When the US government signs contracts with private technology companies, the print is rarely disclosed to the public. However, Palantir Technologies attracted more and more attention during the last decade due to the size and scope of its contracts with the government.
The two main platforms of Palantir are Foundry and Gotham. Each has different functions. Foundry is used by private sector companies to support their global operations. Gotham is marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and is mainly used by governments.
I am a researcher and study the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the Federal Government of the United States. I observe how the government collects more and more data from various sources, as well as the political and social consequences of combining these sources. Palantir’s work with the federal government through the Gotham platform is amplifying this process.
Gotham is a investigation platform designed for the police, national security agencies, public health departments and other state clients. Its purpose is misleading: take the data that an agency already possesses, decompose them in its smaller components and then connect the points. Gotham is not simply a database. Take fragmented data, scattered between several agencies and stored in different formats, and transforms them into a unified network and with search capacity.
There is a lot at stake with Palantir’s Gotham platform. The software allows forces of the order and government analysts to connect vast and disparate data sets, create intelligence profiles and look for individuals based on such granular characteristics as a tattoo or their immigration status. Transforms historically static records (for example, archives of the Motorized Vehicle Department, police reports and social media data required by citation, such as location history and private messages) into a fluid network of intelligence and surveillance.
These departments and agencies use the Palantir platform to compile detailed profiles of individuals, map their social networks, track their movements, identify their physical characteristics and review their criminal record. This may involve mapping the network of an alleged member of a gang using arrest records and registration reading data, or identifying individuals in a specific region with a particular immigration status. The efficiency that the platform allows is undeniable. For researchers, which previously required cross verification weeks of isolated systems can now be done in hours or less. But by expanding government investigation capacity, Gotham also transforms the relationship between the State and its governed.
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Changing the balance of power
The political ramifications of the rise of Palantir become evident when considering their influence and scope in the government. Only the US immigration and customs control service (ICE) invested more than 200 million dollars in contracts with Palantir, using the software to execute its research case management system and integrate travel records, visa records, biometric data and social media data.
The Department of Defense awarded Palantir multimillionaire contracts to support intelligence on the battlefield and AI -based analysis. Even national agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Internal Tax Service (IRS), and local police departments such as New York, have hired Palantir for data integration projects.
These integrations mean that Palantir is not just a software provider; It is becoming a key partner in the way in which the federal government organizes and manages the information. This creates a kind of dependence. The same private company helps define how investigations are carried out, how the objectives are prioritized, how algorithms work and how decisions are justified.
Since Gotham is a private property system, the public, and even the elected officials, they cannot understand how their algorithms weigh certain data or why certain connections stand out. However, the conclusions it generates may have transcendental consequences: inclusion in a deportation list or identification as a safety risk. Opacity hinders democratic supervision, and the broad scope and the wide implementation of the system imply that errors or biases can extend rapidly and affect many people.
Palantir can go beyond the forces of order
Those who support Palantir’s work argue that modernizes the obsolete government computer systems, bringing them closer to the type of integrated analysis that is usual in the private sector. However, political and social interests are different in public governance. The centralized search based on attributes, either by location, immigration status, tattoos or affiliations, creates the ability to prepare mass profiles.
In wrong hands, or even in well -intentioned hands under changing political conditions, this type of system could normalize the surveillance of entire communities. And the criteria that today trigger scrutiny could be extended tomorrow. The EU history offers examples that serve as a warning: the mass surveillance of Muslim communities after 11-S, attacks against civil rights activists in the 1960s and the monitoring of protesters against the war during the Vietnam War are just some examples.
Gotham’s abilities could allow government agencies to carry out similar operations to a much larger scale and a faster pace. And once there is some type of data integration infrastructure, its uses tend to expand, often to areas away from their original mandate.
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A broader change in governance
The substantive issue is not just that the government is collecting more data. It is that the governance structure is changing towards a model where decision -making is increasingly influenced by what the integrated data platforms reveal. In the era before Gotham, putting someone on suspicion of an irregularity could have required specific evidence linked to an event or the story of a witness. In a Gotham -based system, suspicion can arise from patterns in the data, patterns whose importance is defined through proprietary algorithms.
This level of data integration means that government officials can use possible future risks to justify the present actions. The predictive turn in governance is aligned with a broader change towards what some academics call “preventive security.” It is a logic that can erode traditional legal guarantees that demand evidence before punishment.
What is at stake for democracy
The collaboration between Palantir and the Federal Government raises fundamental questions about accountability in a state promoted by the data. Who decides how these tools are used? Who can challenge a decision made by software, especially if it owns?
Without clear norms or independent supervision, there is a risk that Palantir technology is normalized as a default mode of government. It could be used not only to track alleged criminals or terrorists, but also to manage migratory flows, monitor and suppress protests and apply public health measures. Concern is not that these data integration capabilities exist, but that government agencies could use them so that civil liberties are undergoing public consent.
Once in operation, these systems are difficult to dismantle. They create new expectations of speed and efficiency in the application of the law, which makes it politically expensive to return to slower and more manual processes. That inertia can block not only technology, but also the expanded scope of the surveillance that allows.
Choosing the future
As Palantir deepens his collaborations with the Government, the problems posed by its technology go beyond cost or efficiency issues. There are implications for civil liberties and the possibility of abuse. Will solid legal guarantees and transparent supervision limit these tools for integrated data analysis? The answer is likely to depend on both political will and technical design.
In short, Palantir Gotham is more than a simple software. It represents how modern governance could work: through data, connections, monitoring and continuous control. The decisions made today about their use will probably define the balance between security and freedom in the next decades.
*Nicole M. Bennett She is a PhD candidate in Geography and Deputy Director of the Center for Refugee Studies at the University of Indiana
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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