The Tech Company Everyone Loves to Hate Gets the One Thing Everyone Misses

Palantir Technologies has held immigration enforcement contracts worth over $900 million since 2011, spanning every administration from Obama through Biden to Trump’s second term. The California data analytics firm now finds itself at the center of a viral controversy, pilloried on TikTok and Twitter, while its CEO Alex Karp doubles down on defending Western values and meritocracy in ways that make progressive activists recoil.

The Reality Behind the Rhetoric

Start with the basic facts that keep getting buried under viral outrage clips and protest hashtags. Palantir began building data systems for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Obama in 2011. The company created the Investigative Case Management system, a tool that integrated data from DHS, FBI, and other federal databases to support Homeland Security Investigations. The initial contract was valued at around $17 million. Nobody protested. No tech workers circulated petitions. No TikTokers made viral videos demanding boycotts.

The work continued under Trump. Between 2017 and 2021, Palantir secured multiple contract renewals and expansions, bringing the total value to over $500 million during that period. The company’s Gotham and Foundry platforms became central to how ICE manages investigations, tracks enforcement priorities, and coordinates operations across different agencies. Critics highlight the 2018 family separations at the border, arguing Palantir’s tools enabled that policy. Defenders note that immigration enforcement infrastructure existed long before Trump and that the same tools were used under Obama to target criminal networks and human traffickers.

The Biden administration kept those contracts in place. Between 2021 and 2025, Palantir received another estimated $400 million in ICE-related work. The Washington Technology contract database shows renewals in 2022 and 2024. Biden’s DHS modified enforcement priorities, focusing on national security threats, recent border crossers, and egregious public safety risks. The software stayed the same. The vendor stayed the same. The viral outrage mostly stayed quiet.

Then Trump returned to office in 2025, announced plans for what he called the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting one million removals per year, and suddenly Palantir became the villain again. Same company. Same contracts. Same CEO. Different news cycle.

The Man Behind the Controversy

Alex Karp does not make this easier. The CEO and co-founder of Palantir goes on stage at conferences and says things that make half the audience uncomfortable and the other half nod along. At the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2025, Karp delivered an interview that generated millions of views on social media, mostly in the form of shocked, incredulous, or mocking reactions.

Karp talked about “selective empathy” for working-class white men. He criticized what he called “Jewish derangement syndrome.” He defended Palantir’s government work as essential to protecting Western civilization. He joked about “mutually pleasuring customers” versus screwing them over. Clips went viral with overlays comparing his animated speaking style to Robin Williams on cocaine. Progressive activists called for boycotts. Defense analysts and investors praised his clarity.

The interview revealed someone who clearly enjoys being proven right after years of ridicule. Karp spent a decade being told that Palantir was overvalued, that its government focus was unethical, that its technology would never scale commercially. The company went public in 2020 at $10 per share. By late 2025, it traded above $70, with a market cap exceeding $150 billion. Major corporations now use Palantir’s AI platform to manage supply chains, optimize production, and integrate disparate data systems. The U.S. Department of Defense relies on Palantir software for battlefield intelligence and logistics. Karp’s satisfaction at this vindication radiates through every interview.

His critics accuse him of arrogance, of dismissing dissent as derangement, of using his Jewish heritage to deflect criticism of Israeli policy. His supporters see someone willing to state obvious truths that polite society refuses to acknowledge. The truth likely sits somewhere in between, but Karp himself shows no interest in finding that middle ground.

What Other Companies Do Without the Noise

Here is where the selective outrage becomes obvious. Palantir attracts protests and boycott campaigns while other companies doing identical or more extensive work for ICE and DHS operate without significant public scrutiny. CoreCivic manages private detention facilities holding tens of thousands of immigrants under contracts worth over $1.4 billion per year. GEO Group operates similar facilities under contracts exceeding $1 billion annually. These companies profit directly from detention, housing people in facilities that civil rights organizations document as having inadequate medical care, poor conditions, and abuse allegations.

G4S Secure Solutions handles immigrant transportation, moving detainees between facilities and to deportation flights, under contracts worth around $500 million per year. Northrop Grumman supplies border surveillance systems including drones and sensor networks worth over $200 million. Deloitte provides IT modernization for ICE and CBP systems at approximately $150 million per year. Amazon Web Services hosts DHS cloud infrastructure. Microsoft sells ICE facial recognition and data tools.

The CEOs of these companies do not give interviews defending Western civilization or talking about elite hypocrisy. They issue bland corporate statements about compliance and values. They avoid controversy. They keep their heads down. They collect their contracts. The result is that they face a fraction of the criticism directed at Palantir, despite often doing work more directly connected to detention conditions that activists decry.

Larry Ellison, CEO and major shareholder of Oracle, is Jewish. Oracle holds over $100 million in ICE contracts. The company faces occasional criticism but nothing like the sustained campaign against Palantir. Some observers suggest that Palantir’s Israeli connections and Jewish leadership make it a target for activists who conflate criticism of immigration enforcement with criticism of Israel. Others argue that Karp’s vocal defense of his work invites more scrutiny than companies that stay quiet.

The pattern suggests that staying out of the spotlight protects companies from accountability more than changing their behavior does. Palantir could keep doing the exact same work, with the exact same clients, and face far less criticism if Karp would simply shut up. He refuses.

The Policy Reality Nobody Wants to Discuss

Every administration since 2009 has run the same immigration enforcement system with minor adjustments to priorities and rhetoric. This fact makes most political commentary on the issue misleading at best and dishonest at worst. When Obama’s ICE deported over three million people between 2009 and 2017, setting a record that Trump did not surpass in his first term, media coverage emphasized the administration’s focus on “felons not families.” The implication was that Obama targeted criminals while Trump targeted everyone.

DHS data tells a different story. Roughly half of Obama’s removals were individuals with no criminal record beyond immigration violations. These included visa overstays, people caught at the border, and those encountered in workplace raids. ICE under Obama operated what officials called a “dual-track” system. One track focused on individuals with criminal convictions, using databases like the Criminal Alien Program to identify people in local jails and state prisons. The other track processed non-criminals through expedited removal, final order cases, and workplace enforcement.

John Morton, who led ICE from 2009 to 2013, testified to Congress multiple times that the agency lacked resources to deport everyone in the country without authorization. His memos created enforcement priorities, ranking convicted criminals above recent border crossers above long-term residents. But those priorities never stopped the regular deportation pipeline for non-criminals. They just meant fewer agents and less funding went to those cases compared to criminal cases.

Trump’s first term actually had the highest share of non-criminal deportations on record as a percentage of total removals. Total deportation numbers dropped compared to Obama, but the proportion of people removed who had no criminal record increased. This happened because Trump’s executive orders eliminated most enforcement priorities, making every undocumented person a potential target while simultaneously overwhelming the system.

Biden tried to reinstate priorities focusing on national security threats, recent arrivals, and egregious public safety risks. His DHS issued memos directing agents to exercise discretion and avoid low-priority cases. Republican state attorneys general sued, arguing the Biden administration was failing to enforce immigration law. Federal courts issued conflicting rulings. ICE continued processing cases already in the pipeline. The infrastructure remained active even as policy guidance changed.

Trump’s 2025 return brought promises of one million deportations per year and the “largest operation in history.” The actual mechanics will look familiar to anyone who watched the previous 16 years. ICE will pour resources into criminal alien cases because those generate positive headlines and face less legal resistance. They will also process expedited removals at the border, final order cases already adjudicated, and workplace encounters. The dual-track system will continue because it has never stopped.

Palantir’s software supports both tracks. The Gotham platform helps ICE agents investigate criminal networks, track gang members, and coordinate with local law enforcement. The Foundry platform integrates data from biometric systems, visa databases, social media monitoring, and financial records to build profiles on enforcement targets. Civil liberties groups argue this creates a surveillance infrastructure that enables mass deportation and family separation. Palantir argues it provides tools that help agents enforce the law as written by Congress, under whatever priorities the current administration sets.

The debate about Palantir is actually a debate about whether the United States should have an immigration enforcement system at all, but almost nobody argues that position directly. Instead, people pretend that Palantir created the problem or that getting rid of Palantir would solve it. Other contractors would fill the gap. ICE would still have databases. Immigration enforcement would continue. The infrastructure predates Palantir and will outlast it.

When Predictions Come True

Karp returns repeatedly in interviews to the fact that almost every criticism of Palantir in its early years turned out to be wrong. Investors said government contracts would never generate enough revenue to justify the company’s valuation. Competitors said commercial customers would never want software built for intelligence agencies. Tech journalists wrote articles predicting the company would collapse or get acquired at a discount.

Palantir went public through a direct listing in September 2020, avoiding the traditional IPO process where banks set the price and underwrite the offering. The stock opened at $10 and traded sideways for over a year, leading to more predictions of failure. By 2022, the company had turned profitable and begun growing its commercial customer base beyond the government contracts that still provided the majority of revenue. Defense spending increased in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. AI became the dominant theme in technology investing. Palantir’s platforms proved capable of integrating large language models and machine learning tools that other enterprise software struggled to handle.

The company reported $2.7 billion in revenue for 2024, with profit margins around 20 percent. Growth in commercial contracts exceeded 30 percent year-over-year. Government contracts remained stable and lucrative, with the Department of Defense expanding use of Palantir’s Maven system for battlefield intelligence. By the end of 2025, Palantir’s market capitalization exceeded $150 billion, making it one of the most valuable enterprise software companies in the world.

Karp takes visible satisfaction in this vindication. He mentions in interviews how many people who called him crazy or unethical now work for competitors trying to copy Palantir’s approach. He jokes about former critics becoming customers. He talks about eating the downside risk when nobody believed in the model and enjoying the upside now that the model has succeeded. This comes across as arrogant to people who dislike him and refreshing to people who appreciate directness.

The emotional core of his recent interviews is not just about business success but about being proven right on bigger questions. Karp argued for years that software would determine the outcome of geopolitical competition with China. Defense analysts and foreign policy experts dismissed this as Silicon Valley hubris. Then Ukraine used real-time data integration to defend against a larger Russian military, and U.S. defense officials began talking openly about software-defined warfare. Karp argued that Western institutions needed to recover a sense of cultural confidence and stop apologizing for success. Political commentators called this reactionary nationalism. Then voters in multiple democracies elected leaders promising exactly that message.

Whether Karp is right about these bigger questions remains contested. What is not contested is that he made specific predictions about technology, government contracts, and business models that contradicted conventional wisdom, and those predictions proved accurate. That track record gives him credibility with people who care about results and makes him insufferable to people who dislike his politics.

The Project Stargate Connection

Palantir’s involvement in Project Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative announced by President Trump in January 2025, illustrates how the company has moved beyond being just a government contractor into a central player in national technology strategy. Stargate aims to build domestic AI supercomputers and data centers to reduce reliance on foreign infrastructure and maintain U.S. technological advantage over China.

The project’s core partners include OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Arm. Palantir is not a founding partner but plays what officials describe as a “pivotal supporting role” through its expertise in AI-driven data integration and analytics. The company’s track record handling sensitive data for the CIA, Department of Defense, and ICE makes it a natural choice for integrating and securing AI workflows within Stargate’s ecosystem.

Critics see this as further evidence of Palantir building a surveillance infrastructure that will be turned on American citizens. The company’s tools already integrate data from government databases, commercial sources, and social media. Adding advanced AI capabilities increases the potential for abuse. Civil liberties organizations warn about facial recognition systems, predictive policing algorithms, and automated decision-making in immigration enforcement.

Palantir emphasizes that it builds audit trails into its software, allowing organizations to track who accessed what data and what decisions were made based on that data. The company argues this makes systems more accountable than the alternative of agencies building their own tools without oversight. Whether this argument holds up depends on whether the organizations using Palantir’s software actually enforce those audit requirements and whether external oversight exists to review the logs.

Project Stargate positions Palantir to benefit from massive government investment in AI infrastructure regardless of who wins future elections. The project has bipartisan support based on concerns about Chinese technology competition. Defense and intelligence agencies need tools to manage the data generated by new AI systems. Palantir is one of the few companies with experience doing that at scale in classified environments.

The COVID Lesson Nobody Learned

Karp mentions in interviews that the COVID-19 pandemic validated one of his core arguments about government capability. When the crisis hit in 2020, governments needed to answer basic questions quickly. How many ventilators do hospitals have? Which populations are most vulnerable? How much will different policy interventions cost? Where should vaccines be distributed first?

Most governments could not answer these questions because they lacked integrated databases and analytical tools. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service used Palantir’s Foundry platform to track hospital capacity, manage vaccine distribution, and model different policy scenarios. The system drew criticism from privacy advocates but helped NHS officials make faster decisions during a crisis when speed mattered.

Palantir argues this proved the value of having populated databases and integration capabilities before a crisis hits. Critics worry about the precedent of using emergency conditions to justify surveillance infrastructure that remains in place when the emergency ends. Both things can be true. The tools helped during COVID. The tools also create risks if misused.

The broader point Karp makes is that functional government requires data infrastructure, and building that infrastructure after a crisis starts is too late. This applies to immigration enforcement, public health, disaster response, and national defense. The United States can decide it does not want immigration enforcement and dismantle the infrastructure. That would require changing the law, not just criticizing the contractors. As long as the law says ICE should enforce immigration policy, someone will build the tools to do that. Pretending Palantir is the problem avoids the actual policy question.

Why This Company and Not Others

The selective focus on Palantir rather than other defense and immigration contractors comes down to visibility, personality, and politics. Karp’s public statements make Palantir an easier target than companies that avoid controversy. His defense of Western values and criticism of progressive politics alienate activists who might otherwise focus on detention conditions or deportation policy rather than data vendors.

The company’s association with national security and intelligence work adds to its notoriety. Palantir was co-founded with funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. The company’s early clients included the CIA, NSA, and FBI. This background makes Palantir seem sinister in ways that companies selling detention services or transportation contracts do not, even though those services have more direct impact on individuals being detained or deported.

Some critics suggest antisemitism plays a role in the disproportionate focus on Palantir compared to other contractors. Karp is Jewish, as are several other Palantir executives. The company has close ties to Israel’s defense and intelligence sector. Progressive activists have increasingly conflated criticism of Israel with criticism of any Jewish-associated entity, leading to accusations that opposition to Palantir stems partly from bias rather than just disagreement with immigration policy.

This accusation is impossible to prove or disprove definitively. Some critics of Palantir also criticize CoreCivic, GEO Group, and other contractors involved in detention. Some focus exclusively on Palantir because of Karp’s statements. Some avoid criticizing defense contractors with Jewish leadership for fear of being called antisemitic, while others argue that highlighting that leadership is itself antisemitic. The debate has become so polarized that discussing it requires navigating multiple layers of accusation and counter-accusation.

What remains clear is that if the goal is to change immigration enforcement policy or reduce deportations, focusing on data vendors rather than detention operators or the underlying law is an indirect approach. Palantir does not set enforcement priorities, operate detention facilities, or decide who gets deported. The company builds software that integrates data. That software serves whatever policies the current administration implements. If those policies are bad, changing the policies would be more effective than boycotting the software vendor.

The Merit Question That Offends People

Karp’s emphasis on meritocracy hits a nerve because it challenges one of the core beliefs of contemporary progressive politics. The idea that positions and rewards should go to the most qualified individuals without regard to demographic characteristics sounds reasonable to many people but strikes progressives as naive at best and actively harmful at worst.

The progressive critique is that meritocracy assumes everyone starts from the same place and that objective measurement of merit is possible. In reality, access to education, professional networks, and opportunities varies based on race, class, gender, and other factors. What looks like merit often reflects privilege. Elite institutions that claim to select the best candidates actually reproduce existing hierarchies under the guise of objectivity.

Karp rejects this framework. He argues that Palantir hires the best engineers and that the success of those engineers proves the hiring process worked. He points to the company’s track record beating competitors who were larger, better funded, and more politically connected. He claims this success came from focusing on capability rather than credentials or demographic diversity.

Critics respond that tech companies in general and Palantir in particular have workforces that do not reflect the demographics of the broader population, particularly in terms of race and gender. They argue this reflects bias in hiring, even if the bias is unconscious or structural rather than overt. They point to research showing that diverse teams make better decisions and that homogeneous environments perpetuate blind spots.

Both sides talk past each other because they define the terms differently. When Karp says merit, he means technical capability and results. When critics hear merit, they hear a justification for maintaining existing hierarchies. When progressives say diversity improves outcomes, they mean including perspectives that would otherwise be excluded. When Karp hears diversity, he hears quotas that prioritize demographic characteristics over capability.

The empirical question is whether Palantir’s approach produces better results than alternatives that prioritize demographic diversity. The company’s financial performance and technical achievements suggest that at minimum, the approach does not prevent success. Whether a different approach would produce even better results is unknowable because we cannot run controlled experiments on company hiring practices and observe parallel outcomes.

What makes this debate so frustrating is that both sides have legitimate points that the other refuses to acknowledge. Access to education and opportunity really does vary based on background, and ignoring that reality perpetuates inequality. At the same time, organizations need to hire people capable of doing the work, and technical capability does not distribute evenly across all demographic groups for complex reasons involving culture, education, and individual choice. Pretending either of these facts does not exist in order to avoid uncomfortable conversations just makes the problem harder to solve.

The Defense Industrial Base Nobody Sees

Palantir operates within a defense industrial base that most Americans never think about and that progressives have mostly ignored for decades. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics build weapons systems and manage defense contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. These companies employ hundreds of thousands of people in districts across the country, creating political support that makes cutting defense spending difficult regardless of which party controls Congress.

The traditional defense contractors faced occasional criticism from anti-war activists but never the sustained campaign that Palantir faces from tech activists. Part of this reflects different expectations. Nobody expected Lockheed Martin to be progressive or socially conscious. Tech companies like Palantir emerged from Silicon Valley, where employees and activists held them to different standards based on the industry’s self-image as innovative and values-driven.

Palantir bridges the gap between Silicon Valley and the defense establishment, bringing software engineering practices and AI capabilities to government agencies. This makes the company valuable to the national security community and threatening to people who distrust that community. The same tools that help military analysts track terrorist networks can help ICE agents track undocumented immigrants. The technology is neutral. The use cases depend on policy decisions.

Defense contractors have spent decades learning to navigate political criticism by spreading jobs across congressional districts, emphasizing national security threats, and avoiding controversy on social issues. Palantir has not learned those lessons and shows no interest in doing so. Karp goes on stage and says provocative things that generate headlines. The company’s job footprint is concentrated in a few cities rather than distributed nationally. This makes Palantir more vulnerable to political pressure than traditional contractors but also gives the company freedom to speak without worrying about alienating members of Congress.

The question is whether Palantir’s approach represents the future of defense contracting or an anomaly. As AI and software become more central to military capability, other tech companies will face pressure to work with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Some will refuse based on employee activism or political values. Others will participate but try to stay quiet. A few will follow Palantir’s model of working openly with the government and defending that choice. The outcome of these decisions will determine whether the United States maintains technological advantage in the competitions that define geopolitics.

What the TikTok Critics Miss

The viral clips of Karp’s interviews reduce complex arguments to outrage bait. A thirty-second clip of him talking about “selective empathy” or “Jewish derangement syndrome” gets millions of views and generates thousands of comments, almost none of which engage with the substance of his claims. This is how social media discourse works, but it makes productive debate impossible.

Karp’s point about selective empathy is that progressive activists express deep concern for some vulnerable groups while showing contempt for others. The same people who talk about the trauma of family separation at the border mock working-class white men who lost manufacturing jobs or suffered from opioid addiction. The same activists who demand empathy for undocumented immigrants show none for Border Patrol agents doing a difficult job under impossible conditions. This feels like hypocrisy to people who notice the pattern.

Critics respond that Trump and others use “working-class white men” as a shield to defend policies that harm marginalized groups. They argue that concern for white men is manufactured to distract from racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. They point out that white men as a group still hold disproportionate power and wealth, making claims of victimhood absurd. But of course for the individual white man  struggling to make ends meet on minimum wage the story about disproportionate wealth seems like an absolute lie!

Both sides have evidence for their claims. Working-class white men in deindustrialized regions really have suffered from economic displacement, declining life expectancy, and rising suicide and addiction rates. At the same time, white men as a demographic group remain overrepresented in positions of power and wealth. Both facts can be true at once, but treating them as true requires nuance that social media discourse does not allow.

The clips criticizing Karp for “Jewish derangement syndrome” similarly strip away context. He argues that progressive activists hold Jews to different standards than other groups, expecting them to apologize for Israeli policy while not expecting Muslims to apologize for Saudi or Iranian policy. He suggests that some criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism, particularly when it denies Jewish self-determination or holds Jews collectively responsible for the actions of a foreign government.

Critics respond that conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism is a tactic to shut down legitimate debate about Palestinian rights and Israeli policy. They argue that Jews do not face systematic oppression in the United States and that crying antisemitism trivializes real discrimination. They point to growing far-right antisemitism as a bigger threat than left-wing criticism of Israel.

Again, both sides have points. Antisemitism exists on both the far right and the far left, expressed in different ways. Some criticism of Israel is legitimate foreign policy debate. Some crosses into antisemitism by denying Jewish self-determination, using antisemitic tropes, or treating Jews as collectively responsible for Israeli actions. The problem is that honest disagreement about where those lines fall gets drowned out by accusations of bad faith.

TikTok and Twitter reward simplification and outrage. They punish nuance and complexity. Clips of Karp can be presented as either brave truth-telling or narcissistic deflection depending on which 30 seconds you watch and what context you add or remove. This makes the platforms useful for rallying people who already agree with you but useless for changing minds or building understanding.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

If Palantir stopped working with ICE tomorrow, immigration enforcement would continue using tools from other vendors or systems that ICE built in-house. If Alex Karp stopped giving interviews, the company would still hold the same contracts and build the same software. If progressive activists succeeded in making Palantir radioactive to investors and customers, the defense industrial base would fill the gap with companies that have worse track records and less accountability.

The debate about Palantir is mostly a proxy for bigger disagreements about immigration policy, national security priorities, and cultural values. People who believe the United States should enforce its borders and maintain military superiority tend to support Palantir or at least see its work as necessary. People who believe immigration enforcement is fundamentally unjust and that military spending is wasteful tend to oppose Palantir regardless of what the company actually does.

Karp’s public statements make him an easy target for activists who would oppose Palantir’s work regardless of his rhetoric. At the same time, his willingness to defend positions that elite opinion rejects gives voice to millions of people who feel unrepresented by both political parties and mainstream media. Whether he is right or wrong about specific claims, his refusal to apologize for success or retreat from controversy represents something that many people find refreshing after decades of corporate doublespeak and political hedging.

The selective outrage directed at Palantir compared to CoreCivic, GEO Group, G4S, and other contractors doing more direct harm reveals the extent to which progressive activism focuses on symbols rather than material impact. Attacking a data vendor generates headlines and social media engagement. Fighting to change immigration law or improve detention conditions requires sustained organizing and political coalition building that is harder and less immediately satisfying.

The facts remain uncomfortable for everyone involved. Immigration enforcement infrastructure exists across multiple administrations and will continue to exist regardless of which party controls the White House. That infrastructure can be used for mass deportations or targeted enforcement depending on policy choices. Software that integrates data helps agencies do their jobs more efficiently, whether those jobs are deporting gang members or separating families. Technology is not neutral in its effects, but it is neutral in its availability. The same tools work for whatever priorities the current administration sets.

Palantir will continue building software for government agencies because that is the company’s business model and because the government will pay for that software regardless of public opinion. Karp will continue giving interviews defending his choices because he believes he is right and enjoys being proven right. Activists will continue protesting and calling for boycotts because they believe immigration enforcement is unjust and that Palantir enables that injustice. None of this will change the underlying policy as long as Congress keeps writing laws that require immigration enforcement and appropriating money to fund it.

The real question is whether the United States wants immigration enforcement at all, and if so, what kind. Answering that question requires a level of honesty about tradeoffs and priorities that current political discourse does not allow. It is easier to yell about Palantir than to admit that Obama deported three million people, that Biden kept the enforcement infrastructure running, and that most Americans support some level of border control even if they disagree about the details. It is easier to make Alex Karp the villain than to acknowledge that the system he serves was built by both parties over decades and will outlast his tenure as CEO.

Even in the UK where they border issues with people crossing the Channel in small boats. Border force also has software systems written by under private contracts to help make the organisation more effective. Are those companies damaged ethically? Is it ethical to provide services to Border Force? None of this absolves Palantir of responsibility for the uses of its technology. The company makes choices about which clients to work with and which contracts to pursue. Those choices deserve scrutiny and criticism when they enable harm. But selective outrage that ignores identical or worse behavior by less visible companies undermines the credibility of that criticism. If the goal is to change policy rather than win social media arguments, the focus needs to shift from vilifying one vendor to changing the law that creates demand for the services all vendors provide. The morals of the left and the right are very different?

 

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