Palantir held Hack Week to add new controls to the software used by ICE

Hosted by Palantir A Breakout week this spring in an attempt to convert Internal panic On the company’s work with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have introduced more explicit oversight of products used in the Trump administration’s anti-immigration campaign, according to materials reviewed by WIRED.

New tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, with more information about how their employees use Palantir. Organizations can set up “behavioral” alerts, such as filtering data sets, and searching session logs for individual users. It also allows organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information.

Palantir declined to comment.

Palantir regularly Holds breakout weekschallenging engineers from across the company to experiment and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir’s work with DHS and ICE, which has been criticized by both outside critics and insiders Who are afraid of corporate tools It empowers the Trump administration’s campaign against immigration.

“This effort embodies the culture of Palantir where I have chosen to work,” Ted Mabry, Palantir’s chief business officer, wrote in an email to employees in early May. “You have the choice to lash out at sarcastic emojis in stagnant channels, to distrust your peers, and to choose to believe that narratively motivated outsiders who lie about Palantir’s work are more honest than the people who show up to do this work every day. Or you can have the courage to engage and innovate.”

Bringing together employees from across Palantir, this year’s Hack Week focused on building new tools to provide additional oversight of user behavior on platforms like Foundry, the company’s platform. Data integration and analysis tool.

Palantir’s work with ICE has grown significantly over the past year. Last year, WIRED reported that ICE paid the company $30 million to build a product It’s called the “immigration system.” It would provide “near-real-time visibility” to self-deportations out of the United States. It is too It has been reported The company has built a separate tool called Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting for Action (ELITE) that creates maps of individuals who have been identified. Targeted for deportation.

Some of the new tools created during hack week have already been deployed, and others are scheduled to roll out later this year, according to an email reviewed by WIRED. (“These tools significantly expand the usability of audit logs and checkpoints, not only on[Palantir’s DHS contract]but anywhere Foundry operates in highly sensitive environments,” one team leader wrote.)

“This hack week demonstrated that Palantir can turn internal concern about the work (in the DHS contract) into additional platform-level safeguards,” the team leader wrote in the May email. “Instead of walking away from challenging work, business engineers spread across the company wanted to jump into the breakthrough.”

Palantir’s involvement with ICE faced harsh internal backlash earlier this year after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Internal Slack conversations Reviewed by WIRED Show employees questioning business ethics and demanding more transparency.

“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” one worker wrote at the time. “I’ve read stories of people being arrested who were seeking asylum without an order to leave the country, had no criminal record, and were constantly in contact with the authorities. There’s literally no reason to be arrested. Surely we’re not helping to do that?”