Partnering for Peace: Surveillance Rebrands in Times of Crisis
In this post, Aaron Martin reflects on his article ‘Aidwashing Surveillance: Critiquing the Corporate Exploitation of Humanitarian Crises’, which appeared in the 21(1) issue of Surveillance & Society.
At this year’s Copenhagen Democracy Summit in May 2023, Alex Karp, CEO of the controversial American data analytics firm Palantir, sat on stage alongside Danish politician, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to discuss the headiest of topics: “is the free world still in the lead in technology?”
Their exchange centered on why the world needs “a technological alliance of democracies” to shape the future of artificial intelligence (AI) to counter “the malign use of technologies by authoritarian regimes” and “the adoption of digital infrastructure made in China”. Rasmussen, himself a former Prime Minister of Denmark and a former Secretary General of NATO, opened his remarks by thanking the Palantir executive for his “courage”, including a recent trip to Kyiv (“one of the first CEOs to do so”), where Palantir had offered software to Ukrainian forces. In turn, the CEO emphasized that “software is not theoretical” and that governments ought “to start buying software that’s been proven on the battlefield”, reminding the audience that the West’s primary technological advantage over Russia and China is in “institutional enterprise [war] software especially AI”.
These themes — data, surveillance, conflict, and aid — are ones that I have been reflecting on since 2018, and form the core of a recent dialogue in Surveillance and Society in which I ask: what does the surveillance industry stand to gain from getting involved in humanitarian crises?
Before the war in Ukraine, Palantir made waves in 2019 when it announced it would be working with the World Food Programme — the world’s largest humanitarian organization — to help the UN agency tackle global food insecurity as part of a five-year partnership to solve complex supply chain challenges. Activists were quick to point out the dissonance between Palantir’s core business (assisting spy agencies and defense ministries with data problems) and humanitarian imperatives. They also spotlighted Palantir’s checkered human rights record, including facilitating controversial migrant deportations by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.
Still, resistance to the initiative was short-lived, not only because the logistics focus of the partnership made traditional privacy critiques less compelling, but also due to public attention shifting to the COVID-19 pandemic (in which Palantir was — and still is — actively involved in). Nonetheless, the reputational benefits of the partnership for Palantir have been invaluable, particularly after the World Food Programme was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2020.
Palantir representatives go to great lengths to stress they are not a surveillance firm, which allows them to distinguish their software from “surveillance AI”. Companies like Clearview AI, however, are very much in the surveillance business. The American provider of facial recognition software is also very active in Ukraine, with 14 agencies reportedly using its services. Clearview AI has likewise found opportunity in aidwashing its software, which ought to ring alarm bells — the company refuses to pay fines for repeated data breaches elsewhere in Europe.
As crises grow and humanitarian needs increase, it is certain that the surveillance-industrial complex will continue to find opportunity in aid partnerships. It is incumbent upon critical scholars to understand why humanitarian projects appeal to surveillance firms and what the wide-ranging implications of the surveillance-humanitarian nexus are.
