Crime and data: Discussion about Palantir: What should the police be allowed to do?

There are situations in which security authorities are worth the smallest note in gold – for example in the event of an impending attack. But should the police be searched for software in such cases to make all possible databases to establish connections between suspects and possible accomplices? This is highly controversial. What is the debate about the US company Palantir and his programs.

Why do police authorities want to use Palantir?

The police currently have a lot of data, but can only merged them with difficulty if necessary. An example: terrorist suspects from abroad are said to be on the way to Germany. What could be your goal, who your helpers on site?

The investigators have saved all possible data, for example during traffic controls, witness surveys or from sensitive areas such as secret telephone monitoring. However, in order to bring data from a suspect, for example to the license plate or address, police officers have to do research in different systems and formats. Such an evaluation can take several days, according to Bavaria.

What would Palantir bring?

Palantir’s program is intended to establish relationships between the data in cases where people are targeted by the authorities and urges time. In Bavaria, for example, this has been carried out for a year with the cross-procedural research and analysis platform (Vera), a software based on the Gotham program of Palantir.

Vera accesses data from all pots of the Bavarian police so that investigators can search and analyze them. For this purpose, different file formats are translated into a common one. In this way, investigators can recognize connections and bring information together to the same person from the various sources. The data is displayed either in networks, on maps, in time sequence or as pure text tables. New dossiers can then be created from the information.

Where has the software been used so far?

In addition to Bavaria, other Gotham versions in Hesse are under the name of Hessendata and in North Rhine-Westphalia (dar). However, the Federal Constitutional Court received the legal basis in early 2023 in a judgment that the country had created for it. In Baden-Württemberg, the green-black coalition also agreed to use after internal dispute. In principle, the Bavarian LKA has negotiated a framework contract that enables all countries and the federal government to buy for their police authorities.

Where Palantir software is already used by the police, the company refers to several successes by the officials with the program: in Hesse, police officers had arrested a young person in 2017 who allegedly wanted to create an explosive device for an attack. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the software helped the investigators in the Bergisch Gladbach abuse complex. Among other things, a perpetrator was associated with a main suspect in North Rhine -Westphalia via a joint internet connection abroad. In Bavaria, the LKA quickly found out after an attack on the Israeli Consulate General in Munich in 2024 that the shot suspect had not been known there before.

The manufacturer of the program, the US company Palantir, received money from the US secret service CIA as a start-up and counts it among its customers. Data protectionists therefore fear that police data could flow into the United States.

A spokesman for Palantir, on the other hand, emphasizes that such a data drain is “technically excluded”. There is no connection to the Internet or to external servers, so data could not get from the territory of the police. The Fraunhofer Institute for Safe Information Technology had checked the source code of the software on behalf of the LKA before use in Bavaria – and found no evidence of hidden back doors.

On the other hand, data protection officers encounter the software access to police data, which were collected for completely different purposes. Depending on the case, analysts can determine and capture connections between witnesses of an accident and intelligence findings on terrorist suspects. Bavaria’s top data protection officer, Thomas Petri, therefore saw the so -called purpose binding requirement in danger.

The Society for Freedom Rights, which complains against the use of the software in Bavaria, warns: “Anyone who files a complaint, becomes the victim of a crime or is simply in the wrong place at the wrong time can be targeted by the software.” Affected people would not know about it.

Investigators have to specify in the program at the beginning at the beginning, which is why they use the software and which data they access. The more severe the crimes that are to be prevented, and the greater the immediate danger, the more data may be used in the analysis. For example, the review of the reasons given is in Bavaria at the LKA itself.

Who is behind the company?

Founder and head of the administrative head is US billionaire Peter Thiel. Criticism from Germany had also sparked his political preferences: Thiel had supported US President Donald Trump in the election campaign in the past. “However, he is not involved in day-to-day operational business,” says a Palantir spokesman. The company boss is co-founder Alex Karp, who had financially supported ex-office owner Joe Biden in the most recent presidential election campaign.

Karp told the “New York Times” last year that there would have been “massive terrorist attacks” in Europe without Palantir’s software, in the dimension of the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. “We represent the consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior lifestyle and organization, especially if we meet our own demands,” he describes the Company philosophy.

According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, “various options” are checked for a common IT system that is supposed to merge data from the federal and state police data. It is about the use of software available on the market and “the use of individual modular services”. So far, only Palantir has offered a market available software solution in Europe that had met the claims. The federal and state governments would have to make a decision for a common system.

The company itself makes no secret of the fact that Palantir considers itself to be largely unrivaled in his field. So a spokesman writes about possible alternatives: “Should you actually put the hope of solutions that are already reminiscent of debacle such as BER or Stuttgart 21 before the first line, instead of trusting a provider who, according to numerous experts, is without alternative and is” familiar and proves the status “?”

Federal Ministry of the Interior for Program P20