Palantir’s CEO slams Big Tech’s commercial surveillance while defending government surveillance

Article by Brian Fung, CNN Business.

Washington (CNN Business) The CEO of Palantir took a big swipe at Silicon Valley on Tuesday as the software and data analysis company submitted its paperwork to go public, aligning itself with its government clients and deriding a perceived culture of elitism in the Bay Area.

In a letter included in Palantir’s S-1 filing, CEO Alex Karp painted a portrait of Big Tech as fair-weather partners of the public sector and socially disconnected from reality. He sneered at what he described as a commercial data-mining industry out of control, while portraying Palantir — which itself has been criticized for empowering government spying — as a principled actor.

“Our society has effectively outsourced the building of software that makes our world possible to a small group of engineers in an isolated corner of the country,” Karp wrote. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software. But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires.” […]

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