One of the UK’s biggest corporations is profiting from ICE
JVL Introduction
The name Palantir has become familiar, a company that vaunts itself for its role in the NHS in the UK, its software “helping organise information held by NHS hospital trusts – currently in separate databases – in one unified platform”.
All very benevolent – except it isn’t. For Palantir and others like it are at the cutting edge of “AI-Powered Automation for Every Decision, supporting any “democratically elected” regime with the surveillance systems they use to maintain their dominance.
Who, though, knows of RELX, the UK’s 15th largest company? It started out as a small publishing business, became Reed Elsevier, linked up with LexisNexis widely known for its for its legal research capabilities, and much else besides.
It is now a major supplier of information to ICE, the Immigration and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, giving “the deportation machine access to data from over 10,000 sources of information, enabling automated mapping, image matching, real-time phone searches, license plate searches, names of relatives, past residences, utility bills, telephone records, property records, criminal records and more…”
What can we do about it?
It just so happens that the fastest-growing arm of RELX is its events division which is organising the annual London Book Fair in March.
There are vulnerabilities in the system we live under, points where pressure can be applied.
But the research needs to be done first and we are indebted to Evan Robin for making the connections exposed below.
RK
This article was originally published by Vashti on Fri 16 Jan 2026. Read the original here.
One of the UK’s biggest corporations is profiting from ICE
With its contract due to end soon, we can put a dent in the US surveillance regime.
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I find it very worrying that our data is accessible on such a scale not only within but also outside the country. The NHS is in sore need of a system that can hold patient data in one place that is accessible throughout the service. However that data is not currently accessible to patients or to GPs as some is kept on systems that are not compatible with hospital systems making it impossible to see actual scans and only the opinions of those using the machines. It has not been possible for me to opt out of the system that will hold every piece of my data and I am not happy that it will be made available to companies that are answerable to governments other than our own, which is bad enough in its activities both here and in other parts of the world.