ICE Accidentally Just Revealed How Much its New Contract With Peter Thiel’s Palantir Is Worth

A quick public search of GSA contracts shows that Palantir has entered into contracts with the following agencies:

GSA
SEC
Defense Security Service
Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Federal Acquisition Service
DOD
SOCOM
Navy
Army
Air Force
US Fish and Wildlife Service
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
FBI
DOJ
IRS
ICE
CBP
Centers for Disease Control
Natl Institutes of Health
Health and Human Services
USDA
DEA
Commerce
US Census Bureau
State Department
DOL
Secret Service

That's a huge swath of the federal government. DOD and Justice have very large contracts and almost certainly farm out.

Some other bad information, it's a software tool. The agencies already have access to this data, they already would use it.

I never said they didn't. I specifically said the tool aggregates data from both outside and inside the government, which it does. And it's not just a matter of "it would be used anyway", the point of Palantir is that it facilitates connection making to such a degree that it seems almost magical when you use it. If you are an analyst in federal law enforcement in a capacity that you deal with name relational tools etc (I think only the SEC and FBI have internal name relational tools) you'll know how much they are leaned on during examinations and early investigations. Palantir is a full light-year ahead of what came before, and brings so much data together it can be overwhelming.

And that's the point. Palantir didn't create the data. It assembles it in ways that used to require specialists and dedicated teams to produce, if - in some cases - it was ever efficiently put together in similar ways at all previously.

/r/politics Thread Parent Link - motherjones.com