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!
I see two cases where your “Pre rollout rollout” scenario works. First, when the “program” is managed by “true believers” of the “program,” or at least the underlying ideology. Second, those apparatchiks that enjoy the power accrued for “power’s sake.” The mere appearance of “tech supremacy” can be sufficient to inflate, sooth, and stroke egos.
Stay safe.
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.
6 million in 2020 – less comprehensive – unless one knows the the time to double.
Akin to the doubling time of an interest rate.
So 6 becomes 12 and 12 becomes 24 and 24, 48 and 48 -96
so you get the entire population+ in 4 turns.
Not if like the US, the DNA databases exist mainly due to DNA collection at arrests. You aren’t going to see a doubling of that sort.
A dug a tiny bit more. The UK seems to think they are the leader in genomic stuff. They have plans!
1. The UK gov’s wider genomics strategy:
Genome UK: 2022 to 2025 implementation plan for England (pdf) (2022)
Our delivery partners will take forward a world-leading programme of innovation in genomics
diagnostics and clinical services, evaluation of new genomic tools in prevention and early detection of
disease, and cutting-edge genomics research, all enabled by new, large-scale data capabilities.
2. In the NHS (where Palantir really got deep into the UK marrow):
Accelerating genomic medicine in the NHS (2022)
Embedding genomics across the NHS, through a world leading innovative service model from primary and community care through to specialist and tertiary care.
3. Information Commissioner’s Office more recent bit. Has interesting looking links I didn’t click on at the bottom.
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.’
Schneier is way too optimistic.
YouTube, which has a pretty complete history of what I have seen and since I don’t block ads and my upgrade to fiber optic = no VPN allowed, has reason to appeal to my interests, can’t even offer up semi-sensible recommendations. It also regularly asks for me to search (as in offers up nada) as if it has no profile. And it too often puts at the top vids I have already (recently!) watched in full.
Similarly, GPS is overrated. I leave my phone at home when walking but do use a phone to hail rides. I always have to tell the app where I am, as in type in the address of the pickup location. Otherwise it will inevitably show a meaningfully wrong starting address and send the car there.
And then when I start to put in my address, it offers up locations which are similarly not near where I am. And when I finally get my address in, it refuses to believe me and asks if the ride is for someone else.
Adding: so the great overselling of these profile services means you’ll get prettied up versions of what we already see with ICE, such as attributing gang membership based on a tattoo.
Exactly. I wouldn’t expect the lack of good data precluding poor conclusions and tptb applying poor conclusions
Palantir pushing out some Minimal Viable Product leads pretty quickly to “the Algorithm says…” and the IceDF spilling blood.
Use negative customer feedback as the testing phase but the feedback is “they killed my family and shipped me to Africa” instead of “this money transfer platform is janky”.
Have had a similar experience on YouTube although I do have a “premium” account and thus see no ads. More often than not YT will recommend videos from channels I recently watched, which doesn’t exactly require a genius algorithm. Also get quite a few previously watched videos showing up. Super.
But the algorithm really sucks at recommending new videos that it thinks would interest me. More often than not I have to click ‘Not interested’ or ‘Don’t recommend channel’ but it never learns from that and keeps serving me crap.
It’s not even recommending channels I watch, save for the occasional exact video I just viewed.
Only one in 20 attend church in the US. Many lie to pollsters about that, resulting in higher numbers: https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/paul-prather/article289742839.html
So if you are a lapsed Episcopal and go to a wedding held at a Baptist church and a later one at a synagogue, that would throw things off. Admittedly, in the US, Evangelicals and Mormons are big on church-going.
See this also from Pew. Admittedly from 2012 but I can’t imagine things have changed much:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-2-religious-commitment/
As stated in the article, the Palantir system will compile profiles from “dozens of existing law enforcement databases”, i.e. not necessarily from actual behavioural information, but often from bureaucratic data repositories.
Some possibilities (the applicability of those sources regarding the UK would have to be checked, of course):
1) Census and other official demographic surveys, if they include questions about religious affiliation.
2) Many European countries levy a “Church tax”, which is paid with the usual income/wealth tax and then forwarded as subsidy to the various accredited religious denominations. Very often, this requires taxpayers to indicate their religious affiliation in the tax declaration.
3) School records giving information about whether the pupils followed extra courses such as catechism lessons. Or simply registration in a school, if it is an accredited institution managed by a religious organization (e.g. catholic schools, muslim schools).
4) Some religious denominations compile their own databases about members of their faith. In particular, the Catholic Church has an official registry — a colleague dealing with the matter of his marriage was quite surprised by how much the Catholic Church knew about him (including where he lived in several countries, across two continents). Accessing that information is dicey and probably not feasible right away — but what do I know about what governments can demand from accredited religious institutions.
I presume that the reliability and up-to-dateness of all this information is not wholly relevant — what spooks and cops want is information in the first place, and they assume they can correct for inaccuracies by cross-referencing it with other pieces of data; if absolutely necessary, by pinging the presence of suspects in religious establishments; and by wrapping everything in some AI magic made by Palantir. So there you go.
In the 1980’s there were marketers who claimed it was already extant in the PROMIS software. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.
Google AdSense still hasn’t figured out that I ain’t a woman nor that I do not own a pet. I am not claiming that it never works but for my N=1 it surely does not work.
My local food bank is on church property and we are often there at the same time as various services and classes are held. My phone, in my car, may as well be there for Sunday school as shelving donations.
And that’s just one kind of noise.
It really is religious for the Elites.
“Epstein died for your sins.”
And I thought it was
J. saved T from a bullet
just as the Prince of Darkness
saved Hitler from assassination attempts
(plural)
proof and piety in trumpworld
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.
Indeed, what does an algo make of that?
I expect pain on an industrial scale caused by unanswerable entities who are stupid enough to think they can come to valid political conclusions about people based on things like “race” and “genetic data”.
AI will turbocharge their stupidity.
Polluted profiles won’t make much of a difference because the underlying theory is a modern version of phrenology.
The people behind Palantir and such like unfortunately think they can determine all these things. And they can do with 100% accuracy and then make decisions based on that. If it is or isn’t accurate is besides the point. They will use it as is and politicsl stooges/corporate bigwigs are well knowm to fall for any promising tehnology.
And there is the real problem. How many innocents will be dragged up in these fishing expeditions.
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.
The Guardian story you mention is quite the read!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/17/armed-police-threatened-to-arrest-kent-protester-for-holding-palestinian-flag
One of the police officers told Murton they were “trying to be fair”, adding: “We could have jumped out, arrested you, dragged you off in a van.”
Playing nIce Cop/nasty cop?
They started with the “we believe you may be committing an offence under the terrorism act”. Then moved to “you may be distracting drivers” (guess they better arrest billboard owners). And then “we are worried about your safety”. Would love to know the background to why these officers did this. Had they been briefed to?
Ironically, Nectar is also the name of the store “loyalty” card issued by UK supermarket giant, Sainsbury.
I remember a scene from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (1967) where Number Two expresses the desire to McGoohan’s Number Six that the whole world would become the Village. Almost sixty years later we are pretty much there and to an extent far beyond Number Two’s wildest dreams and Number Six’s worst nightmare.
My local police recently signed on the a contract for license plate reader cameras with a company called Flock Safety and folks are very uncomfortable with the potential uses os the data. The contract has not been published and the questions put to city officials get less than transparent answers. The company web site touts their Nova service which, among other things, can build association profiles based on cars parked near one another.
https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-nova
License readers are common tech already for things like FastTrak but the backend data service is the real seller. Concerns about cross cross agency data sharing (think ICE) have people paying close attention. Not sure there’s any easy fix.
One city over from me, Flock cameras are in use to the same lack of comfort among citizens about the use of the data. Every so often local media do a story on how use of the cameras caught dangerous criminals with nearly all the stories being reported in the poorer sections of town though I’m sure they can be found all over. The media loves the cameras and they are certainly on board with blowing off any privacy concerns. The local government claims they’re being transparent and takes citizen concerns seriously, I don’t know of anyone who actually believes that.
Google and Youtube can’t even figure me out on race, political opinion, religion, philosophical beliefs, sex life, etc. How could Palantir do it if a much more resourced organization cannot? I think this is going to be an obvious failure but Palantir will get paid to fail.
Also, didn’t Jordan Peterson at one point want to create a database to track these same data points in academics? So as to document his claimed “cultural Marxism in academia”?
Edit: Just had a thought. The difference is Google tries to determine these data points algorithmically based on your online habits, for billions of people, whereas Palantir could have this data compiled by actual people rather than algorithms, and for a much smaller sample such as academics.
Every police force considers every citizen to be either a criminal or a potential one. However, they don’t treat citizens that way due to a lack of necessary resources. Technological advances may make this possible, though.
“Every police force considers every citizen to be either a criminal or a potential one.”
Exactly, ciroc. They’re the snake in the nest.
Thomas
Sixteen year olds voting in England soon. How will that shift proposed legislation, especially with big demographic changes from immigration?