List of Britta Eder The phone book is full of people the German state considers criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascism, anti-nuclear power campaigners and members of the PKK, a Kurdish nationalist organization that has been banned. ban.
For the benefit of her clients, she is used to being cautious on the phone. “When I’m on the phone, I always think, maybe I’m not alone,” she says. That self-consciousness even extended to phone calls with her mother.
But when Hamburg passed a new law in 2019 that would allow police to use data analysis software built by the CIA-backed company. Palantir, she fears she might be pulled deeper into the big data trawl. A feature of Palantir’s Gotham platform that allows police to map networks of telephone communications, placing people like Eder – people who are connected to the alleged crime but are not criminals themselves. – under effective supervision.
“I think this is the next step in police trying to have more visibility into people without any concrete evidence of a crime,” Eder said. So she decided to be one of 11 plaintiffs trying to get the Hamburg law overturned. Yesterday, they succeeded.
A leading German court has ruled the Hamburg law unconstitutional and grant for the first time to lay out strict guidelines on how police can use automated data analysis tools like Palantir’s and warn against giving out data by bystanders, such as witnesses or a lawyer like Eder. decision speak that the Hamburg law, and a similar one in Hessen, “allow the police, with a single click, to create comprehensive profiles of people, groups and circles,” without distinguishing between suspected criminals. and those associated with them.
Palantir’s decision not to ban the Gotham tool but to limit how police can use it. “There is now the risk of Eder being flagged or being handled by Palantir,” said Bijan Moini, head of the legal department of the Berlin-based Civil Rights Association (GFF), which took the case to court. data will be significantly reduced.
Although Palantir is not the target of the ruling, the decision still deals a blow to the 19-year-old company’s police ambitions in Europe’s biggest market. Co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who remains chairman, Palantir helps police clients connect disparate databases and bring vast amounts of people’s data into one accessible source of information. accessible. But the guidance issued by the German court could influence similar decisions in the rest of the European Union, said Sebastian Golla, assistant professor of criminology at Ruhr University Bochum, who wrote the application. Hamburg’s Palantir law complaint, said. “I think this will have a bigger impact than just in Germany.”
During court proceedings, the head of the Hessian State Criminal Police argued in favor of how they wanted to use Palantir by citing the successes of the software, known locally as “Hessendata”. . In December, police were able to find a suspect involved in a coup plot in Germany (when a far-right group was arrested for plotting to violently overthrow the government) because Hessendata was able to connect a phone numbers flagged through wiretapping with a number sent in connection with a non-criminal traffic accident.
