litI‘m a bit annoyed by all the „#German govs buy #Palantir products“-outrage around here. It might be unpopular, but why should police not be able to cross-reference the data legitimately in their custody? It’s about accessibility of data that is legitimately already there. Which is typically the first reason for outrage. The second one is that Thiel is furthering fascist agendas across the western world and we shouldn’t give him more money to do so. On that opinion I totally agree. But: 1/
As long as I believe in a monopoly on violence, I must consequentially also wish for effective law enforcement. That includes effective search across the information and data law enforcement legitimately retains. The problem isn’t #Palantir. It’s lack of competition. There have been calls for tender each time. The problem is that in DE gov always asks the usual suspects from Bonn and Walldorf etc and in contrast, Palantir can show working tech. 2/
The problem is that we don’t have a scalable VC ecosystem in Europe. 1st row of politics lacks the competence to select adequate guidance, just tap their networks and apparently their peers are as disconnected as they are, thus having the buying power when the need arises, but not the strategic foresight to speculatively advance a tech agenda to also have #sovereign solutions at hand when we need them. #Palantir is an alumnus of In-Q-Tel (IQT), as are Recorded Future, GitLab and many others. 3/
If you believe Wikipedia, IQT itself is a non-profit VC funded primarily from CIA budget and if you believe IQT, their mission is „(…)the transition of groundbreaking technologies from the private to the public sector to advance the national security and economic prosperity of America(…)“. It has grown an ecosystem of further VC investors that ease later series funding for startups and scaleups. Above all, it comes with great visibility into the sphere of deeptech startups and … 4/
… it comes with easier access to government contracts, which are often hard to navigate for young companies. This is an example to follow. There is no need to create fascist billionaires, but there is a need to create a working #sovereigntech ecosystem in Europe so we have the means to our needs when they arise. If we’re talking European defense funding, a European IQT-like non-profit must be part of that. In the field of open source funding @sovtechfund is a great parallel effort along the … 5/
… lines of Open Tech Fund, but on their current budget will have a hard time filling even the gap the USG will rip in to funds for security audits of critical OSS. But it’s the right way forward in strategic OSS investements. But again: this is not the same as an entity steering strategic investments in deeptech startups. It absolutely needs both and it needs both money, intel/ecosystem insight and stategic foresight so EU can be fast enough to fend for itself. Because we need to. 6/6