Lawmakers demand Denver company provide information about U.S. contracts
Ten Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Denver-based Palantir on Monday demanding that the tool company answer questions about its expanding federal contracts under the Trump administration The letter cited a New York Times article in May that released the Trump administration had broadened Palantir s work across the leadership with the company receiving more than million in federal regime spending since President Donald Trump took office Personnel announced the White House was laying the groundwork partly by using Palantir mechanism to consolidate statistics across the ruling body so it could potentially compile a master list of personal information on Americans The letter which was reviewed by the Times was drafted by Sen Ron Wyden of Oregon and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York Other members of Congress who signed included Sens Elizabeth Warren and Edward J Markey of Massachusetts We write to demand information about reports that Palantir is enabling and profiting from serious violations of federal law by the Trump administration which is amassing troves of figures on Americans the letter mentioned The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of content points on people through administration databases including their bank account numbers and curative maintains Trump could potentially use such information to police immigrants and punish critics Democratic lawmakers and others have mentioned Privacy advocates novice unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block statistics access After the Times published the article about Palantir the company revealed that the review is blatantly untrue and published a blog post denying it was a vendor on a project to unify databases across federal agencies In a comment Monday the company declared Palantir does not build surveillance tool and we are not building a central database on Americans nor will we Related Articles Massive Google Cloud outage disrupts popular internet services Could details center boom threaten Colorado s water supply and state goals Judge wrestles with far-reaching remedy proposals in US antitrust episode against Google Denver s city website back online after nearly eight hours This Memorial Day commit to not becoming the Worst Generation Opinion In the letter Monday the Democratic lawmakers appealed that Palantir preserve emails and other records in anticipation of future litigation and congressional oversight The letter included questions for Alex Karp Palantir s CEO such as asking him for a list of the company s current contracts with the federal leadership The letter also urged whether Palantir had sought or received assurances from the U S governing body that its executives board members and employees will not be held responsible for violations of federal law This article originally appeared in The New York Times
