At 7:30 a.m. this morning, the bespectacled, 73-year-old Peter Lippman was in a crowd of activists with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
As he walked around the corner from Cascade Playground to Fairview Market, 400 Fairview Ave. N., Lippman explained he was there for the same reason as everyone else marching with him: To ruin Palantir’s day.
Palantir—a data-mining and analysis firm co-founded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel and ironically named for the telephonic Elven scrying crystals Sauron and Sauruman (evil Gandalf, for non-nerds) used for evil ends in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings—is in the surveillance space.
Shuffling past a Caffe Ladro, Lippman turned down a narrow corridor, stopping at an open door with a keycard entrance. Seven other middle-aged and older adults stood with him and locked arms, all wearing black shirts with “DIVEST FROM GENOCIDE” in bolded yellow.
The members of JVP showed up this morning to pressure the state’s investment board to pull public money from the company, which they say used AI technology to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the mass deportations in the US.
According to a UN report released late last month, there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Palantir has provided Israel with predictive policing technology and AI tech to make automated decisions on the battlefield. And earlier this year, WIRED reported Donald Trump’s administration was paying Palantir $30 million to develop “near real-time” tracking on people self-deporting from the US. Palantir is also helping Trump’s government compile the data on me, you and all Americans from various federal agencies. In May, former Palantir workers shared a letter with NPR that condemned the company’s work with Trump. Palantir worked with Israel long before October 2023, and became an ICE contractor in 2011, during the Obama administration.
Palantir’s Seattle office is not secret, but it’s not common knowledge either. JVP says its action Monday kicks off a campaign to convince the state to cut ties with Palantir. According to JVP’s calculations, of the state’s hundreds of billions of investment dollars, $742,000 is in Palantir.
They’re off by two decimal places. The Washington State Investment Board confirmed late this afternoon that it has $73.4 million invested in Palantir as of last December.
“Palantir is included in many major stock indices, and almost all of the WSIB’s investments in Palantir are held in passive equity strategies,” the WSIB’s Institutional Relations Director James Aber said in a statement.
They also called out Sen. Patty Murray who, according to OpenSecrets, received more than $26,000 from employees at the company. (The Washington State Investment Board did not provide comment before press time. Sen. Murray did not respond to The Stranger’s request for comment.)
Lippman, a Jewish carpenter and author from Seattle, strongly objected to Palantir’s presence here and the state’s investment in it. Nazis killed some of Lippman’s ancestors at Auschwitz, he says. He does not want that “repeated in my name, in our name as Jewish people, and with our tax money.”A white-haired woman standing with Lippman says as a former public school teacher she didn’t want her pension tied up with Palantir.
As Lord of the Rings devotees, Palantir could surely appreciate a principled “you shall not pass” moment? Palantir did not return a request for comment, so I guess we’ll never know, and it’s not their building.
Around 8 a.m., a harried security guard in a grey shirt warned the police had been called and then hurried off to lean on the pastry case at the Caffe Ladro.
For the next hour, people dressed in business casual clothing came to skidding halts in the corridor. One woman asked if there were stairs. She had a business meeting.
One younger activist handed her a flier—it read Jews say CUT TIES WITH PALANTIR—and suggested a virtual meeting instead.
“We might have to,” she said, and left, a little dazed.
One man tried to appeal. He didn’t work for Peter Thiel, he said, as he tried to squeeze through. When he couldn’t, he abandoned diplomacy and told the seniors it would be good when the police arrived. Little did he know, police were parked just a block away, thumbing their vests and walking in circles.
Police didn’t make a bolder appearance until just after 10 a.m. when protesters were already leaving. The Stranger observed an officer telling an activist they intended to “enforce violations of the law” including trespassing and pedestrian interference.
SPD said in a statement that the officer was responding to a call from building management to remove the protesters. Additional police had arrived, SPD says, but they were still “collecting information and developing a plan of action” by the time protesters left. Police had not issued a formal dispersal order, activists say, and they’d planned to leave around 10 a.m. from the start.
JVP didn’t totally shut down the building. Security found a workaround up a flight of stairs to an elevator, one woman with a walkie-talkie explained as she jogged next to a man in khakis and a button up.
At one entrance, activists wearing the same black and yellow shirts sat in a circle, and chanted slogans to a stomp-clap beat. Some wore cardboard hats shaped like surveillance cameras.
Michael Grant, a JVP organizer and public school teacher in Tukwila, jangled a tambourine. He says he was horrified to learn Palantir was not only in Seattle, but its technology was being used for “such horrible, villainous purposes” in Gaza and the US.
“What’s really important and really scary is that these corporations, in partnership with the government, are seeing what they can get away with,” he says. “How far they can train it on, in this case the trapped population of Gaza before they can employ the same tools they’ve refined at home. What’s really important to me is interrupting that cycle.”
Editors note: This story has been updated since publication to include monetary information from the state.
AI and military technology is a reality across the globe. I agree that the IDF is out of control but companies that create AI tech and employ us are not the enemy here.
What AI contacts does Hamas have?
Viv, you forget the continued reading link!
The Stranger keeps fluffing this sad little group, not understanding their minuscule numbers and ineffectual tactics themselves belie the Stranger’s claim to “genocide” in Gaza. Jewish collective memory does not include merely (real) genocide, but their Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. They know the difference between genocide and urban warfare when they see it, which is why so few of them agree with the Stranger.
Yawn.
@3 criticize Israel for anything ever? You’re an antisemite. Shit all over this Jewish group? No problem. Just in case it wasn’t already obvious to everyone the issue isn’t defending the Jewish people but rather dogmatic support for American imperialism.
@5 “dogmatic support to American imperialism”…. good lord, that’s gotta be the center square on the “Far Lefty Bingo” card.
If you’d included “late-stage capitalism”, “tax Amazon”, and “privilege” you coulda swept the board in one motion. Maybe throw in “police state” for shits and giggles, too.
After Patty Murray gave us Trump the first time, I will always vote for her opponent.
@6
Don’t forget “acknowledgment of land stolen from native people” and “defund the police” for a complete Bingo card.
Sounds like a good investment to me, stock price up 120 percent over the last 6 months. Always glad to see our gov investing our hard earned $ well!
Palantir is a sketchy corporation owned by a sociopath, and they now have all of our data, 100M+ taxpayer dollars, and a mandate to aggregate our personal information in a master database that had been segregated for our security. Even if you don’t care about their work with the idf there are very good reasons to be concerned about palantir.
@6 unfortunatly Chuck M. has a trademark on “Late Stage Capitolism” so have to pay royalties to use it for the bingo card (CM is nothing if not a smart capitalist.
@6 wait do you not think the reason the US supports Israel (and Saudi) is to maintain bases of power in that region? I mean, I get you’re just trying to have a laugh at my expense, but do you really disagree on the substance?
7: Explain please.
These three things I know for certain: (1) the antiabortion movement has nothing to do with protecting babies, (2) the anti-trans panic has nothing to do with protecting women’s sports, and (3) the ongoing destruction of Gaza, more than a year after Netanyahu insisted that “victory” was mere weeks away, has nothing to do with protecting Israel.
@10 I was going to say the same thing: The master file Palantir is building for Trump will not only empower him (and future presidents) to destroy the financial and reputational life of anyone he chooses, but will also be an irresistible target for world-class hackers everywhere. So-called “information silos” exist in government for very good reasons, as MAGA-world will realize once it’s too late to save them.
14: To be clear, you’re using “panic” to describe the emotions of betrayal and helplessness a woman or girl feels when biological males as trans women win at a physical competition they would have had a shot at otherwise? Why do you so easily poo poo it?
Or answer it this way. What’s the satisfaction at winning at a sport where you have a physical advantage?
Yes, some do win over trans women. But if that were the case overall, nobody would be talking about the issue.
@15 pretty sure “panic” was in reference to the righteous outrage expressed about the issue by dudes who otherwise only think about women’s sports when they’re sharing memes mocking it
16: Pretty sure doesn’t cut it.
@15 I’ll be very brief: It’s because the panic over trans inclusion is (1) vastly overblown relative to the actual extent of trans athletes’ participation (let alone predominance) in organized sports and (2) being orchestrated in the main by out-and-proud misogynists such as Trump who have spent years, even decades, relentlessly attacking Title IX and the whole idea of gender parity in sports as unfair to males — and who in many cases can’t even mention the WNBA or the name of any prominent non-MAGA female athlete without spewing obscenity-laden sexist hate speech toward them. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that such people care less than nothing about women’s equality and that this “issue” is a cynical political ploy first and foremost. I hope that answers your question.
16: You did. No sense in belaboring over disagreements.
*19 refers to 18
@10, @14: As Bruce Schneier described, the slovenly way in which the fElon presidency’s minions collected and stored the data means the Chinese Communist Party (among other foreign organizations) may well already have easy access to it:
“This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal US data and install backdoors to allow for future access.”
(https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-national.html)
There’s no point in complaining about one company in the US when pretty much anyone in the world with the technical acumen and desire to access the data could easily do so. Russians, Chinese, numerous allies — it was all open to them, and may still be.
@21 Yes, it may already be possible — with sufficient time, motivation and specialized knowledge — to find out anything about anyone. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be deeply concerned that Palantir, at Trump’s behest, is creating a one-stop-shopping portal where all that info is quickly and easily accessible. Essentially, the entire country is being doxxed.
@21 Sure, perhaps today you can find out anything about anyone, IF you know where to look and are willing to invest time and effort in the search. I won’t dispute that. But Palantir is making all that info conveniently accessible (and infinitely sortable) in one centralized location at the Trump administration’s fingertips. Essentially the entire U.S. population is being doxxed, and Democrats are saying next to nothing in protest. They’ll soon wish they had spoken up — as will we all.
@all Sorry for the duplication. I wrote post #23 because it appeared #22 had vanished, and now it’s back. This is a VERY weird commenting system.
@22, @23, @24: Palantir has been doing this for years, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/palantirs_surve.html
Note that most of the examples given came from publicly-available data:
“If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period.
“With a name, police can also find a person’s email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it’s in the agency’s database.
“The software can map out a person’s family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too.”
The difference is that now, thanks to the fElon presidency, Palantir can track plenty of other data which used to be kept safe by the feds. (As can any number of countries and people who do not like us very much.) This is a direct result of who we elected president. We had a chance to keep this from happening. Why didn’t we?
Because folks like JVP — who didn’t care about any of the above, until a mostly-imaginary connection to Gaza was provided to them — were All Gaza, All The Time last year. And we can now see whose purpose that really served. Abandon Harris, the Stranger, Sawant — take your bow. This is what listening to you has done for us.
@25 “We had a chance to keep this from happening. Why didn’t we? … Abandon Harris, the Stranger, Sawant — take your bow. This is what listening to you has done for us.”
You have it exactly backward. The Harris campaign DIDN’T listen, and they lost. That’s why “we” didn’t keep Trump from winning–the Democratic Party doesn’t listen.
@13, We have Trump now because the Democratic Establishment decided that 4 years of Trump was better than 4 years of Progressive Democratic Socialism. Us “Little People” in Washington State overwhelmingly supported Bernie in 2016. Our entitled Senators kissed Hillary’s losing Ass. I will always vote to turf them. Hopefully the Democrats will allow progressives to primary them. That said, I will ALWAYS vote against them!
@26, @27: Yes, those ladies impertinently refusing your explicit orders is why we have Trump. How “progressive” of you. Good work, guys.
@28 you’re not very good at this
@27: ‘Us “Little People” in Washington State overwhelmingly supported Bernie in 2016.’
Evidence for which would be? How familiar are you with Washington State politics?
“Hopefully the Democrats will allow progressives to primary them.”
Yes, that’s right, you actually believe senators completing their fifth (!) and sixth (!!) terms might face significant primary challengers — and with the acquiescence of their political party, no less (!!!).
Wow. Just — wow.
“That said, I will ALWAYS vote against them!”
Murray and Cantwell were first elected to Congress in 1992. Murray has remained there ever since, whilst Cantwell made a fortune in tech’ and joined the Senate in 2001, remaining there ever since. Each has a worthy track record far too long to cite in full here, but Murray has long championed veterans, whilst Cantwell spent much of her first senatorial term ensuring Washington state would not suffer from the predations of Enron. Yet, you’ll “ALWAYS vote against them” because you’re a Hillary-hater on the level of a Sawant or a Trump, and therefore you cannot ever forgive anyone who has ever helped her. Your hateful, divisive, vindictive, and retributive approach to politics also imitates that of a Sawant or a Trump, making you every bit as much a part of our problem as they are.
@29: While I have both great confidence you have no idea what “this” even is, and you still remain totally certain that you do, I will apologize for not denoting your anger was directed specifically at the disobedient brown lady.
@30 Bernie won the caucuses by an overwhelming majority. Since Washington moved to their incumbent protection primary, I will always vote against our incumbents. I actually hope that a Republican winning a senate seat would motivate our leaders to embrace ranked choice voting.
@31: Thanks for admitting you’d rather send a Republican to support Trump (or fantasize about it, anyway) than tolerate the Democrats you despise. There’s a reason we liberals are better off just ignoring you and working for progress on our own, and you’re displaying that reason very, very clearly. If you have a complaint with how the Democratic Party chooses nominees, then you can always, you know, JOIN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. That’s how political parties work. But you won’t do that, because your whiny sense of entitlement knows no bounds, and you intend to get what you want by issuing threats, not by doing the actual labor of activism. (How’s that been working for you, again?)
@26: No amount of your fantasizing will retroactively create a situation where your choice was between “restrain Israel a little,” and “restrain Israel a lot.” Your real choice was between little or nothing, and by demanding a lot, you chose nothing by default. Americans support Israel as the only democracy in that region, home to the only capital city in that region to host Pride parades, and won’t abandon it to jihadis from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran just because you keep so demanding. “Gaza Isn’t Driving Votes,” and your refusal to admit that obvious point gets you nothing but scorn, ridicule, and defeat. I hope you enjoy them.
@32 Send one in for six years to be beaten by a real Democrat in the next election. Uh, I am a Democrat, I have been a delegate to more than one county convention.
@33: Yeah, because throwing away literal decades of senatorial seniority won’t hurt Washington State. At all. And reinforcing whatever Republican president you guys stick us with next won’t hurt our country, either. That’s how we should reward either senator’s excellent service, with a protest vote against something neither of them could do much about.
“Uh, I am a Democrat, I have been a delegate to more than one county convention.”
Joined up to fluff Bernie, did you?