Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court
Switzerland rejected Palantir on security grounds after independent journalism shed light on fundamental issues. Now the company is suing to tell its side of the story.
[Falk Steiner in Heise Online]
A series of articles by Switzerland’s Republik magazine resulted in Palantir being rejected by Swiss authorities as a potential security risk: it appears to have determined that there weren’t sufficient protections against Swiss data falling into American hands, which in turn led other governments to question use of the firm for the same reason. Now Palantir is taking them to court to force them to make a “counterstatement” that would correct the record.
Of course, this has brought more international attention to Republik’s stories than they would otherwise have received:
“With the step to court, Palantir has generated more attention for the "Republik" reporting than the objected articles themselves could have caused – 23 years after Barbra Streisand triggered the effect named after her. And yet, there are reasons why Palantir is acting this way.”
A Swiss counterstatement doesn’t actually hinge on the correctness of the original statement: it’s apparently sufficient for another version of events to be possible. So this is more of a way for Palantir to get its own PR line out than it is to sue Republik for inaccurate reporting.
That’s important because Palantir is trying to make headway into European markets and finding it tougher than they’d like. Understandably, there’s a lot of resistance to the firm that provides surveillance powers to the likes of ICE, and whose CEO has justified “anti-woke” strategies that bolster an increasingly authoritarian regime over the last few years.
[Link]