Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

Culture

from the hans,-i've-just-noticed-something dept

There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one asks, peering at his cap, “are we the baddies?” The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for the question to surface. You’ve probably seen it:

I thought about that sketch reading Wired’s reporting on the internal turmoil at Palantir, where both current and former employees are starting to ask that question of their own work:

Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”

“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

That’s quite a decision for the company, given that Palantir is supposed to be in the business of using technology to predict how strategic decisions will play out.

It turns out a lot of Palantir employees agree that maybe it’s not so good for them or the company to be picking the morally bankrupt, historically unpopular position. Better late than never, I suppose.

There’s a “well, duh” element to all of this that we shouldn’t gloss over. Palantir has been Palantir for two decades. The company is named after the corrupting all-seeing surveillance orb from Lord of the Rings. Its initial venture capital came from the CIA. Peter Thiel co-founded it. The entire pitch has always been mass data aggregation in service of authoritarian state power. If you took a job there at any point in the last twenty years, the skulls were sitting right on top of the cap, plainly visible, and people were pointing at them constantly.

So in one sense, the current employee soul-searching is just the sort of late-to-the-party realization that deserves to be called out. Where, exactly, did people think this was going?

But it’s also a sign of how far Karp is willing to go — stripping away the plausible deniability that let employees tell themselves they were just building tools, not endorsing a worldview. Palantir didn’t just keep doing what it had always been doing. Karp made a deliberate choice to escalate, both in what the company is building and in how openly it’s announcing what it’s building it for.

The Wired piece documents the various moments where things began shifting internally: the deepening ICE deportation infrastructure work, the death of nurse Alex Pretti during anti-ICE protests, the questions about whether Palantir’s Maven targeting system was used in the missile strike on an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 120 children. And then, to top it all off, Karp published a manifesto telling employees and customers and the entire world that the company now believes pluralism itself is a civilizational error.

The most damning revelation in the Wired piece comes from a Palantir privacy and civil liberties (PCL) employee in a recorded internal AMA — and it shows that the entire concept of a PCL team at the company is window dressing, there so Karp and others in management can pretend they’re not quite as authoritarian as they actually are.

At least one of these AMAs was organized independently of PCL leadership by two team leads, including one who worked directly on the ICE contract for a period of time. “This was very rogue,” a PCL employee who worked on the ICE contract said in a February AMA, a recording of which was obtained by WIRED. “Courtney [Bowman, head of the privacy and civil liberties team] doesn’t know that I’m spending three hours this week talking to IMPLs [Palantir terminology for its client-facing product teams], but I think this is the only real way to start going in the right direction.”

Throughout the lengthy call, employees working on a variety of Palantir’s defense projects posed hard questions. Could ICE agents delete audit logs in Palantir’s software? Could agents create harmful workflows on their own without the company’s help? What is the most malicious thing that could come out of this work?

Answering these questions, the PCL employee who worked on the ICE contract said that “a sufficiently malicious customer is, like, basically impossible to prevent at the moment” and could only be controlled through “auditing to prove what happened” and legal action after the fact if the customer breached the company’s contract.

And then the big (if unsurprising) reveal that Karp doesn’t seem to think much of civil liberties and these employees are basically forced to see if they can distract the dictator-wanna-be at the top (does this sound familiar?):

At one point during the call, one of the employees tried to level with the group, explaining that Palantir’s work with ICE was a priority for Karp and something that likely wouldn’t change any time soon.

“Karp really wants to do this and continuously wants this,” they said. “We’re largely at the role of trying to give him suggestions and trying to redirect him, but it was largely unsuccessful and we seem to be on a very sharp path of continuing to expand this workflow.”

So the internal civil liberties function has been reduced to politely suggesting that maybe the CEO not do the worst version of the worst thing, and getting overruled.

Cool cool cool.

What seems to have finally broken the dam, though, was not the deportation work or the missile strike — it was the manifesto. As one employee posted internally after the company published its 22-point screed:

“I’m curious why this had to be posted. Especially on the company account. On the practical level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the software outside of the US (for sure in the current political climate), and I doubt we need this in the US?” wrote one frustrated employee. The message received more than 50 “+1” emojis.

The actual harms — the deportations, the surveillance infrastructure, the dead children — generated internal Slack threads and uncomfortable AMAs. The branding embarrassment generated more of a revolt.

The skulls were always on that hat. People only really started pointing at them when management decided to put the hats on billboards.

Two things are worth calling out separately:

Workers who take jobs at companies like Palantir have an obligation to think harder about what they’re building before they build it. The “I was just writing code” defense has always been weak, and it gets weaker the more obvious the application becomes. We wrote recently about how the “bring your whole self to work” era has pretty much ended, and how workers in a tighter labor market are increasingly going to find themselves at companies whose values they can’t fully stomach. That’s part of what’s happening in a labor market where management has way more leverage. But it’s also true that some companies have been waving very large red flags for a very long time, and “hey, I needed a job” excuse only goes so far when the job is building deportation infrastructure and missile targeting software that ends up blowing up schoolchildren. That shit sticks to people. And it should.

The second is that better-late-than-never still matters. The PCL employees pushing back internally, the Slack threads demanding accountability, the rogue AMAs organized without leadership’s blessing — this is the kind of pressure that has, in the past, gotten Google to drop Project Maven (which the amoral Palantir, naturally, swooped in to take over). Internal dissent is one of the only mechanisms that actually constrains what companies like this do. When employees stop accepting the rationalizations, things change. Sometimes the company changes. Sometimes the employees leave and build something better. Either one is better than just letting things continue as they are.

You can argue that Palantir taking on Project Maven when Google dropped it means that internal protest is fruitless, but that’s simply not true. Internal protest makes it more expensive and difficult for companies to get away with doing bad things. It may not stop them all, but it adds real friction. And if, as now, we start to add some real social baggage for being the software devs who were “just coding for a paycheck,” it can definitely make a bigger difference over time.

Which brings us back to why Karp’s manifesto might end up being a strategic disaster even setting aside the moral question. Palantir’s value proposition has always rested on a kind of plausible deniability: yes, we build surveillance tools, but we have a civil liberties team, we care about safeguards, we’re the responsible adults in the room. The manifesto torched that framing on purpose. And now the company’s own engineers are saying, in writing, that the post is making it harder to sell software, harder to recruit, harder to defend the work to friends and family.

These kinds of things should be costly. That’s how society prevents people from just going along with enabling horrendous human rights violations because the pay and perks are decent.

And at Palantir, the skulls are on the cap. Some people are finally noticing.

Hans, are we the baddies? Yeah. You probably are. So, are you going to keep wearing those skulls?

Filed Under: are we the baddies, culture, employment
Companies: palantir

Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well.

Failures

from the a-very-bad-bet dept

Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit.

The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past couple weeks, though it’s still down on the year.

Welcome to patronage capitalism with a stock ticker attached.

Last year, we wrote about the disturbing trend of tech founders and VCs nodding along to the neoreactionary pitch that democracy is holding back innovation, and that what the industry really needs is a “tech-friendly” strongman to sweep away institutional guardrails. We argued this was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal, since real innovation requires exactly the kind of stable, open, competitive institutions that authoritarianism systematically destroys.

Palantir has apparently decided to volunteer as the case study. Palantir — the very company whose entire sales pitch is built around using technology to make better strategic decisions and predict how things will play out.

But now the company seems to be betting that Trumpist-flavored authoritarianism is a permanent feature of the American political landscape — and that going all-in on it will never, ever have any long-term consequences.

Over the weekend, the company’s official account posted what it called a “brief” 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, framed as an introduction to the “philosophy” behind Palantir’s work. Most of it is a reheated version of the familiar Thiel-adjacent playbook — Silicon Valley owes a debt to the country, we must build AI weapons before our adversaries do, the iPhone has made us soft — the kind of thing that gets nodded along to at certain conferences and immediately forgotten.

But a few points deserve to be called out. First, there is the quite telling series of bullet points effectively saying that famous people shouldn’t be subject to public criticism because it means they might not want to help save you piddling simpletons.

We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

[….]

The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

This is the same Harpers Letter-style nonsense where people who deem themselves to be great thinkers or great men of history find it horrifying that the public might call them on their bullshit. I mean, sure, we should show more grace in general to lots of people, but these fragile-minded billionaires keep acting like because some wacko on social media calls them on their bullshit pronouncements it’s the end of the world.

But it gets way worse from there. Buried near the end are points 21 and 22, which are insane, and should make anyone who continues to work with or for Palantir radioactive:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Strip away the corporate-academic language and you’re left with a very old, very problematic argument: certain cultures — and we all know which ones they are claiming are supposedly the “middling” and “regressive” ones — are inferior, and the pursuit of inclusivity has been a civilizational error. That framing — some cultures produce wonders, others are regressive and harmful, pluralism is a civilizational threat — has been used to justify exclusion, hierarchy, and far worse for over a century. And while internet fascists like to think of it as edge lord contrarianism today, to most people it just comes across as a shiny coat of paint on historical bigotries and ignorance.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, sarcastically pointed out that it was “extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.” In a much longer and more thoughtful thread on this, he made a key point:

This is the publicly endorsed worldview of a company that is rapidly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance and enforcement apparatus, and it contains arguments that would be at home in a white nationalist pamphlet.

Palantir has always been a bit creepy and cultlike in their worship of government power. Years back I debated one of its founders regarding Google employees convincing the company to drop out of a government AI surveillance effort, Project Maven. He insisted that those employees were naive and Google was weak for backing down. Of course, Google’s decision to leave Project Maven turned out to be a huge win for Palantir, who effectively took it over in Google’s place.

But back then, Palantir at least played the game of pretending to care about cultural diversity and pluralism. As Chris Person pointed out, until fairly recently, Palantir had employee resource groups called Palamigos, PalaNoir, PalanQueer, PalanGender Queer, the Palantir Interfaith Network, PalAPI, and PalNoir. The company celebrated exactly the kind of pluralism and multicultural identity that Karp’s manifesto now denounces as “shallow” and “vacant.”

And yes, they even pretended they had a pro-DEI stance:

At least now we see what happens when they feel they can go full mask off.

With Trump in power, Karp apparently feels free to discard the diversity framing the company used for years to recruit employees and just say the quiet part out loud.

The apparent hope is to use Trump’s support over the next few years to permanently weave themselves into the federal government’s tech stack. The NY Times last year talked about how Palantir’s Foundry is becoming the connective tissue for federal data:

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Palantir has made itself ideologically and technically indispensable to one specific administration’s political project — which happens to include mass deportation, data consolidation on citizens, and the kinds of enforcement actions that require exactly the ideological framework Karp just publicly endorsed.

Meanwhile, the even more recent $10 billion Army contract consolidates 75 separate contracts into a single decade-long enterprise deal.

Supporters of Palantir will likely argue that it sounds like this “embrace fascism” strategy is working great. The company is signing these rich contracts and getting its technology deep within the infrastructure of the federal government. And, yes, you could say that these are short term wins (even if the stock price is kinda lagging).

But these things cut both ways. When your value to the government is primarily ideological alignment with a specific political project, you become a clear and visible target the moment that project loses power.

One of the many problems with fascism as a business strategy is that it only works if the fascists stay in power indefinitely. It’s a woefully unpopular ideological position, especially in the US — betting on a temporarily ascendant horse that has no chance in a longer race.

But Karp and Palantir have bet the farm that either Trumpism will remain a powerful force within the government or that they will be so deeply buried in the systems that it would be effectively impossible to rip them out when more grounded leadership enters the picture.

That’s an incredibly risky bet, and one I doubt will pay off.

Karp has made sure that he and his company have become ideologically toxic to a non-fascist government. A future non-Trumpist administration will have tremendous reputational incentive to very visibly rip out Palantir, as a signal that the prior regime’s infrastructure is being dismantled.

This is exactly the trap we warned about last year when we wrote about Silicon Valley’s embrace of fascism for short-term gain. Contractual dependency you can unwind. But you’ve told everyone in public what you are, and you can’t walk that back when the winds shift.

And the winds do shift. Companies that tied themselves to nationalist or authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century tend not to have great long-term track records as independent entities. Some survive — though often in name only, most heavily restructured, with decades of reputational rehabilitation to follow. When you make yourself a load-bearing pillar of a specific regime’s specific project, your fate becomes tied to that regime’s fate.

Then there’s the talent question. The piece we wrote last year noted that authoritarianism drives brain drain — that foreign students, researchers, and the global talent pool that has always fed American innovation are already heading elsewhere. Palantir just published a document telling the world, in effect, that a diverse workforce is “shallow” and “vacant” and that some cultures are “regressive.” The engineers who have options — and the best ones always do — just got a very clear signal about whether they should take Palantir’s recruiter call.

There’s a version of Palantir’s business that doesn’t require publishing a white-nationalism-adjacent manifesto. You can sell analytical software to the federal government without announcing that pluralism is a mistake and that some cultures are regressive. Plenty of defense contractors manage it. The business didn’t force the decision to publish those 22 points. It was a choice to double down on ideological signaling, presumably because Karp and company have calculated that visible loyalty gets rewarded in the current environment.

And perhaps it earned some cheers from the remaining trolls on X, for whatever that’s worth.

But it’s a recipe for disaster over the long haul, which seems odd for a company whose entire sales pitch is based around the ability to use its tech to get great insights into how strategic decisions will play out.

This is exactly the warning we gave tech founders last year. The pitch that democracy is messy and slow, that innovation really needs someone who “gets it” cutting red tape, leads directly and predictably here: first you justify the pragmatism of cutting red tape, then you’re chasing the contracts, then drafting the manifestos, until your stock price depends on friendly presidential posts and your long-term viability depends on a political coalition never losing power.

Palantir has decided this is its business model. The rest of the industry should watch very carefully what happens next. Because the thing about tying yourself to a regime isn’t that it never works. It’s that when it stops working, it stops working all at once — and you’ve burned every other option on the way there.

Filed Under: alex karp, donald trump, fascism, silicon valley
Companies: palantir

ICE Is Going On A Surveillance Shopping Spree

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the abolish-ice dept

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at $28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget) and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICE’s budget would be the envy of many national militaries around the world. Indeed, this budget would put ICE as the 14th most well-funded military in the world, right between Ukraine and Israel.  

There are many different agencies under U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that deal with immigration, as well as non-immigration related agencies such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ICE is specifically the enforcement arm of the U.S. immigration apparatus. Their stated mission is to “[p]rotect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.” 

Of course, ICE doesn’t just end up targeting, surveilling, harassing, assaulting, detaining, and torturing people who are undocumented immigrants. They have targeted people on work permits, asylum seekers, permanent residents (people holding “green cards”), naturalized citizens, and even citizens by birth. 

While the NSA and FBI might be the first agencies that come to mind when thinking about surveillance in the U.S., ICE should not be discounted. ICE has always engaged in surveillance and intelligence-gathering as part of their mission. A 2022 report by Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology found the following:

• ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
• ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
• ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
• ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
• ​​ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
• ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs. 

With a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history. 

How We Got Here

The entire surveillance industry has been allowed to grow and flourish under both Democratic and Republican regimes. For example, President Obama dramatically expanded ICE from its more limited origins, while at the same time narrowing its focus to undocumented people accused of crimes. Under the first and second Trump administrations, ICE ramped up its operations significantly, increasing raids in major cities far from the southern border and casting a much wider net on potential targets. ICE has most recently expanded its partnerships with sheriffs across the U.S., and deported more than 1.5 million people cumulatively under the Trump administrations (600,000 of those were just during the first year of Trump’s second term according to DHS statistics), not including the 1.6 million people DHS claims have “self-deported.” More horrifying is that in just the last year of the current administration, 4,250 people detained by ICE have gone missing, and 31 have died in custody or while being detained. In contrast, 24 people died in ICE custody during the entirety of the Biden administration.

ICE also has openly stated that they plan to spy on the American public, looking for any signs of left-wing dissent against their domestic military-like presence. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a recent interview that his agency “was dedicated to the mission of going after” Antifa and left-wing gun clubs. 

On a long enough timeline, any surveillance tool you build will eventually be used by people you don’t like for reasons that you disagree with. A surveillance-industrial complex and a democratic society are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of your political party. 

EFF recently published a guide to using government databases to dig up homeland security spending and compiled our own dataset of companies selling tech to DHS components. In 2025, ICE entered new contracts with several private companies for location surveillance, social media surveillance, face surveillance, spyware, and phone surveillance. Let’s dig into each.

Phone Surveillance Tools 

One common surveillance tactic of immigration officials is to get physical access to a person’s phone, either while the person is detained at a border crossing, or while they are under arrest. ICE renewed an $11 million contract with a company called Cellebrite, which helps ICE unlock phones and then can take a complete image of all the data on the phone, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, text messages, and even Signal and WhatsApp messages. ICE also signed a $3 million contract with Cellebrite’s main competitor Magnet Forensics, makers of the Graykey device for unlocking phones. DHS has had contracts with Cellebrite since 2008, but the number of phones they search has risen dramatically each year, reaching a new high of 14,899 devices searched by ICE’s sister agency U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) between April and June of 2025. 

If ICE can’t get physical access to your phone, that won’t stop them from trying to gain access to your data. They have also resumed a $2 million contract with the spyware manufacturer, Paragon. Paragon makes the Graphite spyware, which made headlines in 2025 for being found on the phones of several dozen members of Italian civil society. Graphite is able to harvest messages from multiple different encrypted chat apps such as Signal and WhatsApp without the user ever knowing. 

Our concern with ICE buying this software is the likelihood that it will be used against undocumented people and immigrants who are here legally, as well as U.S. citizens who have spoken up against ICE or who work with immigrant communities. Malware such as Graphite can be used to read encrypted messages as they are sent, other forms of spyware can also download files, photos, location history, record phone calls, and even discretely turn on your microphone to record you. 

How to Protect Yourself 

The most effective way to protect yourself from smartphone surveillance would be to not have a phone. But that’s not realistic advice in modern society. Fortunately, for most people there are other ways you can make it harder for ICE to spy on your digital life. 

The first and easiest step is to keep your phone up to date. Installing security updates makes it harder to use malware against you and makes it less likely for Cellebrite to break into your phone. Likewise, both iPhone (Lockdown Mode) and Android (Advanced Protection) offer special modes that lock your phone down and can help protect against some malware.

Having your phone’s software up to date and locked with a strong alphanumeric password will offer some protection against Cellebrite, depending on your model of phone. However, the strongest protection is simply to keep your phone turned off, which puts it in “before first unlock” mode and has been typically harder for law enforcement to bypass. This is good to do if you are at a protest and expect to be arrested, if you are crossing a border, or if you are expecting to encounter ICE. Keeping your phone on airplane mode should be enough to protect against cell-site simulators, but turning your phone off will offer extra protection against cell-site simulators and Cellebrite devices. If you aren’t able to turn your phone off, it’s a good idea to at least turn off face/fingerprint unlock to make it harder for police to force you to unlock your phone. While EFF continues to fight to strengthen our legal protections against compelling people to decrypt their devices, there is currently less protection against compelled face and fingerprint unlocking than there is against compelled password disclosure.

Internet Surveillance 

ICE has also spent $5 million to acquire at least two location and social media surveillance tools: Webloc and Tangles, from a company called Pen Link, an established player in the open source intelligence space. Webloc gathers the locations of millions of phones by gathering data from mobile data brokers and linking it together with other information about users. Tangles is a social media surveillance tool which combines web scraping with access to social media application programming interfaces. These tools are able to build a dossier on anyone who has a public social media account. Tangles is able to link together a person’s posting history, posts, and comments containing keywords, location history, tags, social graph, and photos with those of their friends and family. Penlink then sells this information to law enforcement, allowing law enforcement to avoid the need for a warrant. This means ICE can look up historic and current locations of many people all across the U.S. without ever having to get a warrant.

ICE also has established contracts with other social media scanning and AI analysis companies, such as a $4.2 million contract with a company called Fivecast for the social media surveillance and AI analysis tool ONYX. According to Fivecast, ONYX can conduct “automated, continuous and targeted collection of multimedia data” from all major “news streams, search engines, social media, marketplaces, the dark web, etc.” ONYX can build what it calls “digital footprints” from biographical data and curated datasets spanning numerous platforms, and “track shifts in sentiment and emotion” and identify the level of risk associated with an individual. 

Another contract is with ShadowDragon for their product Social Net, which is able to monitor publicly available data from over 200 websites. In an acquisition document from 2022, ICE confirmed that ShadowDragon allowed the agency to search “100+ social networking sites,” noting that “[p]ersistent access to Facebook and Twitter provided by ShadowDragon SocialNet is of the utmost importance as they are the most prominent social media platforms.”

ICE has also indicated that they intend to spend between 20 and 50 million dollars on building and staffing a 24/7 social media monitoring office with at least 30 full time agents to comb every major social media website for leads that could generate enforcement raids. 

How to protect yourself 

For U.S. citizens, making your account private on social media is a good place to start. You might also consider having accounts under a pseudonym, or deleting your social media accounts altogether. For more information, check out our guide to protecting yourself on social media. Unfortunately, people immigrating to the U.S. might be subject to greater scrutiny, including mandatory social media checks, and should consult with an immigration attorney before taking any action. For people traveling to the U.S., new rules will soon likely require them to reveal five years of social media history and 10 years of past email addresses to immigration officials. 

Street-Level Surveillance 

But it’s not just your digital habits ICE wants to surveil; they also want to spy on you in the physical world. ICE has contracts with multiple automated license plate reader (ALPR) companies and is able to follow the driving habits of a large percentage of Americans. ICE uses this data to track down specific people anywhere in the country. ICE has a $6 million contract through a Thomson Reuters subsidiary to access ALPR data from Motorola Solutions. ICE has also persuaded local law enforcement officers to run searches on their behalf through Flock Safety’s massive network of ALPR data. CBP, including Border Patrol, also operates a network of covert ALPR systems in many areas. 

ICE has also invested in biometric surveillance tools, such as face recognition software called Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of people they stop to determine if they are here legally. Mobile Fortify checks the pictures it takes against a database of 200 million photos for a match (the source of the photos is unknown). Additionally, ICE has a $10 million contract with Clearview AI for face recognition. ICE has also contracted with iris scanning company BI2 technologies for even more invasive biometric surveillance. ICE agents have also been spotted wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban video recording sunglasses. 

ICE has acquired trucks equipped with cell-site simulators (AKA Stingrays) from a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (likely the cell-site simulators were manufactured by another company). This is not the first time ICE has bought this technology. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, ICE deployed cell-site simulators at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019, and ICE more than 1,885 times between 2013 and 2017, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Cell-site simulators can be used to track down a specific person in real time, with more granularity than a phone company or tools like Webloc can provide, though Webloc has the distinct advantage of being used without a warrant and not requiring agents to be in the vicinity of the person being tracked. 

How to protect yourself 

Taking public transit or bicycling is a great way to keep yourself off ALPR databases, but an even better way is to go to your local city council meetings and demand the city cancels contracts with ALPR companies, like people have done in Flagstaff, Arizona; Eugene, Oregon; and Denver, Colorado, among others. 

If you are at a protest, putting your phone on airplane mode could help protect you from cell-site simulators and from apps on your phone disclosing your location, but might leave you vulnerable to advanced targeted attacks. For more advanced protection, turning your phone completely off protects against all radio based attacks, and also makes it harder for tools like Cellebrite to break into your phone as discussed above. But each individual will need to weigh their need for security from advanced radio based attacks against their need to document potential abuses through photo or video. For more information about protecting yourself at a protest, head over to SSD.

There is nothing you can do to change your face, which is why we need more stringent privacy laws such as Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.

Tying All the Data Together 

Last but not least, ICE uses tools to combine and search all this data along with the data on Americans they have acquired from private companies, the IRS, TSA, and other government databases. 

To search all this data, ICE uses ImmigrationOS, a system that came from a $30-million contract with Palantir. What Palantir does is hard to explain, even for people who work there, but essentially they are plumbers. Palantir makes it so that ICE has all the data they have acquired in one place so it’s easy to search through. Palantir links data from different databases, like IRS data, immigration records, and private databases, and enables ICE to view all of this data about a specific person in one place. 

The true civil liberties nightmare of Palantir is that they enable governments to link data that should have never been linked. There are good civil liberties reasons why IRS data was never linked with immigration data and was never linked with social media data, but Palantir breaks those firewalls. Palantir has labeled themselves as a progressive, human rights centric company historically, but their recent actions have given them away as just another tech company enabling surveillance nightmares.

Threat Modeling When ICE Is Your Adversary 

 Understanding the capabilities and limits of ICE and how to threat model helps you and your community fight back, remain powerful, and protect yourself.

One of the most important things you can do is to not spread rumors and misinformation. Rumors like “ICE has malware so now everyone’s phones are compromised” or “Palantir knows what you are doing all the time” or “Signal is broken” don’t help your community. It’s more useful to spread facts, ways to protect yourself, and ways to fight back. For information about how to create a security plan for yourself or your community, and other tips to protect yourself, read our Surveillance Self-Defense guides.

How EFF Is Fighting Back

One way to fight back against ICE is in the courts. EFF currently has a lawsuit against ICE over their pressure on Apple and Google to take down ICE spotting apps, like ICEBlock. We also represent multiple labor unions suing ICE over their social media surveillance practices. 

We have also demanded the San Francisco Police Department stop sharing data illegally with ICE, and issued a statement condemning the collaboration between ICE and the malware provider Paragon. We also continue to maintain our Rayhunter project for detecting cell-site simulators. 

Other civil liberties organizations are also suing ICE. ACLU has sued ICE over a subpoena to Meta attempting to identify the owner of an account providing advice to protestors, and another coalition of groups has thus far successfully sued the IRS to stop sharing taxpayer data with ICE. 

We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an irresistible tool for anti-democratic forces.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: dhs, ice, surveillance
Companies: clearview, clearview ai, fivecast, motorola, palantir, paragon, pen link, shadowdragon, techops specialty vehicles

How Palantir Is Mapping Everyone’s Data For The Government

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the the-panopticon dept

When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public. Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government.

Palantir’s two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is used by corporations in the private sector to help with global operations. Gotham is marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and is primarily used by governments.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I’m observing how the government is increasingly pulling together data from various sources, and the political and social consequences of combining those data sources. Palantir’s work with the federal government using the Gotham platform is amplifying this process.

Gotham is an investigative platform built for police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients. Its purpose is deceptively simple: take whatever data an agency already has, break it down into its smallest components and then connect the dots. Gotham is not simply a database. It takes fragmented data, scattered across various agencies and stored in different formats, and transforms it into a unified, searchable web.

The stakes are high with Palantir’s Gotham platform. The software enables law enforcement and government analysts to connect vast, disparate datasets, build intelligence profiles and search for individuals based on characteristics as granular as a tattoo or an immigration status. It transforms historically static records – think department of motor vehicles files, police reports and subpoenaed social media data like location history and private messages – into a fluid web of intelligence and surveillance.

These departments and agencies use Palantir’s platform to assemble detailed profiles of individuals, mapping their social networks, tracking their movements, identifying their physical characteristics and reviewing their criminal history. This can involve mapping a suspected gang member’s network using arrest logs and license plate reader data, or flagging individuals in a specific region with a particular immigration status.

The efficiency the platform enables is undeniable. For investigators, what once required weeks of cross-checking siloed systems can now be done in hours or less. But by scaling up the government’s investigative capacity, Gotham also alters the relationship between the state and the people it governs.

Shifting the balance of power

The political ramifications of Palantir’s rise come into focus when you consider its influence and reach across the government. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone has spent more than US$200 million on Palantir contracts, relying on the software to run its Investigative Case Management system and to integrate travel histories, visa records, biometric data and social media data.

The Department of Defense has awarded Palantir billion-dollar contracts to support battlefield intelligence and AI-driven analysis. Even domestic agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Internal Revenue Service, and local police departments like the New York Police Department, have contracted with Palantir for data integration projects.

These integrations mean that Palantir is not just a vendor of software; it is becoming a partner in how the federal government organizes and acts on information. That creates a kind of dependency. The same private company helps define how investigations are conducted, how targets are prioritized, how algorithms work and how decisions are justified.

Because Gotham is proprietary, the public, and even elected officials, cannot see how its algorithms weigh certain data points or why they highlight certain connections. Yet, the conclusions it generates can have life-altering consequences: inclusion on a deportation list or identification as a security risk. The opacity makes democratic oversight difficult, and the system’s broad scope and wide deployment means that mistakes or biases can scale up rapidly to affect many people.

Beyond law enforcement

Supporters of Palantir’s work argue that it modernizes outdated government IT systems, bringing them closer to the kind of integrated analytics that are routine in the private sector. However, the political and social stakes are different in public governance. Centralized, attribute-based searching, whether by location, immigration status, tattoos or affiliations, creates the capacity for mass profiling.

In the wrong hands, or even in well-intentioned hands under shifting political conditions, this kind of system could normalize surveillance of entire communities. And the criteria that trigger scrutiny today could be expanded tomorrow.

U.S. history provides warning examples: The mass surveillance of Muslim communities after 9/11, the targeting of civil rights activists in the 1960s and the monitoring of anti-war protesters during the Vietnam era are just a few.

Gotham’s capabilities may enable government agencies to carry out similar operations on a much larger scale and at a faster pace. And once some form of data integration infrastructure exists, its uses tend to expand, often into areas far from its original mandate.

A broader shift in governance

The deeper story here isn’t just that the government is collecting more data. It’s that the structure of governance is changing into a model where decision-making is increasingly influenced by what integrated data platforms reveal. In a pre-Gotham era, putting someone under suspicion of wrongdoing might have required specific evidence linked to an event or witness account. In a Gotham-enabled system, suspicion can stem from patterns in the data – patterns whose importance is defined by proprietary algorithms.

This level of data integration means that government officials can use potential future risks to justify present action. The predictive turn in governance aligns with a broader shift toward what some scholars call “preemptive security.” It is a logic that can erode traditional legal safeguards that require proof before punishment.

The stakes for democracy

The partnership between Palantir and the federal government raises fundamental questions about accountability in a data-driven state. Who decides how these tools are used? Who can challenge a decision that was made by software, especially if that software is proprietary?

Without clear rules and independent oversight, there is a risk that Palantir’s technology becomes normalized as a default mode of governance. They could be used not only to track suspected criminals or terrorists but also to manage migration flows, monitor and suppress protests, and enforce public health measures. The concern is not that these data integration capabilities exist, but that government agencies could use them in ways that undermine civil liberties without public consent.

Once put in use, such systems are hard to dismantle. They create new expectations for speed and efficiency in law enforcement, making it politically costly to revert to slower, more manual processes. That inertia can lock in not only the technology but also the expanded scope of surveillance it enables.

Choosing the future

As Palantir deepens its government partnerships, the issues its technology raises go beyond questions of cost or efficiency. There are civil liberties implications and the potential for abuse. Will strong legal safeguards and transparent oversight constrain these tools for integrated data analysis? The answer is likely to depend on political will as much as technical design.

Ultimately, Palantir’s Gotham is more than just software. It represents how modern governance might function: through data, connections, continuous monitoring and control. The decisions made about its use today are likely to shape the balance between security and freedom for decades to come.

Nicole M. Bennett is a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Filed Under: civil rights, data, democracy, gotham, law enforcement, predictive policing, privacy, surveillance, transparency
Companies: palantir

Palantir Continues To Burnish Its Evil Tech Overlord Reputation By Kicking Journalists Out Of A Tech Conference

Journalism

from the beat-it,-data-points dept

Palantir has never had a great reputation. Even before it teamed up with Trump to create a massive, abusable database of American residents’ information, it was working with forward-looking cop shops, that wanted similar massive, abusable databases of their own, even if those were limited to surveilling people in their own jurisdictions.

The company is never going to gather much praise from the press, so it will have to content itself with counting the billions it’s bringing in from government contracts. Oh, and chasing journalists it doesn’t like out of tech conferences that are otherwise open to the public. Here’s Caroline Haskins, reporting for Wired about four ejections made by Palantir employees, one of which was her own.

Prior to being kicked out of Palantir’s booth, the WIRED journalist, who is also the author of this article, was taking photos, videos, and written notes during software demos of Palantir FedStart partners, which use the company’s cloud systems to get certified for government work. The booth’s walls had phrases like “REAWAKEN THE GIANT” and “DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP!” printed on the outside. When the reporter briefly stepped away from the booth and attempted to re-enter, she was stopped by Eliano Younes, Palantir’s head of strategic engagement, who said that WIRED was not allowed to be there. The reporter asked why, and Younes repeated himself, adding that if WIRED tried to return, he would call the police.

Younes has since tried to justify his actions. A lengthy XTwitter screed claims the journalists have only themselves to blame for their ejections because [scrolls scrolls scrolls scrolls] their coverage of Palantir wasn’t flattering enough and/or this one time a reporter was rude during a press conference.

Apparently this is all the justification Younes needed to make Palantir look even more thin-skinned and evil than it already appears to be. First, Younes personally went after Haskins. Then he sent consecutive sets of goons to toss out three other tech reporters.

Later that day, Palantir had conference security remove at least three other journalists—Jack Poulson, writer of the All-Source Intelligence Substack; Max Blumenthal, who writes and publishes The Grayzone; and Jessica Le Masurier, a reporter at France 24—from the conference hall, Poulson says. The reporters were later able to reenter the hall, Poulson adds.

To be fair to the security guards, they weren’t actually goons. I mean, they did eject the reporters but apparently allowed them back in after a “friendly” conversation with the three ejectees, asking them only to “respect any requests from attendees” (but, importantly, not vendors) to stop filming them.

Younes also took time to rebut a claim no one ever made during his extended follow-up to his ejections of multiple reporters from an open-to-the-public tech expo.

On Tuesday, Palantir posted on X claiming the Times article was “blatantly untrue” and said that the company “never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans.” The Times article did not claim that Palantir buys or collects its own data, though it’s a common misconception that the company does so.

Much like other tech companies that have made themselves pariahs, denying claims no one made and ejecting reporters you don’t like isn’t going to do anything to alter public perception… at least not in the direction Palantir would prefer. If this is the stance Palantir wants to take in response to critical reporting, it’s never going to be the swaggering badass it thinks it is. It will just be another petulant tech company that’s too thin-skinned to absorb the criticism its questionable actions will always generate.

Filed Under: caroline haskins, jack poulson, jessica le masurier, max blumenthal, trump administration
Companies: palantir

Trump Administration Showers Palantir With Millions To Compile Data To Wield Against American Citizens

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the better-keep-an-eye-on-the-non-right-wing-radicals dept

Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated.

That private contractor would be Palantir, which has never shied away from the role of villain since its inception. And it only makes sense this administration would choose Palantir, what with the company’s founder being such a huge fan of Trump, fascism, and censorship.

Nearly a billion dollars are headed Palantir’s way, even as DOGE continues to strip funding from nearly every government agency it has decided to meddle with. That’s not a coincidence, as the New York Times reports.

Palantir’s selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded by Peter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.

Just more insiders doing some (horse) trading. Palantir has already received more than $100 million from the Trump Administration since Trump took office in January. The Defense Department’s outlay dwarfs the $113 million already allocated towards this project. The DoD has awarded a $795 million contract to Palantir, but has yet to actually start spending that money.

It obviously will end up spending it. But the main concern is the addition of Palantir software to a bunch of agencies not normally considered to be part of the federal government’s domestic spyware programs.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

The administration and its surveillance partner are also seeking to infect the IRS and Social Security Administration with Palantir’s tech, adding to the massive haystack the Trump administration can use for whatever purposes it wants.

Given how this administration has handled itself since returning to office, it’s not that much of a stretch to believe this massive data collection will be used to help Trump and his compatriots find targets for arrest, deportation, or unconstitutional executive orders.

Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. 

That’s obviously the point of this massive data pile, which removes silos that were put there for a reason. Stripping away these separations creates an extremely enticing target for malicious hackers, who always appreciate government contractors doing the dirty work of amassing personally identifiable information for them.

The only open question is whether Palantir’s expanded data collection will be exploited by malicious hackers or malicious administration members first. Rest assured, it will be abused by someone, and any legal recourse after the fact isn’t going to be able to undo whatever harms have been inflicted on Americans by this intermingling of data from multiple federal agencies.

Palantir, of course, couldn’t care less. Its statement on this disturbing development merely says that it’s proud to be a hammer but it can’t control what the administration decides are nails.

“We act as a data processor, not a data controller,” it said. “Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted.”

This is obviously true. A contractor can’t control what the government does with the tools it provides. However, it can decide whether or not to provide the tools. Palantir will never choose otherwise, no matter who’s in office. And if it’s willing to aid a president determined to do bad things with the data it provides, it’s certainly willing to sell to other autocrats and human rights abusers elsewhere in the world. Ethics are a luxury this multi-billion dollar company apparently can’t afford.

Filed Under: defense department, dhs, doge, elon musk, health and human services, irs, mass surveillance, peter thiel
Companies: palantir

Palantir CEO Sure Seems Pleased His Tech Is Capable Of Getting People Killed

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the disrupting-life dept

As if things weren’t terrible enough, the techbros of the world have decided the one-two punch of Donald Trump and Elon Musk will make them even richer than they already are, even if it means making the world a worse place to live… or suddenly die.

Palantir has been on the leading edge of surveillance tech for years, making the world worse by inflicting cities with “predictive policing” and similar “advancements.” Taxpayers are stuck paying the tab for AI-assisted crunching of tainted cop data, ensuring the same old shitty, racist policing will just cost more than it did the last time around.

Palantir is doing the same thing for the US military. And that’s the sort of thing that makes CEO Alex Karp (himself a billionaire) inordinately happy. In a recorded earnings call, Karp bragged about how rich Palantir’s shareholders might be, and how dead other people without a significant amount of Palantir shares will be. Here’s Lucas Ropek with the details for Gizmodo:

“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them,” Karp said, with a smile on his face. The CEO added that he was very proud of the work his firm is doing and that he felt it was good for America.

It’s one thing to aid and abet in extrajudicial killings. It’s quite another to brag about it on recorded earnings calls while smiling. Just being complicit is ghoulish enough. Celebrating the fact that helping to kill people is making you richer just makes it clear you no longer have a soul.

And that’s not all of it, even though that’s probably the worst of it. The same earnings call featured Palantir’s CEO applauding the ongoing destruction of the federal government by Musk and the Trump Administration.

“We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Karp said, apparently excited about Musk’s effort. “Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working,” he continued. “There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”

While this reference to killing people might have been a bit more metaphorical, the unequivocal support for “disruption” is also ghoulish. Disruption doesn’t only “expose things that aren’t working.” Disruption, by its very definition, is capable of breaking things that are working. Sure, we all want things to work better and more efficiently, but no one ever thinks that’s what’s happening when their power or internet service provider is “disrupted.” A DDoS is a “disruption,” but only its perpetrators would consider that a positive outcome.

We’re being metaphorically bombed into the governance Stone Age (to borrow a mass killing metaphor) by a bunch of billionaires too rich to care what happens to the other 99.9% of people that have the misfortune of sharing this country — and the world beyond it — with them. And they’re so happy they’re going to have even more money and power that they can’t stop themselves from gloating about it in public.

Filed Under: alex karp, billionaires, elon musk, surveillance tech
Companies: palantir

German Court Places Limits On Mass Surveillance Enabled By Peter Thiel’s Palantir Software

Privacy

from the mass-harvesting-still-problematic dept

Big data has always been big business but, in recent years, it’s also become big government business. The stuff advertisers like is also stuff the government likes. Millions of tax dollars have been fed to private companies offering government agencies a wealth of information they’ve never had access to before. Everyone carries a computer in their pockets these days, and the always-on nature of the internet creates a wealth of data that can be obtained, stored, and analyzed for less than pennies on the byte.

Peter Thiel’s Palantir rides the forefront of the government access wave. The CIA-backed data analytics company provides its services to a number of US agencies, including the rightfully reviled ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Palantir scrapes up everything that isn’t nailed down and serves it up to people with the power to stop, arrest, or kill persons of interest generated by proprietary algorithms criminal defendants are often denied access to.

If there’s a downside, it’s very limited. Private contractors are rarely sued for their contributions to mass surveillance. The directly responsible party is the government agency and a host of immunity options await those sued by those indiscriminately targeted by “collect it all” software.

That’s the way it works in the United States. In Europe, it’s a (slightly) different story. While courts may often defer to the national security concerns of acronymed agencies, they aren’t nearly as willing to allow private companies — even if employed by government agencies — to exercise the same amount of subjective discretion.

As Morgan Beaker reports for Ars Technica, a recent German court decision has placed limits on what government agencies can do with their Palantir-enabled surveillance. Handling a lawsuit filed in response to a law passed in Hamburg that granted the government permission to use Palantir’s powerful surveillance software, the court arrived at this conclusion:

A top German court ruled the Hamburg law unconstitutional and issued strict guidelines for the first time about how automatic data analysis tools like Palantir’s can be used by police, and it warned against the inclusion of data belonging to bystanders, such as witnesses or lawyers like (German attorney Britta) Eder. The ruling said that the Hamburg law, and a similar law in Hesse, “allow police, with just one click, to create comprehensive profiles of persons, groups, and circles,” without differentiating between suspected criminals and people who are connected to them.

That’s always been the problem with bulk collections and the software that enables these collections. Private companies are unwilling (or unable) to place limits on government (mis)use of their software. Private contractors aren’t necessarily supposed to understand the laws governing collections and government agencies are often given even more leeway to get things wrong. This results in over-collection which, when combined with an often minimal level of oversight, quickly turns into privacy violations never imagined by lawmakers dozens or hundreds of years earlier. That’s where the courts need to step in. And that has happened here.

But this decision doesn’t actually prevent German government agencies from utilizing powerful third-party surveillance tools. It simply adds guardrails for use of the data collected by Palantir and its competitors. And it only affects the single German state overseen by this court.

The court decision in Germany affects Hamburg, which was about to start using Palantir and now cannot use the company’s software until it rewrites its rules governing the way police analyze big data. Hesse, which has been using Palantir software since 2017, can keep using the platform under strict conditions but must rewrite its local legislation by September.

It’s not like it’s a loss, though. The decision can be cited elsewhere in Germany in other cases challenging Palantir-enabled data dragnets. And, while the decision did not directly target Palantir, the limitations it imposes means Palantir’s offerings can’t be used by Hamburg law enforcement until changes are made. In response, the company’s reps have offered up a grinning-through-gritted-teeth statement:

“We welcome the German Federal Constitutional Court’s efforts to provide clarity on the circumstances and ways in which police authorities can process their lawfully collected data to help keep people safe,” says Paula Cipierre, head of privacy and public policy in Palantir’s Berlin office.

This forced cheeriness is not represented in Palantir’s statements to its shareholders. As Meaker reports, its letter to shareholders last November openly complained about the European market and its supposed inability to engage in the sort of regulatory “flexibility” that allows Palantir to sell to multiple US agencies without having to fear being sued under local or federal privacy laws.

Grapes it is, then. Some sour. Some incredibly sweet and permissive. Palantir will remain successful, even if it has to stunt its products’ effectiveness to comply with local laws. Governments will never stop wanting access to data, especially when utilizing third parties gives them plausible constitutional deniability. Palantir will remain fully operational and profitable. This decision doesn’t directly affect it or its competitors. It only affects their customers. Maybe that will be enough to instigate a larger pushback against third-party-enabled surveillance in Germany, if not the rest of European Union. But even if it doesn’t, Hamburg residents are now slightly more insulated from government overreach.

Filed Under: germany, hamburg, law enforcement, privacy, surveillance
Companies: palantir