In an exchange this week on “All-In Podcast,” Alex Karp was on the defensive. The Palantir CEO used the appearance to downplay and deny the notion that his company would engage in rights-violating in surveillance work.
“We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties, which is by the way the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually buy our product,” Karp said.
What he didn’t mention was the fact that a tranche of classified documents revealed by Edward Snowden and The Intercept in 2017 showed how Palantir software helped the National Security Agency and its allies spy on the entire planet.
Palantir has attracted increased scrutiny as the pace of its business with the federal government has surged during the second Trump administration. In May, the New York Times reported Palantir would play a central role in a White House plan to boost data sharing between federal agencies, “raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”
Karp immediately rejected that report in a June interview on CNBC as “ridiculous shit,” adding that “if you wanted to use the deep state to unlawfully surveil people, the last platform on the world you would pick is Palantir.”
Karp made the same argument in this week’s podcast appearance, after “All-In” co-host David Sacks — the Trump administration AI and cryptocurrency czar — pressed him on matters of privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties. “One of the criticisms or concerns that I hear on the right or from civil libertarians is that Palantir has a large-scale data collection program on American citizens,” Sacks said.
Karp replied by alleging that he had been approached by a Democratic presidential administration and asked to build a database of Muslims. “We’ve never done anything like this. I’ve never done anything like this,” Karp said, arguing that safeguards built into Palantir would make it undesirable for signals intelligence. That’s when he said the company’s refusal to abuse civil liberties is “the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to actually buy our product.”
Karp later stated: “To your questions, no, we are not surveilling,” taking a beat before adding, “uh, U.S. citizens.”
In 2017, The Intercept published documents originally provided by Snowden, a whistleblower and former NSA contractor, demonstrating how Palantir software was used in conjunction with a signals intelligence tool codenamed XKEYSCORE, one of the most explosive revelations from the NSA whistleblower’s 2013 disclosures.
XKEYSCORE provided the NSA and its foreign partners with a means of easily searching through immense troves of data and metadata covertly siphoned across the entire global internet, from emails and Facebook messages to webcam footage and web browsing. A 2008 NSA presentation describes how XKEYSCORE could be used to detect “Someone whose language is out of place for the region they are in,” “Someone who is using encryption,” or “Someone searching the web for suspicious stuff.”
