Palantir's Documented Controversies

Your company is doomed. That's essentially what an executive at Kleiner Perkins told five men in a Silicon Valley conference room in two thousand four, after watching their software demo. According to Britannica, that's the moment. It's company lore now... which is a polite way of saying it may have grown in the telling. But hold onto it. Because twenty years later, that doomed little startup gets argued over in a New Orleans courtroom, torn open by a hacker collective, and blockaded by protesters at its own cafeteria door. All for a product almost nobody can describe. So what does it actually DO? The company is Palantir. Two thousand three. Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings. Thiel took the name from Tolkien... the palantiri. Seeing-stones. Look into one, and you can see across enormous distances. If you've read the books, you know the catch. Those stones also showed you exactly what somebody else wanted you to see. Venture firms passed, so Thiel and his fund largely bankrolled the roughly thirty million dollar start themselves. Then In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, put in about two million. Small money. In Washington, a very loud signal. February, two thousand eleven. A security executive named Aaron Barr, of HBGary Federal, goes public with a boast. He says he can unmask the hackers of Anonymous. Anonymous takes his email. All of it. And publishes it. Somewhere in that pile is a proposal. Barr's firm, Palantir, and Berico Technologies, nicknamed Team Themis, solicited by lawyers at Hunton and Williams. Tactics against WikiLeaks supporters and critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Disinformation. Feeding feuds between groups. The Chamber denied hiring anyone and called it a baseless smear. But the documents were real. And they were out. Palantir cut contact with HBGary within days. Karp apologized publicly to the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was named in that proposal, saying free speech and privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy, and vowing employees involved would be dealt with. And look, a proposal is not a campaign. Nobody has shown these tactics were ever carried out. But a company whose entire product is seeing patterns had just been caught, in writing, aiming that lens at journalists and activists. That was the loud story. The next one was almost silent. New Orleans. February twenty-third, two thousand twelve. Mayor Mitch Landrieu signs an agreement giving the city free access to Palantir's platform. Free. Routed through his signature anti-violence program... so it never went through public procurement. For nearly six years, the software helped flag which residents were likely to be caught up in violence. City council members had no idea. When The Verge broke the story in early two thousand eighteen, defense attorneys discovered a tool shaping police attention had never once been disclosed in court. Landrieu's office declined to renew. A judge granted one convicted man the chance to argue the software hid evidence that helped him. Then immigration. Since twenty fourteen, Palantir built the software behind ICE's Investigative Case Management system, a contract reported at fifty-three million dollars. Plus a separate tool, FALCON, around forty-two million. Documents surfaced by the group Mijente and The Intercept show agents were instructed to use the FALCON app before workplace raids. Twenty nineteen: protesters swarm the Palo Alto headquarters and block the cafeteria entrance. Jewish groups including Never Again Action rally outside offices in Palo Alto and New York. A privacy conference at Berkeley drops Palantir as a sponsor. Palantir disputed the characterizations. And kept the contracts. Now the quiet part of the record. Twenty sixteen. The Labor Department accuses Palantir of systematically screening out Asian engineering applicants. One hiring pool: more than a hundred and thirty qualified people. Seventy-three percent of them Asian. Four hired. The odds of that by chance, the government said... about one in a billion. Palantir called the analysis flawed, admitted no wrongdoing, and in April twenty seventeen signed a consent decree. One point six six million dollars in back pay and stock, plus job offers to eight people. And here's the thing about those five men nobody would fund. Being turned down over and over bought them something money usually takes away. Control. Early on, Palantir simply declined to give investors board seats. Even the CIA's. Nobody could tell them who to sell to. That was the bet. That was also the cost. So. What does Palantir actually do? Even its own founding has at least four different tellings. The mythology says it sees everything. The documented reality is narrower, and stranger: it connects databases that already existed, for clients who already had power. Notice that the fight is almost never about the math. It's about who aimed it, and whether anyone was told. Which is the part you can actually use. The tool is never the story. The permission is the story. So next time something arrives sold to you as neutral technology, ask the only question that ever mattered... who is holding the stone, and what do they want you to see?