You do not, under any circumstances, gotta to “hand it” to Palantir, a company known for its AI surveillance and battlefield tech, and whose CEO Alex Karp has mused about legalizing war crimes.
But you have to admit, it’s pretty striking to hear that even some of the company’s own employees are starting to feel disgusted about ICE amid its brutal crackdown in Minneapolis, according to new reporting from Wired.
After federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, some Palantir employees began openly questioning the work the company was doing with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, the immigration authorities deployed in Minneapolis and other American cities.
“In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this,” one worker wrote in Slack thread about Pretti’s killing. “Thinking pragmatically: is the reputational damage we’re taking for being associated with them worth it? What if the next administration will be democratic and they cut all the contracts with us?”
“We need an understanding of our involvement here,” another demanded.
The protests were raised in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to discussing news items. And many of the posts that were either critical of ICE or questioned Palantir’s involvement with the agency received dozens of upvotes in the form of “+1” emojis, according to Wired, underscoring how the sentiment was far from being fringe, and that the unrest was out in the open. Some employees even wondered if Palantir could help put an end to what they were reading about in the news.
“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” one employee wrote. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?”
Palantir and ICE have deep ties. A 404 Media scoop from earlier this month, for example, described how Palantir was secretly providing ICE a tracking tool called “ELITE” to scour Medicaid data and other government sources to create a map of people it could potentially deport, generating a dossier for each person that included where they live. Palantir was also awarded a $30 million contract to build ICE an “ImmigrationOS” to provide “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the country, and also worked on updating the agency’s database so it could “complete target analysis of known populations.”
But according to Wired, Palantir has been so internally secretive about its work with ICE over the last year that employees have been relying on news reports to find out about the services their employer provides the agency.
Now, the groundswell of unrest within Palantir’s ranks has seemingly reached a point where it can’t be ignored by leadership. In response to the Slack protests, Palantir’s civil liberties team updated its internal wiki with a breakdown on its work with ICE, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes,” per Wired.
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