New tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, with more information about how their employees use Palantir. Organizations can set up “behavioral” alerts, such as filtering data sets, and searching session logs for individual users. It also allows organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information.
Palantir declined to comment.
Palantir regularly holds hackathon weeks, challenging engineers from across the company to experiment and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir’s work with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, which has come under fire from both outside critics and insiders who fear the company’s tools are enabling the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
“This effort embodies the culture of Palantir where I have chosen to work,” Ted Mabry, Palantir’s chief business officer, wrote in an email to employees in early May. “You have the choice to lash out at sarcastic emojis in stagnant channels, to distrust your peers, and to choose to believe that narratively motivated outsiders who lie about Palantir’s work are more honest than the people who show up to do this work every day. Or you can have the courage to engage and innovate.”
Bringing together employees from across Palantir, this year’s Hack Week focused on building new tools to provide additional oversight of user behavior on platforms like Foundry, the company’s data integration and analysis tool.
Palantir’s work with ICE has grown significantly over the past year. Last year, WIRED reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid the company $30 million to build a product called “ImmigrationOS” that would provide “near-real-time visibility” into self-deportations out of the United States. The company has also been reported to have built a separate tool called “Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting for Enforcement” (ELITE) that creates maps of individuals who have been targeted for deportation.
Some of the new tools created during hack week have already been deployed, and others are scheduled to roll out later this year, according to an email reviewed by WIRED. (One team leader wrote: “These tools expand the usability of audit logs and checkpoints in a tangible way, not just on… [Palantir’s DHS contract]but anywhere the foundry works in highly sensitive environments.”)
“This breakout week showed that Palantir can shift internal attention toward business [on the DHS contract] “To additional platform-level safeguards,” the team lead wrote in the May email. “Instead of walking away from the difficult work, commercial FDEs have [forward deployed engineers] Across the company he wanted to jump into the hack.
Palantir’s involvement with ICE faced harsh internal backlash earlier this year after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Internal Slack conversations reviewed by WIRED showed employees questioning work ethics and demanding more transparency in it.
“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” one worker wrote at the time. “I’ve read stories of people being arrested who were seeking asylum without an order to leave the country, had no criminal record, and were constantly in contact with the authorities. There’s literally no reason to be arrested. Surely we’re not helping to do that?”
