{"id":301929,"date":"2025-09-01T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T11:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=301929"},"modified":"2025-08-27T06:50:56","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T05:50:56","slug":"palantirs-tools-pose-an-invisible-danger-we-are-just-beginning-to-comprehend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/palantirs-tools-pose-an-invisible-danger-we-are-just-beginning-to-comprehend\/","title":{"rendered":"Palantir\u2019s Tools Pose an Invisible Danger We Are Just Beginning to Comprehend"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>

\u2018The invisible nature of these surveillance structures \u2013 and how they influence our lives \u2013 is part of the reason the public understanding of what these tools do is so murky.\u2019
Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

Weaponized AI surveillance platforms threaten human rights around the world. Here\u2019s how they work.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

24 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0\u201cI<\/span>ce is just around the corner,\u201d my friend said, looking up from his phone. We were writing at a coffee shop in one of the oldest neighborhoods of New York<\/a> City, where schools and churches support thriving migrant communities as they have since long before the United States existed. Now the agents of this rogue federal agency \u2013 recognized for civil rights abuses like racial profiling, wrongful detention, medical neglect and inhumane detentions \u2013 were just footsteps away, shaking down our neighbors in their homes and at the park across the street.<\/p>\n

A day earlier, I had met with foreign correspondents at the United Nations to explain the AI surveillance architecture that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is using across the United States. The law enforcement agency uses targeting technologies which one of my past employers, Palantir<\/a> Technologies, has both pioneered and proliferated \u2013 tools I was once charged with illustrating as a graphic designer and writer, yet the consequences of which I am just coming to understand. Although largely invisible, technology like Palantir\u2019s plays a major role in world events, from wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine to the detainment of immigrants and dissident students in the United States. But despite its ubiquity, lawmakers, technologists and the media are failing to protect people from the threat of this particular kind of weaponized AI and its consequences, partly because they haven\u2019t recognized it by name.<\/p>\n

Known as intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (Istar) systems, these tools, built by several companies, allow users to track, detain and, in the context of war, kill people at scale with the help of AI<\/a>. They deliver targets to operators by combining immense amounts of publicly and privately sourced data to detect patterns, and are particularly helpful in projects of mass surveillance, forced migration and urban warfare. Also known as \u201cAI kill chains\u201d, they pull us all into a web of invisible tracking mechanisms that we are just beginning to comprehend, yet are starting to experience viscerally in the US as Ice wields these systems near our homes, churches, parks and schools.<\/p>\n

The invisible nature of these surveillance structures \u2013 and how they influence our lives \u2013 is part of the reason the public understanding of what these tools do is so murky. It is also, however, what drew me to work for Palantir as an architecture writer. It was a chance to get to know the digital spaces where many people spend most of their lives today. Working with cloud software in offices, driving new cars in our commutes, doom-scrolling on social media at home \u2013 we all feed vast amounts of data to surveillance and targeting programs created by big tech which we often don\u2019t recognize until it\u2019s too late. This is why I continue trying to convey and illustrate how these Istar applications violate our civil rights and autonomy in increasingly perverse and violent ways.<\/p>\n

The dragnets powered by Istar technology trap more than migrants and combatants \u2013 as well as their families and connections \u2013 in their wake. They appear to violate first and fourth amendment rights: first, by establishing vast and invisible surveillance networks that limit the things people feel comfortable sharing in public, including whom they meet or where they travel; and second, by enabling warrantless searches and seizures of people\u2019s data without their knowledge or consent.<\/a> They are rapidly depriving some of the most vulnerable populations in the world \u2013 political dissidents, migrants<\/a> or residents of Gaza<\/a> \u2013 of their human rights.<\/p>\n

There was a time when I wrote about the row homes in my neighborhood, with ornate windows and star-shaped iron studs, and how they welcomed migrants who sought hard work and opportunity in the US. With shared walls and affordable rents, they created tolerant and prosperous communities and accelerated the rise of the largest middle class in history. Now a new kind of architecture greets migrants and visitors to America and decides their future \u2013 one that is not made of bricks, mortar and lumber, but comprising these invisible and invasive digital surveillance systems.<\/p>\n

With names like Investigative Case Management (ICM) and ImmigrationOS, the big data platforms Palantir provides for the Department of Homeland Security, and like those it offers the IDF, are fundamentally composed of four shared elements: the underlying data integrated into the system, the interpretation and modeling of that data through analytics, and the execution of automated actions \u2013 with or without human involvement. At every layer of this architecture, there are significant ethical questions regarding civil rights, data collection, data quality, bias, discrimination, accuracy, automation and, most importantly, accountability.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, however, these platforms generate and track targets by exploiting a mind-boggling range of datasets. This can include deeply personal information such as biometric and medical data, social media data involving friends and family, precise location data derived from license plate readers, sim card data, and surveillance drone data. They can also process data purchased from a thriving ecosystem of private data brokers, or subpoenaed from companies such as Waymo and Meta. The lack of transparency regarding datasets exploited in these applications, and how they are shared across systems, further distorts the picture. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to focus on the victims.<\/p>\n