NHS England didn’t tell the truth about who can see patients’ medical records, and it has now admitted that Palantir engineers have had full admin access to identifiable patient data all this time. NHS’ legal document said only NHS staff could see them. When I called them out for not telling the truth, a few senior people who work for NHS and Palantir told me I was wrong. 3 Palantir engineers hold admin access to the National Data Integration Tenant, the system holding those records before names are stripped out. 33 more engineers from other suppliers have narrower access. I called this out because Palantir's software requires full access to customer data. No organization can work with Palantir while keeping its data private. Data sovereignty doesn't exist when a supplier runs the core systems storing and interpreting that data. A system can't interpret data without full access to it. NHS now says supplier access to identifiable data is technically necessary. That would have been decided when the system is designed, not afterwards, so it was necessary from the first day. NHS designed the system and then published a document saying the access doesn’t happen. Tom Bartlett built the NHS tenant. He published a defence of the access, and I replied straight away. He compared admin access to holding the keys to a warehouse of sealed boxes. But his own diagram shows a part of the system where the records sit with the names still on them. The boxes are already open where Palantir engineers work. He also said the data is pseudonymised. Pseudonymisation swaps names for codes. Anyone holding the list that matches the codes to the names swaps them back. And the tenant holds the data before the codes are applied. He said the access is audited, but audit logs show misuse after it has happened and the people who run the logs hold the admin access. He relied on a diagram from a design document that nobody outside NHS and its suppliers has checked against the running system, and neither he nor NHS has said what the admin role permits. He then wrote that you can’t build a national data integration platform “without seeing the data that flows through it”, which is the thing he was arguing against. Dr Nicola Byrne, the National Data Guardian, had to write and ask before NHS admitted all of this. Her office says it can’t independently check NHS claim that the access is necessary. NHS England lied about who could see your medical records. The document was there to tell you exactly that. It left out the 3 Palantir engineers who held admin access to the records of tens of millions of people. NHS England calls it an error and apologises for the confusion. I don’t believe them. They knew. Everything else NHS has said about this rests on the word of people who didn’t tell the truth from the start. We should take anything they save from this point forward with a pinch of salt because they haven’t been truthful with the most important information. You could possibly imagine when it comes to the personal identify information attached to the most sensitive information that people could have exposed.