Palantir and the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC)
Information Certainty: Documented
Deployment Purpose: Surveillance
| Summary |
|---|
| Motherboard uncovered documents revealing Palantir's extensive influence in California. From January 2012 to March 2017, about 300 cities, with a total population of 7.9 million, accessed Palantir's Gotham service through the NCRIC, operated by the Department of Homeland Security. NCRIC combines resources from 14 counties in Northern California. Palantir's Gotham and Foundry services are utilized, enabling police departments to request data covertly. While NCRIC plans to switch to SAS, Palantir's spokesperson stated that the license permits indefinite use. NCRIC employs Palantir for intelligence management in counterterrorism, drug trafficking, and other criminal investigations. Although Palantir doesn't offer facial recognition, its data can be integrated with such technology, expanding surveillance capabilities extensively. |
Products and Institutions:
Status and Events:
| Status | Ongoing |
|---|---|
| Events | Start (2 January 2012, Documented, ?, No description) |
| Start Date | |
| End Date |
Users:
| Involved Entities | |
|---|---|
| Managed by | Palantir Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) |
| Used by | Palantir Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) |
Location:
| City | San Francisco (CA) |
|---|---|
| Country ⠉ | USA |
Description[ ]
Motherboard obtained documents via public record requests which reveal that the scope of Palantir’s influence in California is significantly larger than previously documented. Payment records indicate that between January 2012 and March 2017, about three hundred cities, collectively home to about 7.9 million people, had access to Palantir’s Gotham service through the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which is run through the Department of Homeland Security. The NCRIC is a regional law enforcement facility that combines the resources of 14 California counties: Del Norte county, Mendocino county, Sonoma county, Lake county, Napa county, Marin county, San Francisco county, San Mateo county, Santa Cruz county, Monterey county, San Benito county, Santa Clara county, Alameda county, and Contra Costa county. Gotham is one of Palantir’s two services, and the other service is Palantir Foundry. These 300 police departments could request data from Palantir, and an NCRIC agent would retrieve this data and provide it to local police. Per this arrangement, none of these departments have to disclose the fact that they have access to Palantir 1
The NCRIC still uses Palantir, according to a phone call with a NCRIC spokesperson. However, the organization’s contract with Palantir expires this year, at which point it will replace Palantir with SAS, a different data analytics company. In an email to Motherboard, a Palantir spokesperson said that the NCRIC has a license to continue to use Palantir’s software indefinitely. This means that even after a Palantir contract period expires, the benefactor can continue to use Palantir forever. The NCRIC investigates "terrorist operations, major drug trafficking organizations and other major criminal activities," according to its website. A NCRIC spokesperson said in a phone call that the organization, which employs about 80 people, uses Palantir for its intelligence management system, which is a “core” part of every NCRIC investigation 1
Palantir does not offer facial recognition software. However, facial recognition technology from another company can be combined with data mined using Palantir. The result is a surveillance net that’s ubiquitous in scale 1
References
- a b c d "300 Californian Cities Secretly Have Access to Palantir". (2019) <https://www.vice.com/en/article/neapqg/300-californian-cities-secretly-have-access-to-palantir> Accessed: 2022-06-27