We’d all love answers about what Palantir’s doing with our data

But is a Democrat letter going to be the thing that gets them for us?

As Palantir’s CEO publicly jokes about sending protesters to North Korea and targeting his enemies with drone strikes (um, what?), we can’t say it sits GREAT with us that the government has recently been upping its contracts with Palantir, a company known for compiling massive amounts of data on Americans.

Democrat lawmakers don’t seem to love this development either. Last week, a group of ten of them sent a letter to the company demanding answers about its $100 million+ federal government contract, and reports that its employees are actively helping the Trump administration compile a “mega-database” of American taxpayer information. One searchable, sharable way to find out everything about anyone who’s ever paid taxes, you say? Fun! (For the record, Palantir has denied it.)

We agree with the letter’s authors—among which include Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—that this genre of collecting of people’s data is a “surveillance nightmare” (or, in layman’s terms, absolutely terrifying!!!) and we appreciate the effort to get some clarity on what on earth is going on here.

But we wonder, as we have wondered before, if government regulation is going to be the vehicle that’s best able to hold Palantir (and the government itself here) accountable. When it comes to secretive tech companies like this one, so often it’s the insiders who are providing the public with the relevant, most up-to-date, information. That info about the immigrant database? Internal leak. And the warning recently that, based on what he’s seen, this country is on the brink of allowing Palantir’s technologies to “run our government, to run our battlefields, and our personal lives”? Yes, a former Palantir employee.

Palantir might not have been on everyone’s doomscape until recently, but actually insiders have been shedding light on Palantir’s disturbing activities for years. Think back to 2017, when Edward Snowden gained international notoriety for exposing Palantir’s involvement in sweeping NSA surveillance programs used all over the world. Or in 2018, when a whistleblower informed the American public that the company had collaborated with Cambridge Analytica on harvesting a huge cache of Facebook data. All Palantir.

The House Judiciary Committee has now opened an investigation into Palantir’s use of AI-driven content moderation. We’re all for government investigations. But do we think they will yield official answers before, say, July 4, when the government is planning to launch a website meant to “accelerate government innovation with AI”? Probabbbbly not.

Not that we’re letting the government off the hook here. If we’re going to have the necessary transparency in any meaningful way it’s going to have to be an all-hands-on-deck situation. Government officials need to be able to probe the company’s actions to the full extent of their abilities—and then they need to take action to stop them and make sure they face suitable consequences when things are going wrong.

But to do this, insiders are going to continue to have an important role. So let’s make it safe for them to keep the public informed—so that we can, in good conscience, make the following plea: If you’ve seen something absolutely insane happening with relation to Palantir’s government data operations, please tell us! Tell someone! Because co-founder Peter Thiel has said explicitly that he’s got no qualms skirting democracy in order to execute his vision:

“I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics,” he once said, as unearthed by A More Perfect Union. “The basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things… but maybe you could actually [act] unilaterally, without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you, through technological means.”

We are definitely a no on letting Thiel—and Palantir—unilaterally run our government or lives. So let’s not let them.