BREAKING: Facing a threatened lawsuit from @openDemocracy & @Foxglovelegal, the UK govt secretly signed a massive a 2-year, £23m NHS data deal with controversial tech firm Palantir (1) https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/controversial-tech-firm-palantir-23m-nhs-data-deal

The contract, quietly inked on 11th Dec, opens the door for Palantir to play a major, long-term role in the NHS – well beyond COVID.

Has this controversial firm – founded by a Trump-backing billionaire who consults with White nationalists - really earned the public's trust?

How might, say, Black or Muslim NHS users feel about their health data going to a company with a long track record of work with the CIA, the US Department of Defense & the LAPD?

This latest, sneaky comes after months of assurances that the deals were only a short-term, ‘emergency’ response to the COVID crisis – and that any extension would be put out to public tender.

Suspecting they were about to strike a long-term deal with Palantir, we wrote to the govt warning that we'd issue court proceedings to challenge any such move

Instead of responding, they simply pushed the Palantir deal through, thereby avoiding having to defend it in court

On top of that, they used our enquiries as an excuse to hide what they were up to; telling other journalists that they couldn’t answer their questions on the COVID-19 datastore because it was the subject of “legal action”

This fits a long, worrying pattern of secrecy and obfuscation.

And we're not going to let it pass. We’re now assessing the grounds for a more ambitious legal challenge: to establish a precedent that will stop them ever doing this again.

The secrecy, cronyism and lack of accountability we’ve seen from the UK government this year cannot become the new normal. And we’re going to fight to make sure it isn’t.

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