Labour peer Tom Watson has become a paid adviser to a ‘spy tech’ firm at the centre of an NHS privacy row over patients’ data.
Lord Watson, who has long campaigned for victims of Press intrusion, has joined Palantir – a CIA-linked data mining company.
Palantir has a £330million contract with the NHS to create a data system, which sparked a privacy row last year.
The British Medical Association called it ‘deeply worrying’ that the US giant, which has close ties to defence and intelligence agencies in America, the UK and elsewhere, would be handling British patients’ sensitive details.
Lord Watson has declared on the latest Lords’ Register of Members’ Interests that he is being paid as a member of the company’s ‘public services advisory board’. He has not divulged how much money he is earning or whether he will be lobbying for further Whitehall contracts.
When he was a Labour MP, he accepted £540,000 in donations from Max Mosley and supported the late F1 racing tycoon’s campaign for tighter privacy laws against the Press.
Lord Watson also piled pressure on Scotland Yard detectives from Operation Midland who were investigating claims of a VIP paedophile ring made by Carl Beech, which were later found to be made up.
The allegations were against high-profile figures, including former home secretary Lord Brittan. Beech was jailed for 18 years.
Labour peer Tom Watson has become a paid adviser to a ‘spy tech’ firm at the centre of an NHS privacy row over patients’ data
Lord Watson (pictured right), who has long campaigned for victims of Press intrusion, has joined Palantir – a CIA-linked data mining company
Palantir has a £330million contract with the NHS to create a data system, which sparked a privacy row last year
Palantir’s UK arm is run by Louis Mosley, a nephew of Mr Mosley. Earlier this year, he told The Times: ‘Fundamentally what [Palantir] provide is very powerful and therefore potentially very dangerous. We will only work in countries that are subject to the rule of law and western-aligned.’
He has defended the company’s work with the NHS, which he said makes it easier for doctors and clinicians to ‘bring together’ data about patients to help them ‘do their job’ and save lives.
Former Cabinet minister David Davis has said it was ‘the wrong company to be put in charge of our precious data resource’. Palantir was founded in 2003 by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneur, including Peter Thiel, a former donor to Donald Trump.
It provides data analysis software for companies and government agencies.
One of its biggest clients is the US military with which it has a $100million contract to build AI-powered targeting systems for soldiers. Its software has been used to separate and deport migrant families in America.
Another company which Mr Thiel financed – Clearview AI – was fined £7.5million by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK for ‘using images that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition‘.
Lord Watson did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for Palantir said: ‘[We are] constituting an advisory board to ensure that as we do more public sector work in the UK, our approach is informed by independent experts from a range of relevant public service backgrounds.
‘Tom and the other members will act as a sounding board for how and where Palantir’s software products, which integrate and synthesise data in order to support better decision-making, can be most usefully deployed across the public sector.’
