Palantir, the Peter Thiel-backed company that sold data to ICE and NYPD, has a CEO who is a 'self-described socialist'

pulse

November 16, 2018 5:17 AM

Palantir is known for selling data to spy agencies and ICE, but its CEO portrays himself as a socialist rather than a cut-throat neoliberal, according to new report.

Palantir, the big data company that has sold information and software to the likes of ICE and the NYPD, has a reputation that some might compare to LexCorp, but a new profile from The Wall Street Journal describes CEO Alex Karp as "a self-described socialist."

That political identification is in stark contradiction to the company's activities.

Not everyone will like it

Karp admitted to The Wall Street Journal that his family has expressed their displeasure with Palantir's work and acknowledged that Trump-era politics has muddied Palantir's saleability. Palantir has been reported to have contracts managing and selling big data to the likes of the NSA, FBI, CIA, ICE, and numerous military agencies.

In New Orleans, Palantir was secretly being used for predictive policing, according to The Verge. Predictive policing programs have previously been shown to increase

the deportation force to store and search troves of data on targeted individuals and manage their profiles.

When employees reportedly "begged" to end the ICE deal, Karp claimed that data was being used for drug enforcement, not family separation, a highly unpopular Trump administration policy that separated undocumented parents from their children.

Palantir also contracted with the NSA to aggregate, organize, and index data from

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