Tech workers to protest Palantir over Immigrant Tracking

A coalition of tech workers in Silicon Valley will demonstrate outside of Palantir’s headquarters to protest the company’s assistance to the US government in creating a system to track immigrants and foreign travelers entering the country. Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center showed that Palantir, based in Palo Alto (CA), could help create a system for “extreme-vetting” of immigrants and foreign travelers entering the US. The company had also reportedly played an undisclosed role in US Customs and Border Protection intelligence. “We want to make it clear that the overall tech community is watching what Palantir does,” said Jason Prado, a software engineer at Facebook and member of the Tech Workers Coalition. The Tech Workers Coalition is organizing the Palantir demonstration. “And we want to hold the tech community overall accountable for the values that we as a community have,” Prado said.

The Tech Workers Coalition has created an online campaign to support their protests, which are apart of the 120 hours of action in the Bay Area, a set of anti-Trump protests invoking Martin Luther King Jr. in the lead up to inauguration day. The Coalition has three primary demands: join other major tech companies in pledging to never create a Muslim registry, disclose steps taken to avoid government overreach and abuse and if this not possible, dismantle databases that could be abused.