From 2007-2014, Baghdad’s American-designed checkpoints were a daily game of “Russian Roulette” for Iraqi civilians. Imagine being stopped, having rifles pointed at your head, being harassed or detained simply because a computer system tagged you as suspicious based on the color of your hat at dawn or the car you drove.
This was the reality created by Palantir Technologies, which sold the U.S. military and intelligence community on the promise of a “God’s Eye” system that could identify terrorists through data analysis. But compelling evidence suggests their unaccountable surveillance system instead helped create the very terrorists they claimed they would find.
The evidence is stark: In 2007, Baghdad had over 1,000 checkpoints where Iraqis faced daily humiliation — forced to carry fake IDs and even keep different religious songs on their phones to avoid being targeted. By 2014, many of these same areas had become ISIS strongholds.
This wasn’t coincidence.
A pivotal WIRED exposé revealed how Palantir’s system nearly killed an innocent farmer because it misidentified his hat color in dawn lighting. U.S. Army Military Intelligence experts on the ground described their experience literally as:
“if you doubt Palantir you’re probably right.”
And here’s the key quote that encapsulates the entire broken system:
“Who has control over Palantir’s Save or Delete buttons?”
The answer: Not the civilians whose lives were being ruined by false targeting.
The Institute for War and Peace Reporting documented how these checkpoints created a climate of fear and sectarian division in 2007. Civilians were “molested while the real militants get through easily.” The system was so broken that Iraqis had to carry two sets of ID and learn religious customs not their own just to survive daily commutes.
Most damningly, military commanders admitted their targeting data was inadequate and checkpoint personnel had “no explosives detection technology and receive poor, if any, information on suspicious cars or people.” Yet Palantir continued to process and analyze this bad data, creating an automated system of harassment that pushed communities toward radicalization.
When ISIS emerged in 2014, it found fertile ground in the very communities that had faced years of algorithmic targeting and checkpoint harassment. The organization recruited heavily from populations that had endured years of being falsely flagged as threats — a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy. During this period, Palantir’s revenue grew from $250 million to over $1.5 billion — a for-profit-terror generation engine enriching a few who cared little or not at all about the harms. The American taxpayers were being fleeced.
Palantir marketed itself as building a system to find terrorists. Instead, it helped create them by processing bad data through unaccountable algorithms to harass innocent civilians until some became the very thing they were falsely accused of being. The company has never had to answer for this devastating impact.
As we rush to deploy more AI surveillance systems globally, the lesson of Palantir in Iraq stands as a warning: When you build unaccountable systems to find enemies, you may end up creating them instead.
We must ask: How many of today’s conflicts originated not from organic grievances, but from the humiliation and radicalization caused by surveillance systems that promised security while delivering only suspicion leading into extra-judicial assassinations?
Palantir’s profits are from failure. Their income an indicator of the violence they seed.
Note: This analysis draws on documentation from 2007-2014, tracking the relationship between checkpoint systems and the rise of ISIS through contemporary reporting and military documents.
Palantir’s core argument for ethical immunity is that they just built a database (AtlasDB) and some search tools. Their main database is a relational layer on top of Cassandra, open sourced at https://github.com/palantir/atlasdb. What they actually sell is the digestion, interpretation, and display of data to non-technical users who don’t understand how error-prone these processes are.
But here’s the reality: They specifically designed and optimized their system to help identify human targets while knowing the data was unreliable. The “error-prone nature” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature – it creates more “threats” requiring more Palantir services to track. Like a garbage company that dumps trash on lawns to create demand for cleanup, Palantir’s targeting errors create more targets. Each false positive at a checkpoint creates new grievances, new “threats” to track, new contracts to win.
I know their staff and this ethical choice personally. I myself built a social data aggregator and sentiment analysis engine that could track trends across multiple networks. The technology was powerful and it could have made millions in brand management or market analysis. When someone like Peter Thiel told me they wanted to weaponize it for political targeting, I could have said “not my problem” and kept collecting bigger and bigger paychecks from stabbing democracy in the back. Instead, I walked away and let years of my work die rather than help build something intentionally harmful.
The ethics are simple: If you build a targeting system knowing it will get innocent people killed based on bad data, you share responsibility for those deaths. But Palantir’s business model is even more sinister: they intentionally profit from their system’s failures. Each error creates more “terrorists” to track, each false positive generates more data to analyze, each grievance drives more contracts. It’s a cruel mindset.
And now former Palantir engineers are bringing these same tactics home, building domestic surveillance systems for U.S. police departments to target political dissidents. The same flawed algorithms, the same perverse incentives, the same pattern of creating the very threats they claim to fight – Peregrine Technologies is just like the Palmer Raids of 1916 but with better databases. The blueprint was written in Iraqi blood, and now it’s being deployed on American streets.
You don’t get to build a weapon, hand it to someone you know will misuse it, and then say “not my problem.” Especially when that misuse is actually your profit engine. Palantir’s engineers had a choice. They chose to keep “improving” their system even as they saw it create the very threats it claimed to fight. They chose blood profits over lives, then profited from mounting piles of lives they destroyed.
Here’s what none of the PowerPoint rangers want to admit: We’ve been down this road before, and it always ends the same damn way. In Nam, we dumped millions into Operation Igloo White – sensors that couldn’t tell a farmer’s shovel from an AK-47. When that failed spectacularly, instead of learning the lesson, Nixon just dragged those same broken toys home to play with.
Now we’re watching Palantir pull the exact same cynical move. They’re selling us expensive, flashy ‘predictive’ systems that can’t tell a family dinner from a terrorist meetup. But here’s the real kicker – when these systems fail overseas and get people killed, there’s zero accountability. The contractors just shrug it off and pivot to selling the same garbage to police departments back home like it’s 1970 again.
Every time we screw up and kill civilians based on bad automated intel, we create more enemies than we started with. But somebody’s stock price goes up, so I guess that makes it all worth it to the guys in the boardrooms who’ve never had to look a family in the eyes and explain why their ‘predictive analytics’ just destroyed innocent lives.
Israel just hyper targeted two octogenarians watching TV because they had the same last name as some wanted teenagers. Boom, glad hands and high fives for a big miss. There ain’t nobody holding Palantir-fed trigger-happy drone operators accountable on mistaken identities, let alone getting these facts to reporters.
The brass knows such stuff doesn’t work like advertised. But as long as there’s a revolving door between saccharin defense contractors and the sweet-tooth Pentagon, we’ll keep buying their high-fructose snake oil, failing upward, and then turning these broken tools on our own people. It’s not about effectiveness — it’s about who’s getting paid.