UK Census and Lockheed Martin

The F-117A Night Hawk – also known as the ‘Stealth Fighter’ for its ability to evade radar detection – was built by the secretive Skunk Works division of the US’s largest defence contractor, Lockheed Martin. Today Lockheed Martin continues to build advanced military and intelligence technologies that they deploy and sell around the world. In 2001 and 2011, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) commissioned Lockheed Martin to perform the national census, collecting granular, extensive data on over 28 million households across the country.

As the ONS press release proclaimed, the government hired Lockheed Martin ‘for conducting data capture operations through the use of a specialist team of sub-contractors’, adding that the project had ‘no significant security incidents’.