Activists from the Palestine solidarity faction of Shut The System took action at Palantir Technology’s London office in Soho Square this morning. They destroyed entrances, glass panels, security cameras and ID card readers, then doused the facade in red paint to symbolise the blood of murdered Palestinians. This action was taken in response to the company’s intense surveillance of Palestinians to profit from the genocide in Gaza, along with its controversial contract with the NHS.
Palantir is one of the world’s largest data mining and spy-tech companies, providing artificial intelligence to the Israeli military to escalate its assaults on Palestinians. Meanwhile, it is aggressively expanding its operations in British public institutions, including the NHS for which it faces strong opposition among health workers.
A Shut The System spokesperson said: “The UK government is deepening its 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.”
In early 2024, as the brutal assault on all life and infrastructure in Palestine raged, 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 which scrapes data gathered from the surveillance of Palestinians and places them in AI driven ‘kill chains’, further muddying 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 ethinic cleansing of Palestine.
The company won a controversial £330,000,000 contract to create a centralised data management platform for the NHS, as well as 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 colleges, along with 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. In this regard, Shut The System stands in solidarity with the UK health workers resisting Palantirs’ involvement in the NHS.
Palantir was created with funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm co-founded by Peter Thiell, a man with a long history of financial support for politicians who promote christian nationalist and white supremacist politics, including his mentorship of James Vance. The firm plays a central role in Trump’s White House, including taking on a recent ten billion dollar contract with the US Army and a thirty million dollar contract to play a central role on ICE’s brutal immigration crack down.
This action comes a week after Shut The System took international direct action in London, Paris, Hamburg, Geneva and Vienna against Barclays, Europe’s largest banking investor in fossil fuels and BlackRock, the world’s second largest investor in fossil fuels.
About Shut The System:
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Shut The System is an underground sabotage and direct action group targeting the power holders underpinning the climate emergency and imperialism. Unlike our targets, we are non-violent – we will never physically harm a person or living being. We do not consider the destruction of machinery to be violence. We consider it necessary. We take the necessary steps to end violence.
FACT-CHECKING SUPPORT:
Address of action:
Palantir Technologies UK Ltd, 20 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QR
Palantir UK: https://www.palantir.com/contact/
Companies House:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07042994
