The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform
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Journal articleDate
2022-08-23Department
Media Studies and ProductionPermanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/8070
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https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2022.2100851Abstract
Palantir is among the most secretive and understudied surveillance firms globally. The company supplies information technology solutions for data integration and tracking to police and government agencies, humanitarian organizations, and corporations. To illuminate and learn more about Palantir’s opaque surveillance practices, we begin by sketching Palantir’s company history and contract network, followed by an explanation of key terms associated with Palantir’s technology area and a description of the firm’s platform ecosystem. We then summarize current scholarship on Palantir’s continuing role in policing, intelligence, and security operations. Our primary contribution and analysis are a computational topic modeling of Palantir’s surveillance patents (n = 155), including their topics and themes. We end by discussing the concept of infrastructuring to understand Palantir as a surveillance platform, where we theorize information standards like administrative metadata as phenomena for structuring social worlds in and through access to digital information.Citation
Andrew Iliadis & Amelia Acker (2022) The seer and the seen: Surveying Palantir’s surveillance platform, The Information Society, DOI: 10.1080/01972243.2022.2100851Citation to related work
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/8042
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