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The first part of Nafeez Ahmed’s major investigation into the money, men and motivation behind a massive move into medical data.
The COVID-19 public health crisis is enriching a murky nexus of technology surveillance firms linked to senior Government officials – at the expense of people’s lives. The financial adventures of a former MI5 spymaster and the medical fantasies of Boris Johnson’s top advisor point toward an unnerving endgame: an artificially intelligent (AI) corporate super-state, with a special focus on NHS genetic research inspired by eugenics.
The tale begins with Britain’s security services – and ends with Dominic Cummings. It uncovers the extent to which democracy and public health are now under threat from a series of Government failures rooted in a bankrupt ideology, influenced by the modern relics of scientific racism.
On Sunday 12 April, the Government announced that the NHS would be launching a new COVID-19 contact tracing app. Since then, there has been a flurry of analysis and commentary on the urgent privacy questions posed by this development. But, missing from these questions, is a much wider context which throws light on why the Government failed so dramatically to avert an unprecedented public health catastrophe – which has left the UK with the second-highest COVID-19 death toll in the world.
On the same day that the contact tracing app was announced, former MI5 Director-General Lord Jonathan Evans argued that existing technology used in counter-terrorism and organised crime probes could be used to augment the app being developed by NHSX, the NHS subsidiary focused on digital innovation.
Lord Evans, who headed up Britain’s domestic security service from 2007 to 2013, currently leads the Government’s public standards watchdog and is thus a top advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on ethical standards in the public sector.
“Tough surveillance powers are acceptable where there is equally tough oversight and accountability that ensures the powers are applied lawfully, proportionately and only where necessary,” he wrote in the Sunday Times. “This is now the case for anti-terrorism and the same must apply to health.”
More than a week earlier, Health Secretary Matt Hancock had already granted GCHQ access to NHS data, specifically on the grounds of cybersecurity.
What the former spymaster didn’t say is that, just last year, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) found that MI5 had broken the law in relation to surveillance safeguards designed to limit the sharing and storage of intercepted data. The private data of millions of ordinary citizens could have been shared with foreign governments under opaque and unaccountable ‘national security’ protocols.
Lord Evans is also connected to a burgeoning private cybersecurity industry which has long aimed to exploit the creeping privatisation of the NHS for profits. In fact, he is connected to three giant corporations which are presently profiting from major contracts with the NHS.
From Spy Chief to Lobbyist
Lord Evans’ journey from MI5 Director-General to senior corporate advisor is not particularly unique when compared to the trajectories of his predecessors and successors in the same role. But it provides a window into how the UK’s national security industry is profiting from the piecemeal privatisation of Britain’s public health infrastructure.
According to DeclassifiedUK, an investigative journalism platform focused on British national security issues, Britain’s former spy chiefs have regularly gone on to lobby government for the private sector. This has resulted in the Government investing millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in ‘national security’ private contractors – which have weakened the state’s pandemic preparedness while prioritising far lesser threats.
The COVID-19 pandemic is now accelerating this process as the Government grants unprecedented power to private technology firms with little transparency.
During his 33 years in Britain’s domestic security service, Lord Evans played a key role in the agency’s counter-espionage and counter-terrorism policies, heading up its counter-terrorism division for the duration of the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’. In 2009, as deputy head of MI5, he distinguished himself by justifying the agency’s ties to foreign regimes torturing terrorism suspects to provide intelligence to MI5 and MI6.
The same year that Lord Evans retired from MI5 in 2013, the UK Cabinet Office’s National Risk Register warned that a pandemic was “the most significant civil emergency risk” – a higher priority even than catastrophic terrorism or coastal flooding.
Following his MI5 career, Lord Evans became a lobbyist for a private national security industry that largely failed to protect Britain from this risk. He moved rapidly to take up lucrative positions in the financial services industry, including remunerated positions at Accenture, Deloitte and HSBC.
Bagman for GCHQ-Seeded Spy Venture
By September 2013, he went on to join the advisory board of Darktrace, a $1.65 billion AI-based cybersecurity firm which was ‘founded’ by UK intelligence officials earlier that year, and the core technology of which was originally conceived by Britain’s version of the NSA – the electronic surveillance agency GCHQ, which has just obtained unprecedented access to NHS information systems.
According to detailed analysis by DeclassifiedUK, Darktrace has an almost symbiotic relationship with the UK and US intelligence communities, with staff members coming from GCHQ, MI5, MI6, the UK Ministry of Defence, the UK military and special forces.
Documents from the Government’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) – which is supposed to regulate conflicts of interest for outgoing government officials – confirm that, at the time of his departure in 2013, Lord Evans was granted approval by then Prime Minister David Cameron “to become personally involved in lobbying the UK Government on behalf of his new employer” – namely Darktrace – after two years of his last day of service.
Matt Hancock is a long-time fan of the GCHQ-seeded company advised by Lord Evans. In 2017, Darktrace was a lead member of a UK trade delegation to Singapore led by Hancock in his capacity as then Digital Minister. That year, it emerged that one of Darktrace’s new clients was “an NHS agency”, which was reportedly protected from the WannaCry malware attack by its ‘Enterprise Immune System’ technology.
In July 2018, Hancock became Health and Social Care Secretary – and Darktrace continued to follow him into the NHS. That month, the firm announced that it had signed a “multi-million dollar contract” with a Government department to deploy its technology to protect “public services and citizens’ data”, without identifying the department. A month later, the company confirmed that the NHS was scaling up its adoption of Darktrace technology “to safeguard systems and patient information, including prescription and blood type data”.
In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, Darktrace has attempted to consolidate this work, declaring that it would offer its services to the NHS for free.
In the meantime, Lord Evans also acquired a new role as non-executive director to Ark Data Centers, a UK data storage company, in 2015. He replaced his predecessor, the former MI5 chief Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller. That same year, Ark won a £700 million four-year contract with the Cabinet Office to supply the Government’s entire data centre estate, via its Crown Hosting contract.
By 2018 – the same year that Darktrace began expanding its reach into the NHS –