As a hi-tech dystopia takes shape around us, the concept of the Panopticon becomes more relevant. Meet Junkermann’s associate, Daniel Korski.
For those not so familiar with 18th-century social philosophy, a Panopticon was originally the design for a prison building by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon prison’s architecture allowed one guard in a central guard tower to observe every inmate without those prisoners knowing they were being observed, so those incarcerated were left to assume they were being observed all the time. This prison, in theory, allowed that singular guard to maintain order over every inmate.
Much later, in the 20th century, the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault used the concept of Bentham’s original Panopticon to describe and explore “disciplinary power”. According to Foucault’s work, disciplinary power had been successful due to its utilisation of three technologies: hierarchical observation, normalising judgment, and examinations. Hierarchical observation refers to the fact that the observer in a Panopticon can be of any hierarchical position within the observing body, meaning that a prison guard, supervisor, or a governor could be the person viewing the inmates. Foucault also insisted that the normalisation of judgement is imperative for disciplinary power to exist. The final principle, the examination, is used to combine the first two principles of the observations and the resulting judgements to help decide whether further actions should be taken or punitive measures applied.
Among the most notable of Foucault’s analyses of the utility of the Panopticon is the following quote from his book Discipline and Punish: “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, the uncertainty of whether an individual is constantly being watched induces obedience, allowing only a few to control the many.
In addition to Foucault, the concept of the Panopticon has been vigorously studied over the past few centuries and is particularly relevant to understanding modern forms of mass surveillance. Many modern-day state surveillance apparatuses function under a doctrine similar to the original ideology behind the invention of the Panopticon.
The British GCHQ, the US’s NSA, the Israeli’s Unit 8200, among many others, are the all-seeing eyes of national intelligence agencies who have longed for a way to watch their populations remotely, i.e. online, without their citizens knowing whether or not they’re actually being observed. One man has strived to be at the centre of the growing global Panopticon, from his base in the Panopticon’s birthplace — Britain. His name is Daniel Korski.
The Creator
When I first came across the NHS Healthtech Advisory Board, a body created in 2018 to “advise” the UK’s Health and Social Care Secretary, Matt Hancock, its members opened my eyes to some of the darker actors involved in shaping our tech-guided futures. One of the panellists on Matt Hancock’s team of tech pioneers, who are seeking “to transform technology in the NHS [National Health Service],” was Nicole Junkermann.
Junkermann’s multiple links with Jeffrey Epstein, which appear to have begun around 2002, exposed her as someone who couldn’t be trusted with the future direction of the UK’s healthcare system. Furthermore, Junkermann’s connections with Ehud Barak, Peter Thiel, and Jeffrey Epstein, forged through her investment in the Israeli intelligence-linked surveillance company Carbyne911, made her entry onto the United Kingdom’s government advisory panel problematic for everyone involved. But she was not the only interesting character intimately involved in this particular government project.
While the Healthtech Advisory Board has been hailed since its creation as the brainchild of Matt Hancock, he was actually guided to the project by the man who was, and is, the real mastermind behind the board’s founding, a man who has been helping to quietly write the history of Britain from behind the scenes for the last two decades. He is somebody you’ve probably never heard of, even though his impact on public policy is felt not only in the United Kingdom but globally.
This man has been a senior advisor to the US State Department, an advisor to Hamid Karzai in post-invasion Afghanistan, the team leader of the Basrah Reconstruction Team in post-invasion Iraq, the Head of Political-Military Affairs for the Office of the High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a Committee Specialist for the House of Commons Defence Committee. If that weren’t enough, he was also a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, an advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission, a special advisor to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, and deputy head of policy at 10 Downing Street. Yet, even these are just some of the public offices he has held. This man’s name is Daniel Korski, and he should be notorious.
Described as a “Foreign Policy Writer” and a “Post Conflict Expert”, Daniel Korski is currently only in his early forties, yet his experience is vast. How does one get the opportunities which have been afforded to Mr Korski? Do you need to be a member of a special club from a very young age? Everything about Korski points to military intelligence, so to find him on the same advisory board as a Mossad-linked Epstein associate isn’t too much of a shock, but it does deserve further scrutiny.
This is especially true now that Daniel Korski has left public office and set up a venture capital firm which specifically funds government-related tech startups. While Korski wants to publicly appear to have left government work, it is pretty clear that, upon further inspection, he hasn’t drifted too far from the authorities. So, let us look at Mr Korski’s history in more detail and work our way forward towards his more current projects. In doing so, I truly believe that you will not be able to deny his continuing role as an intelligence operative. You will also be shown evidence of his dystopian side projects and connections to one of the largest growing, government-backed mass surveillance projects in the world. This is an introduction to Daniel Korski, one of the creators of the current digital panopticon.
Daniel Korski’s Curious Past
Henryk Korski, grandfather of Daniel Korski, eluded the Nazi’s whilst living in Poland in the 1940s. After the war, he joined the Polish Communist Party, and by the mid-to-late 60s, he was working in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. But a decade later, when his grandson Daniel was born, the whole family had already relocated to Copenhagen. If you were to go by Daniel Korski’s Wikipedia page, then you would be told that his family were expelled from Poland in the late 1960s. But if you were to look behind the scenes at Korski’s Wikipedia page’s history, then you’d discover that someone disagreed with that description of events.
On 21st April 2013, someone edited this part of Daniel’s Wiki page. This editor wanted people to know: “Korski is the son of Polish Jewish refugees, who fled persecution.” I decided to see if I could trace the IP address of the person who made this change. I managed to track the computer to Brussels, Belgium, and the edit was made while Daniel Korski was living in the Belgian capital, working as an advisor to the Vice President of the European Commission. It’s also just before he left that post and became a special advisor to the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron. It seems that Daniel Korski wanted everyone to believe that his parents had fled persecution in Poland, but was this true?
Daniel Korski himself eventually headed to Twitter to show people the evidence that his parents were Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. He posted two images of official court documents sealed in plastic sleeves and described them as evidence of a pogrom. For those who are unaware, a pogrom is described as “an organised massacre, especially of Jews”. But do the documents supplied by Daniel Korski provide any evidence of a massacre of Jewish people? The straight answer is a definite no. The court papers Korski so proudly presents on Twitter do not mention Judaism at all, but they do mention Henryk Korski’s stance on the war between Israel and Egypt. The documents, which were written in Polish, relate to a court case involving Henryk Korski and his employer.
Henryk demanded reinstatement to his former position in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Trade and compensation for the wages he had been denied. The court refused Mr Korski’s application, and the Korski family soon moved to Denmark, a decision which Henryk himself said turned out to be a lucky move. There is no massacre of Jews in Poland at this time, and there is no pogrom involving Korski’s family either. In fact, the last recorded pogrom happened in 1946. Instead, Daniel Korski is caught misleading the public in an attempt to appear as though his parents were Jewish refugees fleeing the threat of death in communist Poland. Is it any wonder then that in the same year as Daniel Korski was making up parts of his family’s history, he was also appointed as vice president of the United Kingdom’s Jewish Leadership Council.
Daniel Korski grew up in Denmark, so how did he become such an important part of the British government? Korski didn’t start studying for his degree until 1997, when he was 20. He attended the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and later attended Cambridge University for his Master’s. He was either well-connected or very talented, maybe even both, as by the age of 25, he was working for ex-Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown as Head of Political-Military Affairs while Ashdown served as the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Korski held that position from 2002 to 2004, and then served as the Committee Specialist for the UK House of Commons Defence Committee. That short-term position was followed by his first official role overseas on behalf of the British government. In 2005, Korski was in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was officially advising the Karzai government on counter-narcotic operations. He also soon became part of the UK Government’s “Stabilisation Unit” for the war-torn country.
His next appointment, in 2007, was a move to Iraq as the team leader for the Basrah Provincial Reconstruction Team, and during this work in Afghanistan and Iraq, Korski became a senior advisor to the US State Department. With all this experience, we can see that Daniel Korski, who was still only 30 years old, had very clear intelligence connections. So it will come as no surprise that in 2009, Daniel Korski helped to found the European Council on Foreign Relations, where he was also named a “Senior Policy Fellow”. Korski, soon after the creation of the European CFR, became an advisor to the vice president of the European Commission, Catherine Ashton, also referred to as Baroness Ashton of Upholland.
In 2013, Korski returned to the UK as a special advisor to the David Cameron government. In May 2015, he took up the position of deputy head of policy at 10 Downing Street and remained there until Cameron stood down following his defeat in the EU referendum. The Brexit defeat hit everyone involved in the Cameron administration like a hurricane. Many of the politicians who orchestrated the lacklustre campaign to keep Britain in the EU immediately stepped down, and some went into hiding.
Quite amazingly for any advisor to a Conservative government, Daniel Korski had managed to get through almost 15 years in leading Whitehall positions without being involved in a single sex scandal; at least that’s what he thought. Yet, on 14th November 2017, the Telegraph, in an article entitled “David Cameron aide denies groping television writer at Downing Street event,” named Daniel Korski as the man who allegedly groped producer Daisy Goodwin. The article states:
“Daniel Korski, who left his post as special adviser following the Brexit vote, admitted that he had met the TV producer in Number 10 on two occasions, but said that any accusation of inappropriate behaviour was “not only totally false but also totally bizarre”
Ms Goodwin, 55, has claimed that she was “summoned” to Downing Street to discuss a proposed TV show when Mr Cameron was Prime Minister and an official told her she looked like a Bond girl before putting his hand on her breast as she went to leave.” Korski, by the time the sexual assault accusation had been made public, had started his own venture capital firm called simply “Public” or Public.io. Even though he was officially outside government at the time, Korski’s capitalist venture specifically focused on tech startups designed for government applications. They set up base at 1 Horseguards Avenue, Westminster, just opposite the HQ of the UK Ministry of Defence. Public.io also owns Eva Health Technology, previously known as Microtest Ltd, which supplies patient management systems for healthcare professionals, including everything from simple customer booking software to documentation software for vaccines.
In 2018, Korski became Chairman and Co-Founder of the Govtech Summit, which is planned to be held each year in Paris and serves as a global stage for pitching next-generation technologies to governments from around the world. Govtech is a platform where Daniel Korski and his Public.io business partner, Alexander de Carvalho, can introduce the world to tech startups such as Ehud Barak’s Carbyne, a company Public.io and Govtech frequently advertise, even though they are not direct investors in the Israeli firm. It was also in 2018 that the Healthtech Advisory Board, supposedly the idea of Matt Hancock, was formed and began bringing together figures such as Nicole Junkermann and Daniel Korski to help create the blueprint for the hi-tech “transformation” of the UK’s public health sector.
But Korski, since leaving official government employment, has been involved in other activities too. One of his other enterprises is with a man who already has a foothold in the mass surveillance business via a government application and who intends to repeat his early successes on a global scale, as well as many other interesting characters. Please take your assigned seats, strap in, and welcome to Daniel Korski’s Panopticon.
Enter the Panopticon
Nicole Junkermann and Daniel Korski have many common interests in the big tech sector. In 2017 and 2018, they both began investing in and focusing on mass surveillance technology and future healthcare-related tech with great intensity. If one didn’t know any better, one might conclude that both Junkermann and Korski had inside knowledge of an impending healthcare crisis, such as a pandemic. Conveniently for Korski’s and Junkermann’s investment portfolios, the current pandemic has become an excuse for the government to erode our civil liberties and implement widespread mass surveillance technologies on an unwitting public.
While Junkermann was personally investing with Epstein and Thiel in Ehud Barak’s Carbyne911, Korski was supporting similar projects in the UK. On 26 March 2018, Daniel Korski became the director of the UK-registered company Panopticon Technologies Limited. If you were to go to their previous website, Panopticon.Tech, then you’d be met by a dead link, but the Wayback Machine captured their original site twice in 2018.
The founding team at Panopticon Technologies included:
- Sir Mark Rowley QPM, who is described as “one of the most respected and decorated police leaders in the UK”. Rowley had led the national police counter terrorism effort as Assistant Met Commissioner in the UK.
- Alastair Aitken CBE, who helped restructure the UK Army, drew on his three decades of experience in the UK military. He was also heralded for helping redesign US military strategy and was involved in every complex war zone over the last three decades.
- Mark Austin is a former global board member of PricewaterhouseCoopers and a senior executive at IBM. An expert in finance, technology and corporate governance.
- Dale Murray, a partner in the digital strategy consultancy Founders Technology. She was a co-founder of Omega Logic and another advisor to David Cameron on the “Business Taskforce”.
- Max Chambers, who is also part of Korski’s Public.io and was a former senior advisor to David Cameron. He was principal adviser on all aspects of home affairs policy, including security, immigration, counter-extremism, policing and criminal justice.
There are two other important players who also played major parts in the creation of Panopticon Technologies. One is Mike Iiams, the CEO and President of Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc., one of the leading electronic monitoring companies globally. The second is a man named Alasdair James Eli Truett. These last two men should be examined in greater detail.
SCRAM Systems and Mike Iiams
Alcohol Monitoring Systems Inc. was founded in Colorado by Michael Leonard Iiams, among others. Iiams went on to be a very successful President and CEO of Alcohol Monitoring Systems/SCRAM for almost 20 years. His name was also on the patent as one of the inventors of the SCRAM Systems Bracelet, a useful technology designed specifically for professional law enforcement use. America has a well-developed law enforcement technology industry and plenty of problem drinkers. Police departments all over the country are equipped with some of the most state-of-the-art equipment available. One of the first successful forms of police technology to be widely adopted by many states was an alcohol detection system, which was used to track problematic drinkers who committed offences while under the influence. This system was a simple tool in dealing with crimes related to alcohol abuse.
In 1985, Dr Daniel J. Brown of the Indiana University School of Medicine published studies on measuring volatile substances through the skin, including detecting alcohol in sweat. By 1991, the first patent for the Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM) System was filed. In 2005, the SCRAM system was monitoring 1,700 offenders a day, and the program was active in 30 states. Over the following decade and a half, technological improvements have added further functions to the capabilities of the original device. With the rollout of the 4th generation of this technology, it was reduced in size and introduced GPS tracking, enabling police to monitor people on house arrest.
Today, this technology has developed into a multifaceted tracking bracelet that allows officers to monitor suspects via a tablet or a mobile phone, and it is being rolled out globally. Mike Iiams inclusion into Korski’s Panopticon Technologies came just before SCRAM Systems tagging technology won UK Home Office backing for its use in tackling Britain’s problem drinkers. In 2020, national rollouts were announced in Wales, England, and the Netherlands, with the intention of continuing its expansion into other countries. According to Public Health England, alcohol-related crime costs the UK economy more than £21.5bn a year and the Ministry of Justice has declared that the Alcohol Abstinence Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) can be imposed by courts in accordance with community-based orders, which allows for the use of these “next-generation” SCRAM Systems bracelets, referred to in the UK as “peace tags”.
Although Mike Iiams is not listed as a director of Panopticon Technologies in the official UK companies database, he is listed as having significant control of the company, with shares of over 25%. Iiams has also worked for the accounting firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. in Alaska during the construction of the TransCanada pipeline and has been in a senior executive role with JD Edwards, which is now part of Oracle.
Alasdair James Eli Truett
The other person of significance, who was at one point a director at Panopticon Technologies alongside Korski, is Alasdair Truett. Truett’s involvement in the project adds a fascinating dimension to PT, as his background is in military intelligence. Truett’s LinkedIn shows him simply as an officer in the British Army for over 20 years between 1997 and 2017, but the title of officer seriously understates Lt Col Alasdair Truett MBE’s experience.
In the British Army, “Alasdair was advising, planning and executing domestic and overseas intelligence and security policy and operations,” as described on the homepage of Cerebra Global Strategy. His profile goes on to tell us:
“He has operated at the political, strategic and tactical levels for national intelligence, national influence, small and large scale wars and counter-terrorism. Since 2017, Alasdair has provided advice and commercial services to leaders in governments and corporates on a spectrum of matters to do with national, corporate and personal intelligence, security and leadership.”
Truett was not just your average garden variety grunt with a gun on the British Army payroll; Lieutenant Colonel Alasdair Truett was, in fact, a very focused specialist in the field of military intelligence. Truett claims to have only been at Panopticon Technologies for its first 7 months of operation; afterwards, he founded both Fortisat and Cerebra Global Strategy Ltd.
In a Cyber Unplugged podcast entitled Social Engineering: The Threat Is Coming From Inside The House, Truett describes Fortisat as “a national security advisory and business intelligence company that looks at ‘human network intelligence’ and offers advice to governments on emerging technologies that will enhance their national security.”
Flash in the Pan(opticon)
So, why has Panopticon Technologies recently gone dark? Although it is still an active company, the pulling of the Panopticon.Tech website seems to suggest that the enterprise is on hold, or about to be abandoned. But these data-hungry lobbyists for government mass surveillance often work in the shadows.
What do we know about Panopticon Technologies? They described themselves as “a new, ethical, tech-enabled UK security company” and have stated that “we are passionate about new technology and providing immigration, police, intelligence and probation officers with high quality hardware and software to enhance their day-to-day work in monitoring offenders and protecting the public.” But their method, described as using “new behavioural and compliance models powered by cutting-edge analysis,” may have been too much for supporters to bear after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Korski and his Public.io, led by Max Chambers, may have been rash to launch PT so publicly in the first place. For a Panopticon to be successful, the inmates must know that they are potentially being observed, and that is very much the society we find ourselves in today. In this vast cyber-Panopticon, the masses are being observed by the few, and people like Daniel Korski, Alasdair Truett, Nicole Junkermann, Ehud Barak, and Mike Iiams lobby governments to expand and normalise their own homeland mass surveillance programmes. It only takes one government to agree that private companies should be responsible for the mass surveillance of their populations for this trend to take a permanent place in our societies. Now, with COVID-19, there are many excuses to implement panopticonic technologies to further the observation power of the few over the many.
Korski has positioned himself to be one of the most influential players in the modern UK government tech sector. He has used his many UK government connections to benefit himself financially and has been eager to remain publicly affiliated with the ruling UK Conservative government since leaving Whitehall. Korski’s Public.io venture capital firm is located at the heart of the UK MoD and is just a stone’s throw away from the UK Parliament. His entry into military intelligence at such a young age suggests he was recruited by an intelligence agency before attending university. He started studying for his first degree later than most, at the age of 20, leaving us with a small two-year gap in his timeline.
Before he’d even reached his thirties, and with no obvious experience in fighting the war on drugs, Korski became a counter-narcotics operations advisor to the relatively recently installed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s brother, Wali Karzai, was later revealed to have been on the payroll of Western intelligence agencies and also one of Afghanistan’s most prominent and notorious drug traffickers. His drug trafficking activities were allegedly protected by his brother’s government and his CIA benefactors.
Korski was also heavily involved in the UK government’s stabilisation and reconstruction projects in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was even acting as a senior advisor to the US Department of Defence just before he helped create the European Council on Foreign Relations. His intelligence links led him to become one of the most important advisors during the David Cameron government.
His links with military intelligence have become clearer since he’s officially left the halls of power, with Korski’s Panopticon Technologies bringing together some of the leading advocates for government overreach, who also have deep ties to military intelligence. Alasdair Truett, Alastair Aitken, Mark Rowley and Max Chambers have all played leading roles in the creation of the modern intelligence networks in the UK for both homeland security and global intelligence. Korski’s work on the Govtech summit has been keenly supported by French President Emmanuel Macron, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Matt Hancock. Korski’s work has also been a vehicle for the normalisation of the use of public big data by private companies.
The NHS Healthtech Advisory Board offers a brief glimpse into the ongoing creation of the modern digital panopticon. It lets us see some of the intelligence-linked tech giants vying for opportunities to access mass national databases. Junkermann’s Carbyne911 and Korski’s Panopticon Technologies are the monsters lurking in the shadows of the big tech world. They are constantly circling the public sector, seeing it as a soft target, because control over public-sector data means access to every piece of private information from every citizen. Korski and Junkermann may have beautiful smiles and a charming way about them, but they are simply cogs in a machine leading us towards a dystopian future.
So, who is Daniel Korski actually working for? His deep love and support for the European Union suggest that his whole-hearted allegiance is to the European project. But with his globalist background, his establishment connections, and his association with both public and private intelligence agencies, Daniel Korski was a useful asset for any power with a similar agenda: creating a digital Panopticon.
