Hundreds of protestors descended on Palantir’s unmarked office building in downtown Manhattan over the weekend. Organized by the grassroots AIDS group ACT UP New York, they rallied at the New York AIDS memorial before marching on the surveillance company’s offices.
According to photos published by the Advocate, protestors came dressed in flashy outfits and brandishing signs with hardline slogans. “Palantir: ICE and war enabler and profiteer,” read one.
When protestors got to Palantir’s office, however, they collapsed on the pavement, staging a “die-in” — a disruptive form of protest often reserved for urgent human rights struggles.
Die-ins are a common protest tactic in the United States, famously used by LGBTQ activists — including ACT UP — during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s to demand federal intervention from the Reagan administration. The practice has since become widespread at protests decrying police violence, like those following the murder of Michael Brown.
That protest organizers are staging die-ins to draw attention to Palantir — one of the largest private surveillance companies in the history of the US — is telling.
Palantir is the architect of the Maven Smart System, a military AI used by the Pentagon to select targets for annihilation. The system combines satellite data, drone imaging, and other more conventional forms of military intelligence to create an all-in-one solution for US military officers to carry out attacks from afar.
Maven was most recently used in Iran, where it was used to select thousands of targets for destruction, Democracy Now reported. (Questions still remain over whether the system was used to select the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school as a target, in an attack that killed at least 165 students and staff.)
Domestically, Palantir also coordinates heavily with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, providing the agency with a tracking tool and a database to spy on “known populations” of immigrants.
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