Palantir, explained - and sign our petition calling for an urgent debate in parliament!

Welcome to the first edition of The Citizens Understand.

Each week, we’ll cut through noisy tech coverage to break down one complex issue shaping technology and politics, and a curated selection of further reading to help you dig deeper.

Most importantly, we’ll show you how you can respond. Because understanding is only part of the story. This newsletter is about turning information into action - and finding ways to push back, even when Big Tech feels too big to take on.

This week, we’re starting with Palantir: a powerful US surveillance company now deeply embedded in UK defence, borders and public services.

Why a secretive US surveillance company is now embedded in Britain’s military and public services

Named after the all-seeing stone in Lord of the Rings, Palantir Technologies has become one of the most notorious technology companies of the last two decades and one of the most powerful.

Its systems are now deeply embedded in US immigration enforcement, military operations abroad, and, increasingly, the British state.

Now, without public debate or competitive tender, the UK government has handed one of the most sensitive parts of our national infrastructure, the Ministry of Defence, to a company whose political alliances are deeply entangled with the Trump administration.

Let’s break down how we got here 👇

👁️ What is Palantir?

Palantir was founded in 2003 and co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a libertarian tech magnate, major Republican donor and long-time ally of Donald Trump.

Palantir’s UK operations are led by Louis Mosley. Mosley is the grandson of Oswald Mosley, who led the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s.

The company builds data-mining platforms capable of ingesting vast amounts of information, including GPS data, phone records, social media activity and biometric data.

Palantir has two main products:

• Foundry, used by corporations and public bodies to manage large-scale operations
• Gotham, marketed as an “operating system for global decision-making”, designed primarily for governments, police forces and militaries

Gotham’s function is deceptively simple: it takes fragmented datasets held across multiple agencies and fuses them into a single, searchable intelligence web.

That efficiency is precisely the appeal. It is also the danger.

Beyond storing data, Gotham connects information in ways that allow authorities to move beyond record-keeping and into continuous profiling - building detailed personal profiles, mapping social networks and tracking peoples’ movements.

⚔️ Why are we talking about Palantir now?

Because the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has just signed its largest ever defence data contract - a £240 million “strategic partnership” - with Palantir.

It was announced during Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK.

Under the deal, Palantir will provide “data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision-making” across the British armed forces. The contract is three times larger than the previous MoD agreement signed in 2022, and cements Palantir’s role at the heart of UK military modernisation.

Despite Palantir’s deep embedding across government systems, there has been little meaningful public scrutiny of its role and risks.

✊ Sign our petition calling for a full Parliamentary debate on Palantir’s use in UK services.

⛓️ Immigration, enforcement and the “kill chain”

Palantir’s rise is inseparable from Donald Trump’s return to power.

Since Trump re-entered the White House, Palantir’s US government business has surged. In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to share data on Americans. Palantir was selected to help make that possible.

One of the biggest beneficiaries has been U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency responsible for immigration enforcement, detention and deportation inside the United States.

Over the past decade, ICE has spent more than $200 million on Palantir contracts, now using tools to map neighbourhoods, generate profiles on individuals and prioritise potential deportation targets.

The risks of this model were described starkly in our reporting last year, where we interviewed a former Palantir employee Juan Sebastián Pinto who explained that the company’s technology forms part of what he called an AI-assisted “kill chain”: systems designed to pull together data from across government and turn into operational decisions.

Those decisions translate into immigration raids: coordinated enforcement operations in which officers are dispatched to specific homes or neighbourhoods to detain people for deportation.

These raids use the firm’s app, ELITE, to locate and prioritise people for deportation, using addresses from medical records to do it.

Over in the UK, Palantir has been awarded a £330 million, seven-year contract to build the NHS Federated Data Platform, consolidating patient data from up to 240 trusts.

This raises an unsettling question: what happens when a company whose tools are used to mine health data for immigration enforcement abroad is entrusted with Britain’s most sensitive public dataset at home?

🔍 Surveillance, targeting and Gaza

The same surveillance infrastructure used to track and target people inside the United States has also been deployed in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

In January 2024, the company signed a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s defence ministry, formalising a relationship that stretches back more than a decade.

Since at least 2013, Palantir has worked with Unit 8200, Israel’s elite military intelligence unit responsible for mass surveillance, codebreaking and cyber operations. That infrastructure forms part of the intelligence architecture that has enabled Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

Palantir’s AI systems sit within a wider surveillance ecosystem used to identify and prioritise “targets”. Investigations by +972 Magazine revealed that tools such as Lavender assigned people in Gaza numerical scores estimating their likelihood of being affiliated with armed groups, based on sweeping indicators such as age, location or patterns of communication.

Analysis: The risk is not failure but permanence

Once embedded, systems like Palantir’s are difficult to unwind, reshaping expectations of speed and scale and making it politically costly to step back.

That risk is compounded when the software is proprietary and foreign. Embedding American surveillance infrastructure into Britain’s defence systems means the UK does not fully control the tools it relies on, at a moment when those tools are tied to political actors openly hostile to democratic norms.

When the same technology used in the US to track migrants and profile protesters is embedded in Britain’s defence systems and used to consolidate NHS data, the risk is not failure but permanence, where surveillance becomes normalised and accountability disappears.

🗞️ From the archive

A snapshot of our reporting on Palantir over the years documenting its growing influence across military, security and public institutions.

Revealed: Involvement of Palantir & Faculty in UK Public Sector

How the tentacles of Palantir continue to encircle the NHS

‘The Default Operating System’: Palantir’s £245 Million Expansion into the UK

Inside Palantir: Profits, Power & The Kill Machine

✊ How to fight back

Palantir’s expansion in the UK’s government infrastructure and public services has happened with almost no democratic scrutiny.

👉 Sign our petition calling on Parliament to hold a full public debate on its use, risks and accountability.

See you next time,
Team Citizens

About The Citizens Understand:
In an era where technology is reshaping democracy faster than laws can keep up and power is increasingly exercised through platforms, The Citizens Understand exists to cut through misinformation and make complex systems legible. If there’s something you’d like to understand, email lillian@the-citizens.com.