Imagine Sherlock Holmes got a software upgrade, moved into a data center, and invited every public record, tweet and shaky CCTV clip to tea.
That’s essentially what’s happening in parts of Germany, where police are expanding use of Palantir’s surveillance toolkit — aka Gotham — and promising that no, really, ....it’s only for catching bad guys.
Again: Sherlock. In the cloud. With a badge. Let that sink in!
Palantir’s Gotham is sold as the ultimate “bring everything together and find the thread” machine.
Feed it names, fines, criminal records, cellphone metadata, and the contents of some scanned social posts, and in a few seconds it will hand you a tidy dossier on any human being who catches a cop’s curiosity.
Add in a dash of AI, and the fantasy becomes a departmental daydream: Predictive Policing without the paperwork.
Three of Germany’s 16 federal states already use the software — Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia — with Baden-Württemberg said to be next in line.
In Bavaria the setup has a local name: VeRA, short for “overlapping systems research and analysis platform.”
In Hesse, the tool’s been around since 2017; the company rolled it out to Bavaria in 2024.
German press reports say VeRA was involved in about 100 cases by May 2025.
If you think that sounds efficient, privacy campaigners think it sounds like an automated dragnet.
The Berlin nonprofit Society for Civil Rights (GFF) lodged a constitutional complaint against Bavaria’s use — one of several routes being taken to ask courts whether a police force should be able to trawl citizens’ data with no suspicion required.
“Anyone who files a complaint, or who is a victim of a crime, or even just happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time can attract police attention via this software,” GFF lawyer Franziska Görlitz warned.
That’s a sentence you can print on a T-shirt and sleep poorly under.
The well-known hacker group Chaos Computer Club concurs.
Its spokesperson Constanze Kurz called the practice a “Palantir dragnet investigation,” arguing that police are linking data kept for different reasons and re-purposing it inside of “the deliberately opaque software of the US company Palantir, which the police will become dependent on for years.”
"Dependence" is a friendly word for “outsourcing the keys to the kingdom,” which is why Germany’s stated aim of digital sovereignty now sounds a little like asking someone to build your fence with their neighbor’s nails.
But there are defenders in the room as well...
The deputy chairman of the Police Union, Alexander Poitz, pointed to results: after the September 2024 attack on the Israeli consulate in Munich, automated data analysis reportedly helped identify patterns and “provide officers with accurate conclusions about their planned actions.”
“That is how the Munich police were able to take control of the situation relatively quickly and bring it to a conclusion,” Poitz told MDR — which is exactly the kind of sentence officials like to say into microphones while the critics prepare their subpoenas.
Palantir’s company background doesn’t help the public relations angle much either.
Owned by US billionaire Peter Thiel, and historically tied to U.S. intelligence work, the firm’s projects have long made civil libertarians twitch.
Even though the computer source code for the German installations is stored on German servers, journalists have flagged the messy reality that copies could, in theory, migrate to places beyond the country’s legal reach.
...Cue constitutional eyebrows!
Political optics also deepen the drama.
Germany’s new coalition declared that “digital policy is power politics” and pledged to reduce dependencies on foreign tech.
Yet Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) has refused to rule out buying Palantir tools for national agencies — a shift from his predecessor Nancy Faeser’s 2023 skepticism.
Which is to say: the state vows digital autonomy while window-shopping for the surveillance equivalent of an all-you-can-eat data buffet.
Meanwhile, public pressure continues to bubble...
An online petition on Campact garnered more than 264,000 signatures within a week, urging lawmakers to stop the software’s spread.
That’s not a small number — it’s about as big as a very determined flash mob of keyboard activists!
So where does this leave us?
With a clash of priorities that’s fundamentally modern: the police want speed and pattern recognition; civil liberties groups want constitutional safeguards; the tech vendor wants adoption; and everyone else wants not to be surprised by an algorithm while shopping at the bakery.
As Constanze Kurz and others remind us, the question may not be whether data analysis is useful — it can be — but whether a democratic society wants its tireless surveillance tool to be proprietary, opaque, and lightly regulated.
Final thought: if Gotham is the savvy detective, maybe Germany should insist that the detective show their work.
Real transparency won’t be as sexy as a dramatic headline about thwarted attacks, but it might be a better tool for a free society than handing a private company the keys to everyone’s social breadcrumb trail and calling it progress.
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