Some notes on how we ended up with Palantir & how to replace it - Bert Hubert's writings

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There is justified anger about governments relying on Palantir software. There are also calls to write replacement software, perhaps imbued with European values.

And I’d love for that to happen pronto, but first we need to understand a few things. It is not just the software.

Image by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash

“Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it” - Wired

From many governments’ behaviour, it is clear that they are Very Very Very Attached to Palantir. Very . It is often assumed that this is because certain politicians are enamored of Palantir’s most awful politics. Birds of a feather etc.

While this might be the case, something else is also going on.

Palantir software comes with exceptionally good hands-on support. People who will integrate all your various data sets. Data from all over the organization and country. Palantir-the-company this way acts as a valuable integrator. They make stuff happen. They deliver police investigators and other government employees the working integrated data tools they need.

Now, police and government organizations have for decades now (lamentably) decided to not invest in their own IT-capacity. A typical police organization has system administrators around, but these are not going to actively aid with police investigations. They keep the printers running, that kind of thing.

I’m very aware there are pockets of excellence within most government organizations. I’ve happened to work at and with a few even.

Now, we’d love to have more excellent computer support people in police forces and government, but for a variety of sad reasons it is not happening. For one, governments rarely pay even close to market rate for technical talent. But even if we decide that “money is not everything”, the government mostly also does not offer technical employees an inspiring environment to work and grow, nor one in which they are truly valued.

You can motivate people with sufficient coins or with job satisfaction. Governments typically on average offer good technical staff neither of these.

I’m in awe of the good technical people that do stick around at police departments & keep things working, despite everything.

The accounting trick

From what I hear, Palantir is somewhat of an accounting trick. Governments can’t shell out big money for individual employees or contractors. However, I’m told the Palantir consultants “come for free with the software ”. Or at least, they are prepaid, so that they don’t represent an hourly cost to departments using Palantir solutions.

This concept is common in other places as well, and my own company PowerDNS also sold services this way. You paid for support on the PowerDNS software but incidentally we’d solve much of your other problems as well if you asked us. We’d even solve your problems if these originated over at Microsoft or Google or Facebook. This made us very well liked among customer staff.

I’m told that the maritime industry also rents out equipment for a million dollars a day, and then all the people that operate that stuff and the professional engineers that consult with you come for free.

So this is not an unusual construction.

This makes Palantir very hard to replace

Replacing software (migrating) is something people truly madly hate already. But since Palantir effectively also delivers a capable IT support department, the pain of moving away is going to be even worse.

Which is why it rarely happens.

To displace Palantir, it is not enough to show up with equivalent software. A European less scary substitute would ALSO have to come up with free support staff, to replicate the whole experience.

Or, governments could invest in their own staff again, to be able to work with software themselves. This would be an unlikely development however since governments are very much not doing that kind of thing. But it would be great.

But what in any case will not work is just creating software and trying to win tenders. Which will not happen, since software is only a (small?) part of the solution in place, and you need to show up with the full package.

So what to do?

Journalists could be asking questions about this. How much Palantir staff is on site? Do they get to operate and integrate non-Palantir systems? Are they supervised when they access such data, or have things gotten so chummy that departments have stopped doing those four-eyes checks? (This always happens over time). How can we be sure they don’t run off with that data?

Is it true that Palantir staff forms an integral part of data operations over at departments? Is it fair to say that organizations have...