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.”
Later in 2017, BuzzFeed News reported 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 data queried through XKEYSCORE could be imported straight into Palantir software for further analysis. One document mentions use of Palantir tools in “Mastering The Internet,” a joint NSA/GCHQ mass surveillance initiative that included pulling data directly from the global fiber optic cable network 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 software 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 course of nearly three years.”
Karp’s carefully worded clarification that Palantir doesn’t participate in the surveillance of Americans specifically would have been difficult 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 data 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 public takes the NSA at its word that it does not deliberately collect and process information on Americans through tools like XKEYSCORE, it claims the legal authority under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to subsequently share such data 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 security leave large gaps through which the NSA and its partner agencies can effectively bypass legal protections against spying on Americans and the 4th Amendment’s guarantee against warrantless searches.
A 2014 report 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 report notes “Webcam information was fed into NSA’s XKeyscore search tool.”
In 2021, the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded a five-year investigation into XKEYSCORE. In declassified remarks reported by the Washington Post, Travis LeBlanc, a board member who took part in the inquiry, said the NSA’s analysis justifying XKEYSCORE’s legality “lacks any consideration of recent relevant Fourth Amendment case law on electronic surveillance that one would expect to be considered.”
“The former Board majority failed to ask critical questions like how much the program costs financially to operate, how many U.S. persons have been impacted by KEYSCORE,” his statement 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 asked by The Intercept about the discrepancy between its CEO’s public remarks and its documented history helping spy agencies at home and abroad use what the NSA once described as its “widest reaching” tool.
