<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/30/palantir-peter-thiel-cia-data-crime-police>;
Palantir, the CIA-backed startup, is Minority Report come true. It is all-powerful, yet no one knows it even exists. Palantir does not have an office, it has a “SCIF” on a back street in Palo Alto, California. SCIF stands for “sensitive compartmentalised information facility”. Palantir says its building “must be built to be resistant to attempts to access the information within. The network must be ‘airgapped’ from the public internet to prevent information leakage.”
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In 2004, Peter Thiel – the billionaire PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor and and latter-day Trump ally – created Palantir alongside Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Alex Karp. Their intention was to create a company that took Big Data somewhere no one else dared to go. In 2013, Karp, Palantir’s CEO, announced that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make “running a company like ours very difficult”. This is why.
Palantir watches everything you do and predicts what you will do next in order to stop it. As of 2013, its client list included the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS. Up to 50% of its business is with the public sector. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, was an early investor.
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Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too. Palantir is exactly what it says it is: a giant digital eye like Saruman’s seeing stone in The Lord of the Rings.
On the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles, Palantir is getting closest to Philip K Dick’s vision of the future, now. In the film, a premonition of an Orwellian thought-police state, crime rates drop to zero as the pre-crime unit successfully imprisons thousands of individuals for merely thinking of committing a felony.
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One could argue that sophisticated pre-crime algorithms are not necessary when being black and male is seen as reason enough for the police to swoop. What predictive policing has done is militarise American cities, creating a heightened culture of suspicion and fear in areas where tensions are highest and policing is already most difficult. Officers being led to certain neighbourhoods solely because of an algorithm is enough to cause tension; enough to ignite a powder keg and push a delicate policing situation over the edge.
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