The Threat of Palantir Technologies: Counterinsurgency, Racialization, and Predictive Policing

By Zane Maddux

Research Fellow; The Clay-Gilmore Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Counterinsurgency

“Hesitance is preparatory to a freedom from restriction. To be categorized—to become a data set, a line item, a variable—is to be restricted. So we hesitate so that we can think beyond that restriction, as restriction requires negation. To hesitate is to begin to resist one’s negation. So let us now take a break, fully aware of the reality that the world we now inhabit is certain and has been certain of our negation.”^[1] — Joshua Meyers

Palantir & The Racialization of Surveillance

Palantir in The Lord of the Rings is a mystical, all-seeing crystal used by powerful figures to see events in faraway places. This fantasy is becoming a reality through Palantir Technologies, founded with CIA funding in 2003. ^[2] Palantir is a software data analytics company supporting governments in their domestic and military applications of technologizing surveillance and control. Palantir technology acts as a developing infrastructure for counterinsurgency (COIN) and strengthens efforts of racialized social control. Through the virtuous moral justification of its purpose of crime and terrorism prevention, as well as ‘survival and security’, militarized technologies of surveillance and control are rapidly expanded and co-opted into the domestic space, functioning as a form of COIN that is racially targeted, repressive of constitutional freedoms, and steadfast on domestic control. Palantir has become a recent controversial topic of discussion. Most notably because of the political and constitutional rights that it threatens. The Guardian wrote, “They appear to violate first and fourth amendment rights: first, by establishing vast and invisible surveillance networks that limit the things people feel comfortable sharing in public, including whom they meet or where they travel; and second, by enabling warrantless searchesand seizures of people’s data without their knowledge or consent. They are rapidly depriving some of the most vulnerable populations in the world – political dissidents, migrants, or residents of Gaza of their human rights.”^[3]

Palantir as COIN Infrastructure

As David Kilcullen, a military strategist and COIN expert, put it, “Counterinsurgency is, simply, whatever governments do to defeat rebellions.”^[4] When understanding COIN within the context of Palantir, it’s essential to acknowledge how governments surveil those who are perceived to be or become political threats. In this sense, Palantir acts as infrastructure for COIN in how it provides the necessary and sufficient technologies to employ this tactical preemption. “Since 2025, thecompany’s role in the U.S. domestic surveillance has expanded dramatically, and with it, public concern.”^[5] Specifically, “Palantir’s software now underpins immigration enforcement operations, predictive policing initiatives, and inter-agency intelligence-sharing systems.”^[6] One article specifically highlights political activists as being at threat of amplified surveillance, saying “Certain communities are disproportionately affected by expanded surveillance; immigrants and political activists may be flagged by data-driven systems and long-standing safeguards such as privacy rights and judicial oversight risk being diminished by rapid technological deployment.”⁷ It is made clear that Palantir technology advances COIN in how those who are deemed political and social threats are becoming increasingly at risk of being surveilled. What was once a tool reserved for military applications is becoming normalized through its prevalence and is being adopted domestically for social and political policing. Palantir-assisted surveillance is at the core of increased and strengthened predictive policing action across America.

The Racial Logics of Technologized Predictive Policing

Palantir provides software for governments to analyze and aggregate data. Not only does this threaten civil liberties by strengthening the government’s surveillance state, but technologized predictive policing based on data is largely racially biased. Black men thus rise to the forefront of this discussion of the threat Palantir poses to civil liberties. It’s no secret that Black men account for a disproportionate amount of police encounters, arrests, and incarceration in both Canada and America.

Black people face disproportionate surveillance, stops, and arrests, which only increase due to Algorithmic predictive policing.^[7] Predictive policing efforts use things like arrest data to inform policing, ultimately creating a cyclical relationship, turning the disproportionately arrested into the disproportionately surveilled. Predictive policing assumes the neutrality of data, and this can, in effect, amplify things like the gross overrepresentation of Black men in prisons. Imagine a predominantly poor Black neighborhood that already faces disproportionate arrests and police encounters; when this data is used to inform predictive police measures, what occurs is simply an increase in encounters and arrests in that area due to its increased surveillance. Then the cycle continues in how the increase in arrests is then used to justify continued or amplified surveillance.

Palantir is already at fault for this, seeing that “In New Orleans, a secretive partnership with the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) generated a list of ‘likely’ offenders based on social ties and arrest records. In Los Angeles, Palantir’s software helped designate so-called “chronic offenders,” disproportionately targeting minority neighborhoods. Critics found that the system amplified racial bias, essentially automating the injustices of past policing.”⁹ Esteemed scholar of race and surveillance, Simone Browne, simply reminds us that “these machines are designed and operated by real people to sort real people. It is through the human aspects of this process of sorting that the digitized, biometric body is brought into view.” Racial bias, so long as it is a factor of life, will inevitably be imbued into technologies of social and political control.

Another concrete example of racialized predictive policing is broken windows policing. Broken windows policing refers to the predictive policing tactic of understanding low-level crime, like vandalism or broken windows, as being precursors to more serious violent crimes. A tactic often presented as a race-neutral approach to criminality.^[8] However, “broad consent to policing and prisons has been legitimized through such circular racial logic. Just as mass incarceration has depended on a selective suturing of racial categories to criminality, so too has broken windows policing conflated the racialized poor with spatialized disorder.”^[9] This broad conflation of the racialized poor with criminality exists as an immense danger that is only amplified through things like Palantir and the technologization of policing and COIN. The intensified surveillance that Palantir provides allows biased tactics like broken windows policing to exist and flourish. Once you establish such a paradigm that broken windows are signs of more serious crimes, it’s then about finding and adopting an adequate toolkit to be able to surveil these neighborhoods that may have broken windows or graffiti. This is where Palantir comes in to provide these tools and make way for these biased and misinformed theories to become actualized. It’s essential to remember that predictive policing remains far from neutral and is shaped by racialized logics and relationships of power.

Black Ontology as a Criminalized Datapoint

Technologies like Palantir that are used to surveil and control racialized people, reproduce necro-being and exemplify Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-warfare thesis. The process of the racialized person becoming a criminalized datapoint to be conceptualized as a threat in need of surveillance and control is dehumanizing. The social designation of criminality or political threat level and one’s subsequent surveillance, becomes a defining feature of one’s social ontology: Functioning as a factor contributing to things like premature incarceration and or death. Race Philosopher Leonard Harris describes this condition as Necro-Being: That which subjects racialized people to living a kind of social death.^[10] This encompasses conditions that dehumanize and prevent authentic existence experienced by targeted populations. Palantir and the threat of the growing racialized surveillance state can be understood through necro-being as a necro-political extension of state-sanctioned racial control by delineating the socially dead and dying through reducing and isolating racialized persons to criminalized objects that necessitate surveillance. Palantir, in this sense, is deeply connected to Clay-Gilmore’s postulation of understanding racism as a form of low-level warfare against Black males who are constructed as threats to social order. He asserts that this idea is best represented through a framework of COIN, which employs tactics of control against racialized male insurgents.^[11] This is shown through how Palantir’s targeting is made political through the targeting of political activists and how its application is consistent with longstanding trends of technologized predictive policin,g with being grossly racially biased and targeted.

In conclusion, Palantir exists as a major threat to racialized and marginalized people not only in America but across the world. Palantir provides the necessary tools that strengthen the most threatening aspects of the surveillance state. Its utility within local and federal efforts of domestic policing poses the threat of racial bias becoming severely imbued into covert and overt state technologies, which govern our everyday lives. Leading to an increase in racialized violence, premature death, and incarceration, and socially ontologizing Black life as that which necessitates surveillance. Such a reality represents the importance of the core inquiry of the Institute: The philosophical endeavour of understanding how emerging technologies of control maintain racial hierarchies that denude autonomy through the transformation of targeted populations into objects of surveillance.

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^[1] Myers, Joshua., Of Black Study. 1st ed. Pluto Press, 2023,15. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv36cj867.

^[2] Akıllı, Erman. 2025. “Palantir’s All-Seeing Eye: Domestic Surveillance and the Price of Security.” SETA (opinion),

June 10, 2025. https://www.setav.org/en/palantirs-all-seeing-eye-domestic-surveillance-and-the-price-of-security

^[3] Juan Sebastian Pinto, “Palantir’s Tools Pose an Invisible Danger We Are Just Beginning to Comprehend,” The Guardian, August 24, 2025, sec. Opinion/AI,

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/24/palantir-artificial-intelligence-civil-rights

^[4] David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2

^[5] Erman.

^[6] Erman. ⁷ Erman.

^[7] NAACP, Artificial Intelligence in Predictive Policing Issue Brief, February 15, 2024,https://naacp.org/resources/artificial-intelligence-predictive-policing-issue-brief ⁹ Erman.

^[8] Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (London and New York: Verso, 2016), 5.

^[9] Camp, 10.

^[10] Leonard Harris, “Necro-Being: An Actuarial Account of Racism,” Res Philosophica 95, no. 2 (April 2018): 273-302

^[11] Clay-Gilmore, Miron J. “Notes from Inside the Killing Machine – On Racism, Non-Being, and (Counter-Insurgency) Warfare.” Philosophy & Global Affairs 6, no. 1 (forthcoming, 2026) 10.