The Pentagon is moving its whistleblower-hunting system to Palantir's cloud

The Defense Counterintelligence & Security Agency is moving its Counterintelligence Analysis Software (DCIAS) into Palantir's cloud.

A poster published on LinkedIn by U.S. Special Operations Command one week ago in relation to National Insider Threat Awareness month.

Originally developed to help the U.S. Special Operations Forces combine, organize, and disseminate surveillance data as part of locating terrorists after 9/11, Palantir’s Gotham software has also played a major role in helping the Pentagon hunt down whistleblowers. Contracts between the company and the Defense Counterintelligence & Security Agency (DCSA) — which counters both spies and “insider threats”, such as future Edward Snowdens — date back nearly fifteen years, including a $5 million contract in September 2009 for “a turnkey counterintelligence (CI) analytical tool”.

On Monday, the DCSA’s Counterintelligence and Insider Threat Directorate published a justification for moving its Counterintelligence Analytical System (DCIAS) into the cloud computing environment of Palantir’s Gotham product. Estimated to provide Palantir more than $10 million in labor costs alone, the notice also explained why the products from competing companies, such as DataWalk, were supposedly insufficient. (“CI [Office of Counterintelligence] deemed DataWalk inappropriate for DCIAS due to its foreign-ownership ties.”)

The header from a limited source justification posted by the Defense Counterintelligence & Security Agency (DCSA) posted Monday on why it is circumventing the typical bidding process to award Palantir a more than $10 million contract as part of moving the DCSA Counterintelligence Analytical System (DCIAS) into the cloud environment of Palantir’s Gotham data fusion product.

In 2011, at least two years into Palantir’s counterintelligence work with the DCSA, the company was caught supporting the primary business lobby in the United States, the Chamber of Commerce, in its plot to destroy the transparency organization WikiLeaks, as well as sympathetic journalists such as Glenn Greenwald. Despite the behavior being publicly rebuked by Palantir’s self-styled billionaire socialist CEO, Alex Karp, seven years later the company was similarly exposed as central to JPMorgan’s aggressive employee surveillance program.

It is no secret that the U.S. military and its associated spy agencies lump whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner into their “insider threat” category. Indeed, they make it explicit. A January 2020 report from the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), entitled “Legal Hurdles to Insider Threat Information Sharing”, opens with the sentence:

"The large-scale theft and subsequent unauthorized release of classified information by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the arrest of Harold Martin and Reality Winner, and the Navy Yard shooting committed by Aaron Alexis all serve to highlight the risk posed by rogue members of the government’s trusted workforce - those who have been fully vetted and granted access to the nation’s most vital secrets, infrastructure, and workforce.”

The U.S. Intelligence Community could not be more transparent that it views whistleblowers such as Manning, Snowden, and Winner as “rogue members of the government’s trusted workforce”, on par with mass murderers such as Aaron Alexis. Palantir and its ‘socialist’ CEO will now play an even more central role in hunting down any future truthtellers within the U.S. military, applying the same tools developed to hunt down literal terrorists.