everything about what everybody is talking about.’
Yours truly searches more often on LTGBQ than hetero matters due to them being politicized in the US. And I don’t do online dating, so no self-submitted profile of my inclinations. So what does an algo make of that?
I also search on philosophical matters that are in opposition to my beliefs. Again, how many have polluted profiles?
If you aren’t on FB or similar and have created “likes” type profiles, I don’t think this is as easily divined as you assume. Yes, a lot of people have given this sort of thing away via their use of FB and Instagram and TikTok, but once you get past the (admittedly large majority population-wise) who wear their identities and tastes on their chests, this isn’t as easy as you think.
Some readers have also described how they have deliberately polluted their FB profiles.
The following was reported in The Guardian, this week concerning an event in Kent, south east of London:
Armed police threatened a peaceful protester with arrest under the Terrorism Act for holding a Palestinian flag and having signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”, accusing her of supporting a proscribed organisation.
Officers told Laura Murton, 42, that her demonstration in Canterbury, Kent, on Monday evening expressed views supportive of Palestine Action, which was banned under terrorism legislation earlier this month.
Murton said neither of her signs mentioned Palestine Action. When asked directly whether she supported any proscribed organisations, she replied: “I do not.”
In the encounter, which she filmed, one officer told her: “Mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the government.”
A Kent police spokesperson said: “Under the Terrorism Act it is a criminal offence to carry or display items that may arouse reasonable suspicion that an individual is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation such as Palestine Action.”
The police in Britain have pretty much carte blanche to bully and harass anyone with the utmost impunity and make things up as they go along. Just following orders, you might think.