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.”