One of the UK’s biggest corporations is profiting from ICE

“We are very keen to help Germany as it begins this journey to remilitarisation,” declared Louis Mosley, grandson of ur-British fascist Oswald Mosley and the current executive vice president of Palantir Technologies UK and Europe, in a November interview with Bloomberg’s Tom Mackenzie.  

“If you were to get the AFD in power in Germany, [a party] which Germany’s own security services define as ‘extremist’, would that be a government that Palantir would work with?” asks Mackenzie later in the interview. 

“That’s a very difficult hypothetical question,” Mosley replies.  

He needn’t bother actually saying it; we already know the answer. From Israel to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Palantir will be there to support any “democratically elected” regime with the surveillance systems it needs to perpetrate genocide and Gestapo-like domestic terror – all in order to “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority”, as CEO Alex Karp puts it. 

Last Sunday, Mosley appeared as a panelist on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show, weeks after Palantir signed a £240m contract with the UK Ministry of Defence and just days after DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good three times in the face while carrying out its fascistic occupation of the US interior. Rest assured that Mosley was given every opportunity to repeatedly state that we (read: the west) must "rediscover hard power” – and was never once asked to account for the mass death, family separation, and immiseration produced in his working hours. 

Palantir’s leadership – Mosley, Karp, Peter Thiel, and others – are remarkably cartoonish representatives of this terrifying and overwhelming moment. Each day, it seems, ideologically committed defence-tech psychos accelerate their AI takeover of the military-industrial complex and make deeper inroads into new markets. 

But while Palantir projects a totalising, invisible, inevitable, and all-powerful image, it’s important to remember that it, and other companies like it, are just one node in the modern national security state. 

At its core, Palantir is a software company that organises data and spits out connections. It doesn’t provide the original data, it doesn’t build hardware, and it doesn’t supply mercenary forces to carry out atrocities. Palantir’s contributions to human suffering are only as effective as what happens upstream, downstream, and alongside its software. 

ICE, for example, relies on data supplied by RELX, the UK's 15th largest company. Formed by the 1993 merger of a UK newspaper publisher with a Dutch science publisher, RELX is now a massive multi-national company based in London, generating among the highest shareholder returns in the FTSE 100. 

Of course, only a small percentage of its earnings now come from print. In 1994, RELX entered the data brokerage business when it purchased LexisNexis, a software and data company known for its legal research and news aggregation products used in universities, libraries, law schools and law firms around the world. 

A decade later, the company bet big on the rising risk management sector during the war on terror. In 2004, RELX (then known as Reed Elsevier) acquired Florida-based information technology company Sesint for $775m and placed it within the LexisNexis Risk Management subsidiary. Sesint’s value came from its unparalleled network of databases – integrated into a product named Accurint – that for the first time brought together information held by local, state, and federal government agencies, with private consumer information purchased from institutions like banks and insurance companies. Law enforcement agencies were particularly interested in the surveillance possibilities presented by this mass of information. 

Now, twenty years later, Accurint is the flagship product of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and risk is the biggest and most profitable division of RELX. 

The Department of Homeland Security has had contracts for Accurint since at least the first Trump administration. This gives the deportation machine access to data from over 10,000 sources of information, enabling automated mapping, image matching, real-time phone searches, license plate searches, names of relatives, past residences, utility bills, telephone records, property records, criminal records and more. LexisNexis’s recent transformation into an AI company has made mass surveillance and state terror easier than ever. 

LexisNexis’ current contract with DHS is due to end next month, meaning this is an ideal time to revive and intensify past pressure campaigns against the company – and see it permanently end its relationship with the US government. As a recent article in The Nation points out, LexisNexis would be a clear target for a consumer boycott, given that many of its legal research and news aggregation products are used so widely.  

But just as Palantir’s ability to power the West is constrained by other links in the white supremacy chain, the structure of RELX as a multi-national corporation also creates weaknesses – and therefore opportunities for organisers to exert even more pressure.   

The smallest but fastest-growing arm of RELX is its events division, run by its Richmond-based subsidiary RX Global. It’s notable that RX organises the annual London Book Fair, scheduled for March, as well as other major events around the world like New York Comic Con. I’m sure many people would be interested to know that these events are tied to a company facilitating ICE terror, and would perhaps decide not to attend. 

With the UK and governments around the world laying out the red carpet to American military tech, we have to continue to insist on an internationalist understanding of resistance at each and every turn. After all, as Mosley said on the BBC, “the world’s on fire”. ▼