A raging debate in Germany over the use of software from Palantir, a controversial American tech company, is shedding new light onto how deeply dependent European authorities are on the US.
German politicians have been using the summer break to tear into each other over whether police should be allowed to use a specific piece of software.
The software in question is a data analysis tool made by Palantir, a US company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel – an outspoken supporter of US president Donald Trump.
The software, called “Gotham”, connects different data sources to make them more useful for customers. Palantir offers it for a wide variety of use cases: The company’s website advertises videos of satellite constellations and soldiers monitoring drone feeds.
Some regional German police forces have been using a downsized version of the tool for years to connect different databases – but not without loud criticism over their legal basis being insufficient (or just missing outright). Civil society activists have started a lawsuit against Bavaria’s use of the software, for example.
Germany’s ministry of justice – now Christian-Democrat led – is also still checking whether use of Palantir’s software should be authorised at the federal level.
But German authorities are by far not the only ones using Palantir in Europe, as various press reports show. The company did not reply to Euractiv’s questions about which European authorities it has worked with.
Never let a good crisis go to waste
France’s Directorate-General for Internal Security extended an existing contract with Palantir in 2019, signed after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Europol also used the company’s software in its taskforce responding to those attacks.
According to documents obtained by The Guardian, the results were so bad that the EU’s law enforcement agency considered suing Palantir – for example over its software’s “inability to properly visualize large datasets”.
Several countries including the Netherlands and Greece deployed another piece of Palantir software, Foundry, to monitor where Covid-19 cases could be found or how factors like road works could impact the spread of the virus.
The company has an entire health division whose product is being broadly rolled out in the US. In the UK, Palantir has had a £330 million NHS contract since 2023, though its rollout has faced delays, including due to staff scepticism.
In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine plunged Europe into crisis mode again. Once again, Palantir was quickly present, working with the Polish government to build a portal where Ukrainian war refugees could find job offers.
The company has also worked its way into the military realm.
Earlier this year, the Western military alliance, NATO, made headlines for choosing Palantir for its Allied Command Operations, the alliance’s war room, to ease decision-making and military planning.
The move is a blow to France, which has long fought against Europeans’ reliance on the US across many key areas.
What’s the European alternative?
The problem is not that there are no European companies active in the same field.
Siren, a company headquartered in Ireland – with offices in other European countries as well as America and the Pacific – aggressively bills its own product as “the only true alternative” to Palantir.
“With global geopolitics shifting, we at Siren are seeing a growing demand for European investigative technologies,” it wrote in a blogpost, positioning its products as a plug-in alternative to Palantir that works without users having to completely switch to a closed vendor ecosystem.
But the argument has always been that no homegrown alternative can deliver as much as Palantir’s tools can – which is something that’s nearly impossible to judge from the outside.
Still, several German regions remain unconvinced.
Schleswig-Holstein, nestled between Denmark, and the Baltic and North seas, is continuing to look for options in Germany and Europe.
The region’s administration has ambitious tech sovereignty goals in other areas, too, trying to wean itself off Microsoft Office.
“It would be wrong to create a new dependency in another core sector of the state – the police – by procuring Palantir software,” the regional politician Jan Kürschner has said.
“The regions that went down this wrong path should turn around as soon as possible.”
(nl, cp)
