Alex Karp Insists Palantir Doesn’t Spy on Americans. Here’s What He’s Not Saying.

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 hardware to use to abuse civil liberties which is by the way the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to indeed buy our product Karp stated What he didn t mention was the fact that a tranche of classified documents revealed by Edward Snowden and The Intercept in displayed how Palantir utility helped the National Safeguard Agency and its allies spy on the entire planet Palantir has attracted increased scrutiny as the pace of its business with the federal ruling body has surged during the second Trump administration In May the New York Times communicated Palantir would play a central role in a White House plan to boost statistics 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 directly rejected that summary in a June interview on CNBC as ridiculous shit adding that if you sought 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 facts collection plan on American citizens Sacks mentioned Karp replied by alleging that he had been approached by a Democratic presidential administration and appealed to build a database of Muslims We ve never done anything like this I ve never done anything like this Karp revealed arguing that safeguards built into Palantir would make it undesirable for signals intelligence That s when he announced the company s refusal to abuse civil liberties is the reason why we could never get the NSA or the FBI to in fact buy our product Karp later stated To your questions no we are not surveilling taking a beat before adding uh U S citizens Related How Peter Thiel s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World In The Intercept published documents originally provided by Snowden a whistleblower and former NSA contractor demonstrating how Palantir system was used in conjunction with a signals intelligence tool codenamed XKEYSCORE one of the the bulk explosive revelations from the NSA whistleblower s disclosures XKEYSCORE provided the NSA and its foreign partners with a means of easily searching through immense troves of details and metadata covertly siphoned across the entire global internet from emails and Facebook messages to webcam footage and web browsing A 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 Later in BuzzFeed News stated Palantir s working relationship with the NSA had ceased two years prior citing an internal presentation delivered by Karp Palantir did not provide comment for either The Intercept s or BuzzFeed News reporting on its NSA work The Snowden documents describe how intelligence facts queried through XKEYSCORE could be imported straight into Palantir application for further analysis One document mentions use of Palantir tools in Mastering The Internet a joint NSA GCHQ mass surveillance initiative that included pulling details directly from the global fiber optic cable system that underpins the internet References inside HTML files from the NSA s Intellipedia an in-house reference index included multiple nods to the company such as Palantir Classification Helper Target Knowledge Base to Palantir PXML and PalantirAuthService And although Karp scoffed at the idea that Palantir application would be suitable for deep state usage a British intelligence document note also published by The Intercept quotes GCHQ saying the company s tools were developed through an iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the syllabus of nearly three years Karp s conscientiously worded clarification that Palantir doesn t participate in the surveillance of Americans specifically would have been challenging if not impossible for the company to establish with any certainty From the moment of its disclosure XKEYSCORE presented immense privacy and civil liberties threats both to Americans and noncitizens alike But in the United States much of the debate centered around the question of how much evidence on U S citizens is ingested intentionally or otherwise by the NSA s globe-spanning surveillance capabilities Even without the NSA directly targeting Americans their online speech and other activity is swept up during the the agency s efforts to spy on foreigners say if a U S citizen were to email a noncitizen who is later targeted by the agency Even if the community takes the NSA at its word that it does not deliberately collect and process information on Americans through tools like XKEYSCORE it declares the legal authority under Section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to subsequently share such information it incidentally collects with other U S agencies including the FBI The legality of such collection remains contested Legal loopholes created in the name of counterterrorism and national precaution leave large gaps through which the NSA and its partner agencies can effectively circumvent legal protections against spying on Americans and the th Amendment s guarantee against warrantless searches A document by The Guardian on the collection of webcam footage explained that GCHQ the U K s equivalent of the NSA does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant The analysis notes Webcam information was fed into NSA s XKeyscore search tool In the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded a five-year study into XKEYSCORE In declassified remarks disclosed by the Washington Post Travis LeBlanc a board member who took part in the inquiry stated the NSA s analysis justifying XKEYSCORE s legality lacks any consideration of latest relevant Fourth Amendment episode law on electronic surveillance that one would expect to be considered The former Board majority failed to ask critical questions like how much the plan costs financially to operate how multiple U S persons have been impacted by KEYSCORE his comment continued While inadvertently or incidentally intercepted communications of U S persons is a casualty of modern signals intelligence the mere inadvertent or incidental collection of those communications does not strip affected U S persons of their constitutional or other legal rights Palantir did not respond when questioned by The Intercept about the discrepancy between its CEO s residents remarks and its documented history helping spy agencies at home and abroad use what the NSA once described as its widest reaching tool The post Alex Karp Insists Palantir Doesn t Spy on Americans Here s What He s Not Saying appeared first on The Intercept