“I’ve had some of my favorite employees leave ... over ICE,” he says in the interview. ICE agents relied on Palantir’s ICM system during a 2017 operation that targeted families of migrant children, according to an ICE document published in May by Mijente and the Intercept, an online news service. Activist groups have organized a series of protests across the US against Palantir this week over the company's contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. … Axel Springer owns Insider Inc, Business Insider's parent company.

“Does the average American trust a platform company, including Google, to decide whether we should be the dominant player in AI ?” Karp asked, rhetorically. The groups staged a "good riddance" protest outside Palantir's former Palo Alto office, as well as an "unwelcome" protest at Palantir's new Denver headquarters, where it just moved. In 2018, as the tech industry grappled with the ethical implications of lucrative federal defense work, more than 200 employees wrote a letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp … Still, it’s strange, noteworthy and a sign of the times to see a refusal to do business with China articulated explicitly in a tech company’s S-1.

Palantir employees, called “Palantirians,” have taken both sides of the issue: Immigrant employees have written heartfelt letters sharing why they are opposed to the ICE contracts, while at least one former ICE official who now works at Palantir has defended them, according to a current engineer at the company.

Have a confidential tip for our reporters? Palantir makes the fairly combative claim in the risks portion of the unpublished financial filing that its business could be harmed by “coverage that presents, or relies on, inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, or otherwise damaging information” about the company: “As our business has grown and as interest in Palantir and the technology industry overall has increased, we have attracted, and may continue to attract, significant attention from news and social media outlets, including unfavorable coverage and coverage that is not directly attributable to statements authorized by our leadership, that incorrectly reports on statements made by our leadership or employees and the nature of our work, perpetuates unfounded speculation about company involvements, or that is otherwise misleading.”.

An avowed libertarian who has railed against the tech industry’s predominantly liberal politics, Thiel frequently embraces controversy. The company performed trials of a counterterrorism program with the Saudi government in 2013 and 2014 but declined to pursue further work with the country after that, a person familiar with the company said.

"Palantir is filing to go public so executives like Karp can continue to profit off of deportations," Gonzalez said in the statement. Karp said Palantir “doesn’t work with adversaries of the U.S.” and was sharply critical of the Maven withdrawal. "Rather than running from accountability, Palantir should cancel their ICE contract to stop enabling the human rights abuses perpetrated by ICE.".

Last year, The Washington Post reported that Palantir employees were reckoning with the company’s work for the aggressive U.S. immigration agency, “[debating] the ICE contracts in town hall meetings, office hallways, Slack channels and email threads.”. A Palantir spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

KRON4 News reached out to Palantir for comment but could not answer any questions regarding the matter due to their SEC-mandated quiet period. That’s rare. Palantir’s anti-China stance isn’t necessarily surprising given Thiel’s penchant for ominous warnings about Chinese tech dominance — a position that also happens to bolster his relationship with a White House that’s since kicked off an unusual crusade against Chinese social media giant TikTok. Palantir, which was founded in 2004 as a high-tech defense and intelligence contractor and has since expanded into corporate data management software, hasn’t been roiled widespread protests on the scale of those at Google. Palantir’s mysterious work and its founding origins with Trump ally and anti-press crusader Peter Thiel have inspired a number of controversies in recent years, none as divisive as its ongoing business with ICE.

But Karp, Palantir’s chief executive officer, has a message for those critics: The company’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement is here to stay.

Early on, he created a privacy and civil liberties team to review ethical issues in government contracts.

Palantir’s software was used to assimilate data from the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and DHS — including surveillance images, smuggling routes and electronic communications — to quickly find leads, records show.

(In an interview with the New York Times, he said Gawker published articles that were “very painful and paralyzing for people who were targeted,” adding: “I thought it was worth fighting back.”).

Palantir wins competition to build Army intelligence system, Palantir’s most visible tie to the White House is Thiel, the company’s outspoken co-founder, chief backer and executive chairman. A subsequent employee-led campaign asked Palantir, in a letter delivered to Karp, to donate the proceeds of the ICE contract—$49 million over the next three years—to charity. This group’s key tenet, according to its public statement of principles, is to hold the company accountable for answering one question: “Do I want to live in the kind of world that the technology we’re building would enable?”. Alex Karp faced a dilemma last year, when employees of the data-mining company Palantir confronted the chief executive with their concerns over a partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to three people familiar with the incident. The company was involved in an effort called “Operation Fallen Hero,” which hunted down members of the Los Zetas drug trafficking ring believed to have murdered an ICE special agent. Founded in the patriotic fervor that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with $2 million in seed money from a CIA incubator, Palantir has always promoted a mission to defend American interests.

Several Thiel associates have worked in the administration, including on the transition teams at the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce. In his first interview after ICE said this week it was extending a contract with Palantir through 2022, Karp seemed sympathetic to President Donald Trump’s stance on border issues. “It works with all of these government agencies that are intent on tracking communities that are already oppressed and already marginalized.”.

In its S-1 filing, the company wrote that criticisms from "political and social activists" as well as "unfavorable coverage in the media" could pose risks to its business, but added that "being perceived as yielding" to activists could hurt its ability to win government contracts. The operation led to 782 arrests for criminal violations and 634 “noncriminal immigration arrests,” according to an ICE official’s testimony. Mississippi immigration raids expose shortcoming in ICE procedures for dealing with children. Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. I have asked myself, if I were younger at college: ‘Would I be protesting me?'".

Karp is a left-of-center, Hillary Clinton-supporting CEO who just so happens to have a contract to aid Trump’s border police. “We sued the U.S. government twice.

A few, she said, seemed genuinely concerned. If Karp disagreed with Thiel on Trump’s merits as a presidential candidate, the pair have been in agreement on Google’s decision to withdraw from Project Maven, which involved analyzing footage from military drones, and to decline to bid on a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Defense Department, in the face of employee protests. He gained notoriety for bankrolling a successful lawsuit against the news site Gawker, leading to its bankruptcy in 2016.

During preparations for an ICE raid of 7-Eleven stores across the country last year, an ICE supervisor instructed agents to use Palantir’s FALCON mobile app “to share info with the command center about the subjects encountered in the stores as well as team locations,” according to emails published by WNYC last month. Palantir CEO Alex Karp said he stands by his company's controversial work for the U.S. government, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“You know why we have these contracts?

Karp refused to budge.

Palantir has a contract with the division of ICE called Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI.

CALISTOGA, Calif. (KRON) - Firefighters have been working around the clock taking advantage of the weather setting lines ahead of high winds in the forecast.

© 1998 - 2020 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. | All Rights Reserved. However, this month, authorities confirmed that the raids in Mississippi were carried out by HSI, the division that uses Palantir.

Copyright 2020 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. It won the court case in 2016, under the Obama administration, and won the contract this past March, amid a blitz of lobbying and relationship-building with the Trump administration. At a Trump Tower summit for tech CEOs on the eve of Trump’s presidency, Karp was invited to represent Palantir. Account active Their focus was on the surrounding hills in Calistoga. The ICM system lets agents access digital profiles of people suspected of violating immigration laws and organize records about them in one place, according to DHS documents. But with a direct listing around the corner, the famously secretive company is in for a lot more scrutiny. So yeah, Palantir’s technology is being used to kill people. “Silicon Valley is telling the average American ‘I will not support your defense needs,'” Karp told an interviewer in January, a quote the company repeated in a recent ad on Twitter. Incomplete reporting is inevitable for a company that’s largely shrouded the nature of its business from the public eye. Conversely, being perceived as yielding to activism targeted at certain customers could damage our relationships with certain customers, including governments and government agencies with which we do business, whose views may or may not be aligned with those of political and social activists.”. Palantir began working with the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees ICE, in 2011.

“Is that something we want to outsource to a small number of platforms in a very small part of the world, with people who are from a very narrow sliver of society? Everyone wants to prevent human trafficking. Palantir’s business has flourished since Trump took office, with revenue from U.S. government contracts under his first two-and-a-half years in office already surpassing its total under President Barack Obama’s entire second term.