Personal information of national disability insurance scheme participants may have ended up in controversial software company Palantir’s analytics platform as part of a massive multi-agency sharing program investigating fraud, Guardian Australia can reveal.
There have been calls to ban the use of Palantir’s software by the Australian government since May, after it implied some cultures are inferior to others in a manifesto described by one UK MP as the “ramblings of a supervillain”.
Last month, the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) denied using Palantir’s software, following questions from Guardian Australia after a freedom of information request revealed the agency had met with representatives of the company co-founded by US Trump-aligned billionaire Peter Thiel in ۲۰۲۳.
However, Guardian Australia can reveal data from the agency is being shared with the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), which has used Palantir as part of the Fraud Fusion Taskforce of ۲۵ government agencies that is responsible for investigating fraud.
The taskforce – established in ۲۰۲۲ – is led by the NDIA and Services Australia, while the ACIC is responsible for the Fraud Fusion Centre, which brings in “large volumes of information, data and intelligence” held by agencies that could be relevant to the taskforce’s work, according to documents released under freedom of information.
The ACIC last year said the agency was using “a range of specialist tools … to gather intelligence, advanced data analysis” to “identify behavioural patterns and financial activity, and access to extensive intelligence databases that provide deep insights into serious and organised crime networks”.
ACIC has paid millions in contracts to Palantir in the past few years for its software to map connections between people, and the FoI docs suggest ACIC’s capabilities include bulk data analytics and data-matching across participating agencies’ databases.
Gabrielle Josling, a data scientist and researcher, who filed a number of the freedom of information requests to participating agencies in the taskforce, attempted to obtain from the ACIC records of data from the fraud taskforce or centre being fed into Palantir’s software.
In correspondence from late August, an FoI officer revealed reluctance to process the request given “the process for ingesting one FFC dataset into Palantir generates an amount of documents that … would likely not be manageable”.
A spokesperson for the NDIA confirmed it was sharing participant information with the taskforce.
“NDIS participant information is only shared with Fraud Fusion Taskforce partners on a restricted basis where potential criminal conduct is suspected to protect participants from fraud,” a spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for the ACIC said it used “a suite of analytical tools and capabilities” and taskforce-related data collected and stored by the ACIC is consistent with the restrictions agreed with the provisioning agency.
“The contributing agency is responsible for articulating any use, handling, and disclosure restrictions to the ACIC.”
Tom Sulston, the head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, said it was “very concerning” if Palantir was being used in the assessment of potential fraud in the NDIS and similar programs.
“People using NDIS deserve the dignity of not being treated like criminals simply for accessing the services that they need to live a full life,” he said.
“The creation of such enormous aggregated datasets is a fundamentally de-humanising application of surveillance technology. That’s particularly awful when targeted at people living with disabilities, who are already regularly subjected to regular dehumanisation and indignities.”
The Greens senator and digital rights and AI spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said the FoI response revealed that “having Palantir inside any one government agency sees millions of data points ingested by this global surveillance vampire”.
“NDIS participants give their data to the agency believing it will be protected and only used to assist in their claims, having it funnelled into Palantir under the guise of fraud prevention is a deep betrayal.”
A spokesperson for Palantir said the company “builds software that helps organisations use their data to make better decisions and solve their most complex problems”.
“We are committed to supporting Australian government agencies in tackling complex challenges, including serious financial crime and fraud.”
The supermarket giant Coles announced last week it would not extend its contract with Palantir beyond ۲۰۲۷. Coles had used Palantir software in rostering, store operations and supply chain planning.
