A free press & media kit for the nine-part investigation into Splink and Palantir. Everything here is built from public documents, sourced, and adversarially fact-checked. You are welcome to quote, republish or build on any of it — attribution to brandonmyers.net appreciated, not required.
The story in five sentences
The UK state uses Splink — a free, open-source tool built by the Ministry of Justice — to join citizens’ health, tax, justice, benefits and census records into single person-level profiles, lawfully, at population scale, and with no consent, no notification and no opt-out. The same tool is quietly crossing from statistics into real-time operations (court use, a daily probation→police arrest-check feed). No court has ruled the named systems unlawful — but the same policy-not-law shortcut was struck down three times next door (the DPA 2018 immigration exemption), and in Germany the Constitutional Court ruled a Palantir-run police system unconstitutional and named Palantir. Across the same departments sits Palantir — proprietary, US-owned, operational — the layer where “statistics” becomes action; the two are not wired together, and that distinction is held throughout. The discipline of the whole series is that every claim is tiered by what can be proven, and every overstatement is excluded — which is what makes it undismissable.
Hard, citable facts
• Splink: MoJ-built, ~890k downloads/month; links courts/prisons/probation, and ONS linked the 2021 Census to NHS/DWP/HMRC data at near-total population scale.
• Operational use: MoJ’s “Splink Master Record” documents a real-time Core Person Record and a daily North Essex feed of probation supervisees’ police numbers to the police.
• Three rulings: the DPA 2018 immigration exemption ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal (2021), High Court (2023) and Court of Appeal (2023). Germany’s BVerfG (16 Feb 2023) ruled the Palantir-run police analysis unconstitutional — judgment names Palantir.
• NHS Federated Data Platform: Palantir, up to £330m (2023); the national data opt-out does not apply because it is classed as “direct care” (contested in Foxglove litigation).
• Honest limits: no documented Splink↔Palantir technical link anywhere; no UK immigration-enforcement Palantir contract (that is US ICE); the US “mega-database” is reporting, not adjudicated. All stated plainly.
The nine parts
Start: the investigation hub · 1 How Splink Works · 2 The Quiet Joining-Up · 3 Statistics or Operations? · 4 Who Actually Uses Splink · 5 Ruled Unlawful Next Door · 6 The Operational Twin · 7 Palantir Goes Global · 8 The Joined-Up State · 9 The Splink Ecosystem
Evidence & reuse
• Full repository, three master analyses, every contract value and citation, and ~96 archived source screenshots (preserved against takedown): github.com/btmaffiliate/uk-data-linkage-disclosure
• Graphics (free to use): the radial “how it works,” the adopter scorecard, the Splink–Palantir connection map, the global scorecard, the ecosystem board — all on the relevant posts and in the repo.
• Contact: brandonmyers.net/contact. Happy to walk a journalist or researcher through the sourcing, or provide the underlying analyses.
Public sources only; no non-public system was accessed. This is not legal advice.