Palantir’s tech under scrutiny for use in Iran
Silicon Valley billionaire — and Donald Trump supporter — Peter Thiel has emerged as an unlikely player in the international debate over Iran’s nuclear deal with six world powers.
Thiel’s big-data engine, Palantir Technologies, is at the heart of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s system for verifying Iran’s compliance with the landmark 2015 agreement, according to officials familiar with the program. The accord lifted years of punishing sanctions on the Islamic Republic in exchange for curbs on its ability to develop nuclear weapons.
Trump’s scrapping of the accord Tuesday not only angered the other signatories — China, Russia, Germany, France and Britain — but it also is expected to hamstring the atomic energy agency’s sophisticated ability to track the use of uranium in Iran and around the world, according to Ernest Moniz, who helped negotiate the deal as energy secretary.
“We have a completely unique and unparalleled intrusive verification regime that was not there before the agreement,” Moniz said on PBS ahead of Trump’s announcement. “The No. 1 downside is that we lose this regime.”
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged
Trump not to scupper the accord during recent visits to Washington. Macron warned over the weekend that abrogation by the U.S. could lead to war.
Palantir has spent years modifying its predictive-policing software for inspectors at the agency, which was founded in 1957 to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The tool is at the analytical core of its new $50 million Mosaic platform, turning databases of classified information into maps that help inspectors visualize ties between the people, places and material involved in nuclear activities, agency documents show.
That sets up Palantir, which Thiel and his partners built with CIA funding, as the method of choice for assessing the documents that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims to have detailing Iran’s secret efforts to build a bomb.
While experts say Netanyahu revealed little new, parties involved want the 55,000 files and 183 CDs, which he says Mossad agents stole in Tehran, vetted through the atomic energy agency.
The “dirty” or unstructured data obtained by Mossad, which prides itself on deception, could serve as a stress test for Palantir’s nuclear analytics. Even a small amount of false information could cause a flurry of unnecessary snap inspections, said Ali Vaez, a former Federation of American Scientists official who runs the International Crisis Group’s Iran Project.
“Turning the access issue into a ‘gotcha’ exercise might very well be the ulterior motive,” Vaez said. “The more the issue appears as a fishing expedition, the harder it will be for Iran to open its doors to inspectors.”
Iran refuted Netanyahu’s allegations, calling his presentation, which was carried live by American cable news networks, “cartoonish.” However, Trump’s issue with the deal isn’t compliance — the agency has certified Iran’s work 10 times — it’s that it doesn’t address the country’s missile program or regional actions.
Palantir’s role at the atomic energy agency, which has access to information that governments don’t, has come under increasing scrutiny since the company revealed a worker’s misuse of Facebook data in March, according to diplomats and international officials. Also of concern for an international agency known for its independence are Thiel’s close personal ties to Trump, these people said.
Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor, dined at the White House with Trump and the Israeliborn co-chief executive officer of Oracle Corp., Safra Catz, just hours after the president spoke with Netanyahu about Iran on April 4.
A deputy White House press secretary, Lindsay Walters, declined to comment on what was discussed at the dinner. Palantir also declined to comment. An atomic energy agency spokesman said that its data-mining program operates in “a secure environment” and within its “existing legal framework.”
Palantir’s software helps the agency plan and justify unscheduled probes, which have totaled 60 in Iran since the agreement came into force in 2016. The amount of information available to inspectors that Palantir can process has jumped thirtyfold in three years to an estimated 400 million “digital objects” around the world, including social media feeds and satellite photographs inside Iran.
These enhanced investigative abilities, which are inextricably linked with the Iran deal, have raised concern that the agency may overstep the boundary between nuclear monitoring and intelligence-gathering.
Historically, inspectors from the agency have worked more like atomic accountants, tracking stockpiles of fissile material to ensure it isn’t diverted for weapons. But new methods of inspection — from Palantir’s analytics to mass spectrometry — have turned them into potential cybersleuths.
Russia’s envoy for nonproliferation issues, Vladimir Yermakov, said last month that the growing powers of the atomic energy agency are justified only “if the safeguards system remains objective, depoliticized, technically credible, clear to the member states and based on rights and obligations.”
Other countries are also starting to worry about the the agency’s expanding arsenal of surveillance tools. The Non-Aligned Group, which includes Brazil and India, said the agency’s “integrity and credibility” are at stake.
Of equal concern is the false data that “predictive-analysis” systems like Palantir’s can generate — either by accident or design, according to Andreas Persbo, who runs Vertic, a London company that advises governments on verification issues.
“You will generate a false return if you add a false assumption into the system without making the appropriate qualifier,” Persbo said. “You’ll end up convincing yourself that shadows are real.”