There’s a sad story circulating about Palantir trying to weasel its way into German government through far-right channels.
Though “Hessendata,” adapted from the Gotham program developed by the US company Palantir, is not yet in use in Hamburg, it is already being used extensively by the Hesse police since 2017.
Hesse police are perhaps known best for being implicated in far-right political extremism.
Complaints about racial profiling — and far-right sympathies among officers — have plagued the German police, especially in Hesse.
Can we just say Nazis?
Hesse was trying to bring in Palantir while spreading hate.
Most of the suspects had sent messages in far-right chat groups from 2016 and 2017…. Seventeen Hesse officers were suspected of spreading hatred-inciting texts and symbols of former Nazi organizations – outlawed under post-war German law, said prosecutors. The three others, supervising officers, were further accused of obstructing justice while participating in chats but failing to stop the exchanges that continued until 2019. Aged between 29 and 54, all but one officer had been on active duty.
Oh. Not good.
The news reads like Nazi sympathizers in Germany were the ideal champion and target buyer for Palantir.
Why?
The above problems allegedly “ended” in 2019, right where the 2020 Hesse police scandals began.
Unidentified police officers in Hesse accessed the contact details of several politicians and prominent immigrants from official records and shared them with the neo-Nazi group, according to local reports.
Instead of getting better, the problems got worse and were directly related to information “access” (surveillance used in violations of privacy). Police were being setup to use Palantir for political corruption.
Which of course gets to the point: why doesn’t Palantir’s Peter Thiel ever condemn Nazism, especially given his parents fled to South Africa and America to avoid accountability for their offenses in Germany?
Thiel is no ordinary American or European. His father, Klaus, was born in Germany in 1938, which means Thiel’s grandparents were German adults during World War II.
Palantir technology doesn’t work, and becomes a tool of power abuse instead, but that’s just where the troubles begin.
It’s a Trojan horse that promises capabilities it doesn’t have, and by the time officials figure out they’ve been misled (e.g. Hitler’s rise) they’re stuck in the worst possible setup and can’t get out — expensive, highly political and totally proprietary data platform under the thumb of coin-operated politicians.
Hesse historically has been seen as a criminal justice embarrassment to Germany and even the EU.
The German state of Hesse has voted to finally scrap the death penalty from its constitution, amending a 69-year-old legal anomaly which allowed it. The western state is the last in Germany to amend its local legal code, after the national constitution abolished capital punishment in 1949. […] Capital punishment is banned in all EU countries, so this lingering quirk was seen as an embarrassment to Germany, an outspoken opponent of the practice.
Hesse police ignored a federal abolishment rule of 1949. Nudge nudge, wink, know what that means?
The Hesse police being used to push Palantir is yet another disappointment for the region, perhaps even designed to secretly help American extremists spread “death by AI” software to places that abolished fascism and its capitol punishment.
“When you saw their big growth, it was helped by the contracts they signed under the Trump administration,” Radke said. […] Thiel, who made his initial fortune co-founding PayPal [to offer the far-right an online money laundering service], is focusing squarely on getting Ohio’s Vance and Arizona’s Masters elected to the US Senate. Both Vance and Masters are former Thiel employees and raised money by offering dinners with Thiel.
Former Palantir employees are being funded by Palantir to get “elected” and run the government.
Nothing screams corruption, or that the software doesn’t work, like a fascist coup being their definition of “installed”.
Vance won. Masters lost.
Germany should thus treat the far-right sales tactics and extreme political leanings of Palantir as an opportunity to expose any direct ties from it to Nazism. I mean has anyone used Palantir on Thiel himself to show why his family went on the run from German authorities after 1949 but not during the Holocaust? I’m just asking questions.