In April this year, 404 Media revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had paid the company millions of dollars to modify the ICE database to enable it to “complete target analysis of known populations” and spruce up the targeting of that tool and enforcement priorities. The database gives ICM agents the means to sort individuals using hundreds of specific categories covering physical attributes, administrative background and mobility. ICE Director Todd Lyons has fantasies of running the agency’s crude, clumsy deportation policy “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings” in an effort to treat the matter “like a business”.
This charming dystopian thought is a good pairing with the sinister propaganda Palantir enjoys promoting, including a campaign on college campuses that echoes the stirrings of a Nuremberg rally cry: “Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose. Too few in Silicon Valley have asked what ought to be built – and why.” Palantir, to that end, was built to conquer such flabby complacency. “On the factory floor, in the operating room, across the battlefield – we build to dominate.”