Palantir is Using War on Terror Tools to Track American Citizens

According to an article in Bloomberg (April 19, 2018) Palantir, a data-mining company, is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens. The software combs through disparate data sources - financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings - and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uses Palantir to detect Medicare fraud. The FBI uses it in criminal probes. The Department of Homeland Security deploys it to screen air travelers and keep tabs on immigrants.

Police and sheriff’s departments in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles have also used it, frequently ensnaring in the digital dragnet people who aren’t suspected of committing any crime. People and objects pop up on the Palantir screen inside boxes connected to other boxes by radiating lines labeled with the relationship: "Colleague of," "Lives with," "Operator of [cell number]," "Owner of [vehicle]," "Sibling of," even "Lover of."

If the authorities have a picture, the rest is easy. Tapping databases of driver’s license and ID photos, law enforcement agencies can now identify more than half the population of U.S. adults.

The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders... The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact, officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles, physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and the officer’s own observations on the subject.

The cards are digitized in the Palantir system, adding to a constantly expanding surveillance database that’s fully accessible without a warrant.