SCOOP: Digital Ad Targets Palantir Employees

Silicon Valley has a history of internal revolts over military and police contracts. Now, 314 Action is betting that Palantir’s engineers will finally look up from their code.

WASHINGTON — Inside Palantir, they write elegant code. Outside, that code has a name attached to it. The software engineers don’t see that part. They see algorithms. Data structures. Optimization problems.

They’ve built what Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls “mission-critical infrastructure”—the technical term for a digital dragnet that can track someone’s cellphone, their car, their kids’ schools, their medical appointments, their everything.

Now somebody’s putting it in their face.

314 Action, a science advocacy group that usually fights climate denialism, launched a campaign Monday that geofences ad around five Palantir offices: Denver, Palo Alto, Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C.. The message is simple enough that even a software engineer can parse it: “ICE is using your technology to terrorize communities. Use your power. Speak up.”

The ad will follow Palantir workers home. They’ll pop up on their phones when they’re picking up groceries, dropping kids at daycare, meeting friends for drinks. A little taste of what surveillance feels like when you’re on the receiving end.

Shaughnessy Naughton, who runs 314 Action, isn’t pulling punches. “ICE is murdering Americans in the streets, using technology developed by Palantir to do it,” she said in a statement that would make most nonprofit communications directors nervous. Good.

Let’s talk about what Palantir actually does for ICE, since the company prefers bloodless language about “data integration platforms.” In 2025, Palantir reported a total of $1.855 billion in revenue from the U.S. government, representing a 55% increase over the previous year. Their software, called FALCON, aggregates data from license plate readers, utility bills, employment records, hospital visits, and cellphone towers. It creates dossiers so detailed that ICE agents can predict where someone will be before they get there.

This isn’t hypothetical. In 2019, investigative reporters found that Palantir’s technology was central to a workplace raid operation that separated 680 workers from their children in a single day. The software didn’t just find people—it mapped their social networks, their routines, their vulnerabilities. The company called it a “successful deployment.”

The tech industry has seen this movie before. Google employees forced the company to abandon Project Maven, which would have used AI to improve drone strike targeting. Amazon workers pushed back against selling facial recognition to police departments. Microsoft engineers protested contracts with ICE.

What’s different now is the stakes. Congress has until February 13 to fund ICE. That’s three days to decide whether to bankroll an agency that’s operating, by design, as Trump’s deportation machine. Palantir is betting legislators won’t have the spine to defund it.

The company’s bet might be right. But 314 Action is making a different bet—that the engineers who built this system might still have a conscience left to activate. That maybe, just maybe, some will realize that “move fast and break things” hits different when the things being broken are families.

There’s a petition. There’s a website. There’s the usual infrastructure of modern activism. But really, there’s just a question hanging in the air around those five office buildings: Are you going to keep building this, or aren’t you?

The engineers keep walking past the protesters, heads down, AirPods in, their commutes optimized to minimize eye contact. They’ve architected their denial with the same precision they bring to everything else.

But the ads will follow them home tonight. And tomorrow night. And every night until they decide what they want to be complicit in.

The code they write has names attached to it now. They just have to be willing to look.