Palantir has no place at Berkeley: they help tear immigrant families apart

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/31/palantir-berkeley-immigrant-families-apart

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This week, Berkeley Law School is hosting its annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference, a gathering of academics, advocates, government officials, lawyers, business people and others dedicated to digital privacy – privacy in the age of the internet and increasing surveillance. This year, as every year since 2011, that conference will be sponsored by Palantir Technologies, a secretive data-mining company that, among other things, has been active in aiding the Trump administration’s separation of migrant families.

We are demanding that the school cut its ties to Palantir, a company deeply embedded in the current administration’s crackdown on immigrants. We are not alone. More than 140 academics yesterday released a letter calling on the conference to reject Palantir as a corporate sponsor. Palantir employees have also “begged” the company’s CEO to cancel its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Tech workers protested against the company’s contracts with immigration agencies two years ago. Immigration activists rallied outside its headquarters last summer, and Stanford students flyered Palantir employees as they went in for breakfast earlier this month, asking them to stop separating families.

Standing by to watch any institution associate itself with Palantir is unacceptable. We all become complicit in giving the company credibility that softens its image.

Palantir provides software to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that has been called “mission critical” by the government’s own documents. Earlier this month, documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Palantir software was used by federal agents to investigate family members of children who had crossed the border alone. Agents were explicitly instructed to “arrest the subjects and anybody encountered during the inquiry who is out of status”.

In other words, anyone who is undocumented – mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins – who was found by Ice agents during an investigation was arrested for deportation. It’s likely many of those detained were arrested while coming forward to claim their children, as has happened many times under the Trump administration.

At least 443 people were arrested in this way.

Palantir is not just any vendor. It does not simply sell off-the-shelf solutions to government agencies. When it contracts with the government, Palantir’s employees provide “ongoing training and support” to their government counterparts, helping them configure their systems for optimal use.

“We see on day-to-day basis, to some degree, how the information system is being used, which means we are responsible for making decisions on threshold questions about what sort of customers we should work with,” said Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s head of privacy and civil liberties, at a conference in Israel. “These are active areas of discussion and debate in the company where we have to make questions of the sorts of countries that we serve and the sorts of institutions that we serve.”

Make no mistake, Palantir’s software for Ice is custom-built. Palantir’s employees not only know how Ice agents are using its software, they very likely helped set it up and may even provide continuing support, optimizing the software for their client’s use – in this case, separating immigrant families.

The company’s executives, if Bowman’s words are to be believed, have “discussed and debated” the moralities of continuing this contract and decided that Ice’s use is acceptable. Tobacco companies are banned from using Palantir, Bowman says, but agencies that arrest and deport immigrants are not.

The choice Palantir has made is clear. That is why the response from conference organizers to the demand of dropping Palantir is troubling. In their response to leading academics, organizers wrote of “engagement, discussion, and sharing of our views”, stating that we should take the opportunity to debate company representatives. A different email sent out to attendees said that in recent years the conference has lost financial sponsors and implied that Palantir’s funding allows them to keep fees low.

We should note that conference organizers, Chris Hoofnagle and Dan Solove, serve on Palantir’s advisory board on privacy and civil liberties. They are hardly independent in deciding whether to sever the conference’s ties with the company.

How does one debate terror with those who willingly participate in terrorizing others? People are being deported, children are being caged, families are being separated, and Palantir is facilitating these deeds. Palantir should no longer receive the free publicity and access that ensues from partnerships with institutions like UC Berkeley.

There is no dilemma in this matter. Those who care about human rights must push back on governments that violate them and the companies that enable them. It’s past time we tell Palantir: you are not welcome here.

Marisa Franco is based in Phoenix, Arizona, and is a co-founder of Mijente, a national Latinx organizing and movement-building network