On Thursday, 9 October, activists from the Palestine solidarity faction of Shut The System targeted Palantir Technology’s London office. They destroyed entrances, glass panels, security cameras and ID card readers. Activists then doused the front of the building in red paint to symbolise the blood of murdered Palestinians.

They took the action in response to the company’s intense surveillance of Palestinians and its controversial contract with the NHS.

Palantir is one of the world’s largest data mining and spy-tech companies. It provides artificial intelligence to the Israeli military to escalate its assaults on Palestinians. Meanwhile, it’s aggressively expanding its operations in British institutions, including the NHS. This faces strong opposition among health workers.

A Shut The System spokesperson said:

The UK government is deepening it’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide by encouraging Palantir to embed itself deeper into the UK’s civil infrastructure. As such, Shut The System is given no choice but to take direct action in order to materially disrupt Palantir’s operation in the UK, and raise the public’s awareness of the nature of a company that could soon be accessing our most personal data at the heart of the NHS.

Brutal assault on life

In early 2024, Palantir announced a strategic partnership with the IOF, agreeing to:

harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war related missions.

This partnership has involved supplying the IOF with AI software that scrapes data gathered from the surveillance of Palestinians. It places them in AI-driven ‘kill chains’ which further muddies the lines of accountability, as IOF soldiers pursue the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in defiance of international law. Palantir directly profits from enabling the IOF to pursue the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The company won a controversial £330m contract to create a centralised data management platform for the NHS. It also won contracts with British police departments and social services. The NHS contract caused outrage amongst health workers who are forced to witness the relentless killing of their Palestinian colleagues, and the targeted destruction of all health infrastructure in Palestine.

They maintain that a company with such dubious ethics should not be trusted with the sensitive personal data of the UK public. Shut The System stands in solidarity with the UK health workers resisting Palantir’s involvement in the NHS.

White supremacists

In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, helped fund the creation of Palantir. The Co-founder, Peter Thiell, has a long history of financial support for politicians who promote Christian nationalist and white supremacist politics. The firm also plays a central role in Trump’s White House. This includes taking on a recent $10bn contract with the US army, and a $30m contract to play a central role in ICE’s brutal immigration crackdown.

This action took place a week after Shut The System took direct international action in London, Paris, Hamburg, Geneva, and Vienna. It targeted Barclays, Europe’s largest banking investor in fossil fuels and BlackRock, the world’s second largest investor in fossil fuels.

Feature image via Shut The System

By HG

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