Largest ‘women in tech’ conference, Grace Hopper Celebration, renounces Palantir as a sponsor due to concerns over its work with the ICE

Grace Hopper Celebration conference, which is the world’s largest conference for women in tech has said that it has dropped Palantir as a sponsor due to its concerns with the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This news came after concerned civilians published a petition on Change.org demanding that AnitaB.org, the organization for women in computing that produces the Grace Hopper Celebration conf, should renounce Palantir as a sponsor. At the time of writing 326 people had signed the petition; their aim being to reach 500.

The petition reads, “Funding well-respected and impactful events such as GHC is one of the ways in which Palantir can try to buy positive public sentiment. By accepting Palantir’s money, proudly displaying them as a sponsor, and giving them a platform to recruit, AnitaB.org is legitimizing Palantir’s work with ICE to GHC’s attendees, enabling ICE’s mission, and helping Palantir minimize its role in human rights abuses.”

The petition called on AnitaB.org to:

• Drop Palantir as a sponsor for GHC 2019 and future conferences
• Release a statement denouncing the prior sponsorship and Palantir’s involvement with ICE
• Institute and publicly release an ethics vetting policy for future corporate sponsors and recruiters

Several activists and women in tech had urged Grace Hopper Celebration to renounce Palantir as its sponsor.

Following this open opprobrium, AnitaB.org Vice President of Business Development and Partnership Success, Robert Read released a statement yesterday: “At AnitaB.org we do our best to promote the basic rights and dignity of every person in all that we do, including our corporate sponsorship and events program. Palantir has been independently verified as providing direct technical assistance that enables the human rights abuses of asylum seekers and their children at US southern border detention centers. Therefore, at this time, Palantir will no longer be a sponsor of Grace Hopper Celebration 2019.”

Prior to Grace Hopper Celebration, UC Berkeley’s Privacy Law Scholars Conference dropped Palantir as sponsor. This was because of the discomfort of many in the community with the company’s practices, including among the program committee that selects papers and awards. Lesbians Who Tech, a leading LGBTQ organization, followed suit, confirming their boycott of Palantir with The Verge. This was also because members of their community approached them to drop Palantir as a sponsor seeing its recent contract work with the US government.

“Members of our community (the LGBTQ community) contacted us with concern around Palantir’s participation with the job fair,” a representative of Lesbians in tech said, “because of the recent news that the company’s software has been used to aid ICE in effort to gather, store, and search for data on undocumented immigrants, and reportedly playing a role in workplace raids.”

Palantir is involved in conducting raids on immigrant communities as well as in enabling workplace raids: Mijente

According to reports, Palantir’s mobile app FALCON is being used by ICE to carry out raids on immigrant communities as well as to enable workplace raids.

In May this year, new documents released by Mijente, an advocacy organization, revealed that Palantir was responsible for the 2017 operation that targeted and arrested family members of children crossing the border alone. The documents show a huge contrast to what Palantir said its software was doing. As part of the operation, ICE arrested 443 people solely for being undocumented. Palantir’s case management tool (Investigative Case Management) was shown to be used at the border to arrest undocumented people discovered in investigations of children who crossed the border alone, including the sponsors and family members of these children.

Several open source communities, activists and developers have been strongly demonstrating against Palantir for their involvement with ICE. This includes Entropic, who is debating the idea of banning Palantir employees from participating in the project. Back in August 2018, the Lerna team had taken strong stand against ICE by modifying its MIT license to ban companies who have collaborated with ICE from using Lerna. Last month, a group of Amazon employees sent out an internal email to the We Won’t Build it mailing list, calling on Amazon to stop working with Palantir.

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