More and more federal states are relying on the controversial Gotham surveillance software from the American company Palantir or planning to use it. While Bavaria, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia are already actively working on it, Baden-Württemberg will soon introduce it. Even the federal government – i.e. the BKA and the federal police – does not rule out procurement. Officially, the software promises to link a huge amount of data in seconds and thus create perpetrator profiles faster. In Bavaria, for example, the system operates under the name “VeRA” and, according to the Ministry of the Interior, it has been used in about a hundred cases since May 2025, including the attack on the Israeli consulate in Munich in September 2024. Meanwhile, in 2023, the Federal Constitutional Court drew clear boundaries: it is unconstitutional to carry out preventive, automated data analysis without an identifiable threat. Such software should only be used in specific, verifiable threat situations, and even then only under strict conditions. These requirements forced Hesse and Hamburg to rewrite their police laws at the time. A constitutional complaint is currently pending in North Rhine-Westphalia.
But the reality shows a different picture: While politicians emphasize that they insist on the Karlsruhe limits, states are gradually expanding their use. Critics such as the Society for Civil Liberties (GFF) and the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) warn that opaque “data mining” procedures have long since arrived in day-to-day operations, often without those involved ever knowing they have been vetted.
Moreover, Palantir is an American company with close ties to the military and intelligence services. Although the countries emphasize that the data is stored in Germany, critics point out that full protection against outflows to the US can be virtually unguaranteed. This means that the mission directly clashes with the traffic light coalition’s promises to expand digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on foreign tech companies. It was originally referred to as a high-tech weapon against terrorism and organized crime, but there are growing reports that Palantir’s systems are being used for relatively minor crimes. This threatens to neglect the central constitutional appropriation – a central constitutional requirement. With each additional state that relies on Gotham, the legally and politically accepted boundaries are shifting. Instead of respecting the red lines drawn by the Federal Constitutional Court, the trend seems to be toward the normalization of comprehensive, automated personal vetting, powered by a non-transparent, patented U.S. black box.
If this development is not halted or at least slowed down by radical transparency and control mechanisms, Palantir could become in Germany within a few years what has long been a reality in the United States: an invisible but ubiquitous surveillance apparatus whose data power can hardly be politically controlled.
Translated and edited by Hans Seckler