This doesn't mean it's wrong to warn people about Palantir. But our warning shouldn't focus on what the company's tech can do. Our warning should co-cern the fact that that tech is deployed at all. It simply doesn't matter whether Palantir's newtangled systems are more scarily omniscient than the old ones.

If the people to whom this technology is applied include undocumented immigrants in the US or Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, then it is almost immaterial whether the algorithm picks out the "right" people. Those in power have already decided that there are essentially no "wrong" targets in these groups. Palantir is necropolitics, pure and simple. The data sets are merely window dressing. It's not the fact that the data miner might miscategorize someone that makes an individual a victim of Palantir, but rather the fact that Palantir is categorizing them at all.