Palantir CEO Alex Karp says Americans should be more concerned about government surveillance than a new “surveillance state” monitored by private companies.
“The primary evidence for a surveillance state in the West is not government on consumer, it’s [a] company knowing every single action you have at all times,” Karp told Axios.
“And we walk around with surveillance devices called electronic devices and every single thing we do is monitored, not I think primarily so people can eviscerate or have an understanding of am I shagging with too many people on the side and lying to my partner or lying by omission, because they want to sell us like cornflakes.
“That’s the reality of life in the West; can the government surveil your patterns of behavior. It’s called pattern of life surveillance, which is a very, very, very important way of finding terrorists and in general criminals because like everyone has a pattern,” he added.
Palantir has two main software platforms, Foundry and Gotham.
Gotham is built for counterterrorism and national security work, essentially to help analysts connect dots across massive, messy data sets.
Foundry, meanwhile, helps organizations turn sprawling, siloed data into something usable, for decision-making, optimization, and predictive modeling.
Companies like Palantir, Amazon and Google are deep in the surveillance ecosystem.
They provide the tools, cloud infrastructure and algorithms that make large-scale monitoring possible.
Palantir has long-standing contracts with the CIA, FBI, NSA, ICE and the Department of War. Its software has been used for counterterrorism and immigration enforcement.
Critics argue that Palantir’s technology creates an architecture of observation that can outlive the intentions of its creators once governments or corporations depend on that infrastructure.
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