{"id":610098,"date":"2023-02-20T07:49:13","date_gmt":"2023-02-20T13:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/20\/germany-raises-red-flags-about-palantirs-big-data-dragnet\/"},"modified":"2023-02-20T07:49:13","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T13:49:13","slug":"germany-raises-red-flags-about-palantirs-big-data-dragnet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/20\/germany-raises-red-flags-about-palantirs-big-data-dragnet\/","title":{"rendered":"Germany raises red flags about Palantir\u2019s big data dragnet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \"German
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Enlarge<\/a> \/<\/span> German police officers sit in their vehicle at the Neuenburg junction of the A5 motorway and observe the traffic from France.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Britta Eder\u2019s list of phone contacts is full of people the German state considers to be criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascists, people who campaign against nuclear power, and members of the PKK, a banned militant Kurdish nationalist organization.<\/p>\n

For her clients\u2019 sake, she\u2019s used to being cautious on the phone. \u201cWhen I talk on the phone I always think, maybe I’m not alone,\u201d she says. That self-consciousness even extends to phone calls with her mother.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

But when Hamburg passed new legislation in 2019 allowing police to use data analytics software built by the CIA-backed company Palantir<\/a>, she feared she could be pulled further into the big data dragnet. A feature of Palantir\u2019s Gotham platform allows police to map networks of phone contacts, placing people like Eder\u2014who are connected to alleged criminals but are not criminals themselves\u2014effectively under surveillance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, this is the next step in police trying to get more possibilities to observe people without any concrete evidence linking them to a crime,\u201d Eder says. So she decided to become one of 11 claimants trying to get the Hamburg law annulled. Yesterday, they succeeded.<\/p>\n

A top German court ruled the Hamburg law unconstitutional and\u00a0issued<\/a> strict guidelines for the first time about how automatic data analysis tools like Palantir\u2019s can be used by police, and it warned against the inclusion of data belonging to bystanders, such as witnesses or lawyers like Eder. The ruling\u00a0said<\/a> that the Hamburg law, and a similar law in Hesse, \u201callow police, with just one click, to create comprehensive profiles of persons, groups, and circles,\u201d without differentiating between suspected criminals and people who are connected to them.<\/p>\n

The decision did not ban Palantir\u2019s Gotham tool but limited the way police can use it. \u201cEder\u2019s risk of being flagged or having her data processed by Palantir will now be dramatically reduced,\u201d says Bijan Moini, head of legal of the Berlin-based Society for Civil Rights (GFF), which brought the case to court.<\/p>\n

Although Palantir was not the ruling\u2019s target, the decision still dealt a blow to the 19-year-old company\u2019s police ambitions in Europe\u2019s biggest market. Cofounded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who remains the chairman, Palantir helps police clients connect disparate databases and pull huge amounts of people\u2019s data into an accessible well of information. But the guidance issued by Germany\u2019s court can influence similar decisions across the rest of the European Union, says Sebastian Golla, assistant professor for criminology at Ruhr University Bochum, who wrote the complaint against Hamburg\u2019s Palantir law. \u201cI think this will have a bigger impact than just in Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n WIRED<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Enlarge \/ German police officers sit in their vehicle at the Neuenburg junction of the A5 motorway and observe the traffic from France. Britta Eder\u2019s list of phone contacts is full of people the German state considers to be criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascists, people who campaign against<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":610099,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23338,2030,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-610098","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"category-raises","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}