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The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Six arrested at protest of Palantir, tech company building deportation software for Trump admin
Six protestors who demonstrated in front of the New York City offices of Palantir Technologies were arrested on Thursday morning. The demonstrators had gathered to bring attention to the controversial firm and the work it does to power the deportation of immigrants from the US. The protestors stood in front of the Palantir offices on Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas, linking arms to block entrance into the building and forcing several people attempting to enter to shove past them. At one point, several demonstrators entered the lobby of the building holding up signs that read 'Palantir powers ICE,' referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The protest was organized by Planet Over Profit, a climate justice group that also organizes against systemic inequality, with support from immigrant rights group Mijente. Police broke up the demonstration after roughly an hour, and the six demonstrators who were arrested and taken to the seventh precinct were released by 11.20am. Caroline Chouinard, a Brooklyn resident who was arrested at the protest, said that police began to detain and zip-tie her before she could comply with their orders to disperse. Chouinard said several people who identified themselves as Palantir employees also pushed the protestors. Videos shared captured by representatives of Planet Over Profit showed some people attempting to enter the premises pushing the protestors – it is not clear in the footage whether they were employees of Palantir. Chouinard was released with a summons to appear in court on charges of disorderly conduct. 'We met a lot of physical violence during the arrest itself,' Chouinard told the Guardian. 'I personally was not planning on being arrested. I was just using my body to physically stand there and myself and others around me were repeatedly shoved and pushed to the ground and were grabbed. Several police officers were really physical and pushing us around.' Chouinard said she attended the protest because she wants to stop Palantir from enabling agencies that are 'hurting and disappearing my neighbors'. 'We're disrupting Palantir's business as usual because producing AI that makes fascism stronger and more efficient does not belong in NYC,' Chouinard said in a statement. 'Palantir is in the business of tracking and surveilling all of us and it's our responsibility to track them back: they're in bed with the Trump administration, Ice, IOF [the Israeli Defense Forces] and others. From NYC to LA to Gaza, Palantir is one company making unspeakable horrors happen.' The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the protest. Palantir, a data-mining firm founded in 2003 by billionaire investor and Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel and now run by CEO Alex Karp, has attracted an increased level of critique and attention as information about new and expanded contracts with various arms of the Department of Homeland Security as well as other federal agencies have been revealed. In April, Palantir was awarded a $30m Ice contract to create a surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS. According to the contract, ImmigrationOS would be developed to 'streamline' the identification and arrest of immigrants prioritized for removal; to provide real-time tracking and reporting of self-deportations; and make deportations largely more efficient. This additional $30m is on top of an existing Ice contract Palantir was first awarded under the Obama administration in 2014 and has been renewed several times since. Palantir has also been tapped to help the so-called 'department of governmental efficiency' (Doge) build a 'mega API' to access Internal Revenue Service data, according to Wired. In a letter sent in mid-June, 10 Democratic lawmakers said that Palantir's work building a 'mega-database' for the Trump administration, which would gather Americans' personal information from multiple government agencies and centralize it into one repository, as was reported by the New York Times, would violate federal privacy laws. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion The company posted a rebuttal to the letter on X: 'To be very clear: Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens. We do not operate the systems, access the data, or make decisions about its use.' The protestors did not expect Palantir to answer demands to halt its work with Ice and other arms of the federal government. Their goal, according to Liv Senghor, a lead organizer with Planet Over Profit, was to mobilize 'the average American'. 'We want regular people who care about free speech and freedom of privacy to understand how entrenched Palantir is, not only in our government, our military, but in our daily lives,' Senghor told the Guardian after police broke up the protest. 'We want to foment enough anger and discontent at Palantir that we get a groundswell of everyday people who they actually have to listen to.' The organizers of the protest have also planned a protest in front of Palantir's Palo Alto offices on Thursday afternoon.
CNBC
a day ago
- Business
- CNBC
Police detain six outside Palantir office at protest over deportations, military work
Six people were taken into custody by police on Thursday as a group blocked the entrance to the New York office of Palantir to protest the tech company's work for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the Israeli military and other efforts. More than 30 people participated in the protest, according to Planet Over Profit, the group that organized the demonstration in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. The New York Police Department had no immediate comment when asked if the six detained protestors were charged. Planet Over Profit said that all six were released later in the morning. Planet Over Profit, in a statement, said it objected to Palantir's "turbocharging ICE deportations, complicity in the genocide of Palestinians and plans to massively expand surveillance of every U.S. resident." "Palantir's tech programs are being used to deport our neighbors, kill civilians in Gaza, enhance oil extraction, and deny health insurance claims," the group told CNBC. "If your company kills for profit, we will disrupt you," a spokesperson added. Palantir did not immediately return a request for comment. Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel and its current CEO Alex Karp, who donated $1 million to President Donald Trump's inauguration fund. The firm has garnered attention for its defense and software contracts with the government. In April, ICE paid the company $30 million to provide the agency with "visibility" on people self-deporting, according to federal documents. Karp told CNBC in March 2024 that some Palantir employees had left the company because of his public support for Israel, and that he expected more would leave for the same reason. During an earnings call a month earlier, Karp said that he was "exceedingly proud" that Palantir was "on the ground" in Israel on the heels of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas. He also said that Palantir was "involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel." Shares of the company have rallied 500% over the past year and hit a new high for the year-to-date on Wednesday morning.
The Guardian
01-04-2025
- Automotive
- The Guardian
How Tesla became a battleground for political protest
Over the weekend, protesters gathered at Tesla showrooms in hundreds of cities across the world to demonstrate against Elon Musk laying waste to the US government in alliance with Donald Trump. Their goal: stigmatize Tesla's cars. One sign in Manhattan read: 'Burn a Tesla, save democracy.' Protesters are using the commercial democracy of consumer products to influence US political democracy. *** My colleagues Dara Kerr and Edward Helmore report: In New York City, several hundred anti-Tesla protesters gathered outside the EV company's Manhattan showroom on Saturday. Sophie Shepherd, 23, an organizer with Planet Over Profit, explained that the rally was not about protesting electric cars. 'We're here to protest Musk, who has essentially held a Tesla car show on the White House lawn,' she said. 'We want to disrupt his business as much as possible, so that includes all Teslas, and not just the Cybertruck.' The demonstrations did not draw huge crowds. Nonetheless, Musk's fortune has dropped more than $100bn as Tesla's stock has fallen by nearly half since its peak value in December 2024. Musk's political ventures are forcing many Tesla owners to either be a spokesperson for or against the company Musk is synonymous with Tesla. In its comprehensive annual report, the company discloses in the section on risks that it is 'highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, Technoking of Tesla and our Chief Executive Officer'. Technoking of Tesla is one of Musk's official, if juvenile, titles. By extension, consumer sentiment regarding Musk's public persona is inextricable from Tesla. When he was known primarily as a multi-hyphenate technical genius, the inspiration for Iron Man, that perception boosted Tesla's brand like an engine from his rocket company. In light of the polarization of Musk as a public figure, however, reading Tesla's risk assessments in its 10-K form takes on a different tone: 'We will need to maintain public credibility and confidence in our long-term business prospects in order to succeed.' 'We are targeting a global mass demographic with a broad range of potential customers,' reads Tesla's disclosure. Musk's political ventures are forcing many Tesla owners to either be a spokesperson for or against the company. Individual owners are being asked to justify their purchases or publicly declare the separation of their beliefs from their vehicles. Of particular concern are the dates of the purchases, with 'I bought this before Elon went crazy' bumper stickers proliferating as a sign of rebuke of the so-called 'department of government efficiency'. Yet there is a wide swath of the US public that seems to want their car to just be a car, not a political statement. For his own part, Musk is targeting a narrower and narrower audience, hosting a Tesla sales event on the White House lawn alongside one of the most poorly rated and divisive presidents in modern political history. I can't predict Tesla's fate, but for now, widespread social souring on Tesla is making a dent in its finances. Read the full story on Saturday's protests here. Tesla investors brace for global sales data amid consumer backlash over Elon Musk Elon Musk hands out $1m checks to voters amid Wisconsin supreme court election race On Thursday, the White House posted a cartoon depicting the arrest of a wailing woman beside an American flag. The image was captioned: 'Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking, was arrested by @ICEgov in Philadelphia after illegally reentering the U.S. She wept when taken into custody (picture attached).' Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion By ghiblifying this woman, the White House inadvertently made a previously deported felon and literal fentanyl trafficker sympathetic The White House's image is shocking. The contrast between the harshness of deportation and the round softness of the characters rendered in a warm color scheme, evocative of children's animated classics such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, is ghoulish. That seems to be the point. The image is both viral nonsense – there may be little meaning to extract from it other than its capacity to appall – and also a communication from the most powerful office in the United States. We may be obligated to attempt to understand it. Earlier last week, OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with better image generation. Soon, there was a deluge on Twitter/X of real photographs reproduced as still images in the distinctive style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio behind, most recently, the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe-winning film The Boy and the Heron. I made one of the images. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman changed his profile photo to a character he described as 'a twink Ghibli style', too. The White House appears to have done the same. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on the cartoon depiction of the arrest and deportation.) Trump has never seen Ghibli's Princess Mononoke, I would venture. Part of what is supremely bizarre in the image is visual; another part is political. Hayao Miyazaki, the 84-year-old founder of Ghibli, has criticized nationalism and championed environmentalism, expressing opposition to positions easily attributable to Trump's administration. In a 2018 documentary, Miyazaki called one young animator's use of artificial intelligence to produce a grotesque moving figure 'an insult to life itself'. Whether OpenAI violated Ghibli's copyright in equipping its AI model to imitate the studio's style remains an open legal and philosophical question. I recommend reading Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which concerns recreations of the Mona Lisa. Mike Solana, the chief marketing officer of Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and the founder of the conservative newsletter Pirate Wires, tweeted that the image was ineffective in its mockery because it was too kawaii. '24 hours in and we face the first great example of a person working with a form they didn't earn, and therefore don't understand. by ghiblifying this woman the white house inadvertently made a previously deported felon and literal fentanyl trafficker sympathetic… this specific aesthetic is innately endearing. you can't make me want to see a ghibli character in pain,' Solana tweeted. I have written before about how US conservatives love AI while liberals shun it, which I think remains the case. The jarring admixture of seemingly silly internet aesthetics with the Trump administration's punitive approach to immigration will not disappear soon. The White House made a similar post last month. 'ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊'. I expect more. How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border How and why parents and teachers are introducing young children to AI 'Sim farms', high heels, zombie knives: what scammers buy with the money they steal Calling all fashion models … now AI is coming for you Is it safe? Is it spying? Disquiet over NHS 'magic eye' surveillance camera in mental health units The controversial California city backed by tech elite has a new plan: boats From smash-proof cases to updates: how to make your smartphone last longer
