OAKLAND—Organizers, nurses and community members gathered here Thursday night for a forum on Palantir, the surveillance giant co-founded by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Joe Lonsdale.
The event was put on by a coalition that included Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the California Nurses Association and the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America, among others. With an overarching theme of Palantir’s expansion into unexpected sectors, representatives from various parts of the coalition detailed the different campaigns against the corporate behemoth.
Distinct from its competitors, Palantir has spread into surprising sectors of American business like healthcare and utility services. Two central concerns of the coalition are the existing Palantir contracts with California utility giants like PG&E and Southern California Edison and the use of Palantir-developed staffing software used in hospitals.
The wide-ranging panel opened with some background on the company, including its long-standing connections to American intelligence— Palantir received early capital investment from the CIA-linked venture capital firm In-Q-Tel—and its co-founder’s ideology. Thiel spent his college years at Stanford fighting against affirmative action, and he has allegedly expressed support for apartheid South Africa.
Crystal Zermeño, coordinator with the advocacy group California Common Good, created a useful lattice of the corporate history which allowed other speakers to analyze how Palantir related more directly to their respective campaigns.
She appropriately contextualized Palantir as a “political project” rather than just another surveillance giant.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work, particularly around the PG&E and Palantir campaign,” Zermeño told 48hills after the presentation. “Better understanding the footprint Palantir has within PG&E, the role its data is playing and what it has access to, how it’s sort of aggregating, particularly ratepayer data …”
Jonathan Westin, executive director of the Climate Organizing Hub in New York City joined on Zoom to detail the successes of a NYC-based campaign to purge Palantir from healthcare and hospitals in the city. He noted how sustained pressure on Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other council members helped to extricate Palantir from managing that city’s health data.
Pomai Neil, a registered nurse with CNA, outlined Palantir’s relationship to healthcare workers. HCA Timpani and HCA Inspire, two staffing apps used at hospitals in the Bay Area, were developed in part by Palantir Technologies. Neil noted that these products “favor budgets over patient safety” and explained a divestment strategy that’s been successful thus far.
“As registered nurses, we believe that … everyone has the right to health care and no one should be afraid to seek care because of the threat of ICE. We also have strenuous concerns about this data being used to enable and fuel genocide in Gaza,” Neil said after the event. “There are so many insidious layers to Palantir. Our goal is to call them out and make sure that our membership knows that they do not belong in our hospitals and they do not belong in our communities.”
Eric Lerner, campaign director on climate and corporate accountability at ACCE, delivered a detailed report on the Golden State’s utility giants use of the Palantir software Foundry. Both PG&E and SoCal Edison use the software for customer billing, which brings up serious data-sharing concerns, especially given Foundry’s use by ICE. Lerner laid out an ACCE campaign demanding that the utility companies terminate the Palantir contracts and sign a statement highlighting the relationship between the software they use and ICE.
“PG&E is partnered with Palantir, which is very concerning because of the role Palantir is playing with ICE, providing software,” Lerner told 48hills. “ACCE has thousands and thousands of members that are immigrants that are really terrified about the idea that PG&E has partnered with a company like that, and very concerned about data breaches. Because Palantir knows, from their work with PG&E, when people are home, how much energy they’re using and all sorts of details that, if DHS wanted that information, we believe that they could access that.”
Kenny Morris, campaign strategist with American Friends Service Committee, highlighted the harrowing story of a mother arrested by ICE at her work, separated for months from her young children and eventually deported. He pointed out that this case was one of many made possible by Palantir’s immigrant surveillance technology, Falcon. Morris touched on a primary selling point among Palantir and other surveillance companies like Flock, Axon or Motorola: data integration. With AI integration, companies can process and analyze exponentially more data than ever before.
“What Palantir does is bring together all that data,” Morris said.
Despite the seemingly disparate campaigns, concerns over Palantir’s relationship with ICE were critical points in all the presentations. These companies’ relationships with Palantir are evidence of an unsurprising but nonetheless daunting trend in American politics and business: All ethical concerns are sublimated by a drive for ever-increasing profits.
“I think the bigger fight that connects all of this is just how this relates to these corporations that uphold the current administration. These are enablers,” Grace Martinez, deputy director of ACCE, said. “Peter Thiel is very close to Trump so is Alex Karp. A lot of this is really protecting our communities and making sure that we’re fighting for democracy, but we know that the system that we have is not the system that we’re going to need.”
