by The monitoring software called Gotham, which was developed by the US company Palantir, is charged as an all-rounder: gigantic amounts of data are merged at lightning speed.
It only takes a few seconds to fulfill the curiosity of a police officer: name, age, address, fines, criminal register. In combination with selected mobile phones and the content of scanned social media channels, a comprehensive profile of a person immediately appears.
With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), the monitoring program developed by the US technology company seems to realize the dreams of police and secret services.
Three of the 16 states of Germany are already using Gotham: Bavaria, Hesse and Nordhein-Westphalia. Baden-Württemberg plans to implement it soon.
According to data protection lawyers and civil rights organizations, however, there is a major problem: together with those who are suspected of crime, it can also pursue innocent people.
The German non -profit group company for civil rights (GFF) is basically against the use of programs such as Palantir. For this reason, it has submitted a constitutional complaint against the large -scale data analysis in Bavaria.
“Anyone who submits a complaint or is a victim of a crime or is only at the wrong time at the wrong time can attract the police’s attention via this software,” said GFF lawyer Franziska Görlitz.
According to the organization based in Berlin, such an unlimited analysis of data violates the fundamental right to information and the confidentiality of telecommunications, which is guaranteed in the German constitution.
Anyone who appears on the police radar about this so -called data mining knows nothing about it. According to the current law, the police in Bavaria can use the Palantir software, even if there is no danger. In this way, they ignore standards that apply in neighboring Hesse after a successful constitutional complaint by the GFF in 2023. The Federal Constitutional Court must decide a similar complaint against the state of North Hein-Westphalia.
Chaos Computer Club criticizes an opaque software
The Hacker Association Chaos Computer Club supports the constitutional complaint against Bavaria. His spokesman Constanze Kurz spoke of a “Palantir dragnet examination”, in which the police combined separately stored data for very different purposes than the originally intended.
“This is reason enough for this automated mass analysis not to become an everyday instrument for the police. The data collected also end up in the intentionally opaque software of the US company Palantir, on which the police become dependent for years,” said Kurz.
The software company of the US billionaire Peter Thiel made his software available for Bavaria in 2024. It has been in operation in Hesse since 2017. The entrepreneur with German roots and New Zealand citizenship has the call to pursue authoritarian goals and maintain close contact with President Donald Trump and his political circle. US intelligence agencies and the military have long worked with the Gotham program.
In Germany, the Palantir software contains various names, such as Hessendata or Vera in Bavaria – an acronym for “overlapping system research and analysis platform”. According to the Deutscher Zeitung Süddeutsche Zeitung And public broadcaster NDR and WDR, Vera had already used Vera in about 100 cases by May 2025.
One of them was the attack on the Israeli consulate in Munich in September 2024. The deputy chairman of the police tax, Alexander Poitz, said that the automated data analysis made it possible to identify certain movements of certain perpetrators and to give the civil servants precisely concludes on their planned measures.
“In this way, the Munich police were able to take control of the situation relatively quickly and bring them to a conclusion,” Poitz told Public Sender MDR. The broadcaster reported that the US company had been granted unlimited access to the Bavarian police data files in order to bring the systems together.
The computer source code is stored on servers in Germany. However, critics point out that, according to the media, there is no guarantee that copies find their way to the USA.
Berlin: “Digital politics is power policy”
The obvious and growing dependence on foreign technology giants such as Palantir contradicts the declared efforts in Germany. The new government, which included the “Digital Policy Policics” in their coalition agreement at the beginning of this year in Central Law-Christian-Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats of Center Links (SPD):
“We want a digital sovereign Germany. This will reduce digital dependencies by developing key technologies, protecting standards, protecting and expanding digital infrastructure. We will achieve reliable value chains for key industries that are integrated at European level, from raw materials to chips to hardware and software.”
Nevertheless, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) seems to keep his options open after he has previously refused to exclude the purchase of Palantir software for the Federal Criminal Police and the Federal Police.
Dobrindt breaks with the line of his predecessor Nancy Faeser (SPD), who rejected the use of these programs in 2023.
The constitutional complaint of the GFF against the use of Palantir seems to have strong public support. On the German online petition platform Campact, an appeal for politicians, the use of the software in
Germany was signed by more than 264,000 people within a week from July 30th.
This article was originally written in German.
