EXCLUSIVE: How Palantir found itself used in the wake of the Christchurch massacre
New Zealand Police's"free trial" of Palantir software, the company's increasing presence domestically, and who helped make it happen
New Zealand Police used software from controversial software firm Palantir as part of their response to the March 2019 Christchurch massacre, Exit From Affco can reveal.
Beginning shortly after the massacre and ending on December 15, 2019, the Police’s High Tech Crime Group “had access to a Palantir platform” to “analyse data including social media returns”, according to information the Police released in response to an Official Information Act (OIA) request from Exit From Affco.
The Police were given a trial of the Palantir software shortly after the Christchurch massacre, but could not reach a long-term agreement with the software vendor as the Police were unable to afford Palantir’s asking price for the product, a source with knowledge of the matter told Exit From Affco.
In 2023, the Police also considered Palantir’s Gotham platform alongside other providers for an intelligence and data search system but cancelled the project due to supposed ICT workload concerns, according to Radio New Zealand.
Founded in 2003, Palantir provides software which specialises collating and analysing data to governments and private companies alike.
The company’s two main offerings are Palantir Gotham, designed for defence and intelligence purposes, and Palantir Foundry, used for civil government and commercial uses, but they often create custom software for clients for more specific use cases, especially the US government.
The company has long been controversial for its services and clients, with critics especially concerned about surveillance, data collection, data sovereignty, and where that all that information they handle ends up going.
Hiding in plain sight
Social media and the usage of it by Christchurch attacker Brenton Tarrant prior to the shooting has been a key issue in subsequent investigations into the massacre, and the Police’s use of Palantir to analyse social media content could have been an attempt at course correcting after prior law enforcement and intelligence failures.
The final report of the New Zealand’s royal commission into the massacre wrote that the survivors and victims’ relatives felt that “if Public sector agencies had monitored social media, this may have alerted them to the potential threat” and that they “did not understand why [Tarrant]’s social media was not monitored.”
Prior to the massacre, Tarrant was in numerous Facebook groups affiliated with Australia’s far-right movement, and was Facebook friends with several influential Australian far-right figures.
An employee of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) – New Zealand’s domestic security agency – saw Facebook posts made by Tarrant in a report that was made some time in 2018, but did not believe they warranted escalating the matter, according to the Arotake review – the SIS’ own investigation into its actions.
The final report of the government’s royal commission (a type of government inquiry in Commonwealth monarchies) into the massacre identified the employee as having belonged to the SIS’ Combined Threat Assessment Group branch – which is responsible for assessing threats and preparing reports for decision makers – and said the employee claimed to have seen the posts in 2018.
The inquiry accused the SIS employee’s memory of being “awry” and claimed to have been satisfied that “the employee could not have seen these posts before 15 March 2019”, the date of the massacre, because the SIS claimed to have not found any report which included Tarrant’s Facebook posts.
In the 48 hours prior to the shooting, Tarrant posted a flood of anti-immigration and fascist content to his social media pages. He also posted photos of firearms, magazines and tactical gear that had Nazi imagery, references, and slogans drawn on them, alongside the names of people Tarrant would later claim he wanted to avenge.
The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – New Zealand’s largest intelligence agency – told the inquiry that social media accounts “posting weaponry” were not tracked as “[p]osting weaponry … is not an illegal activity”.
The inquiry did not address the fact that Tarrant’s weaponry had fascist references on it, or that he posted it alongside a plethora of violent right-wing content.
A 2025 University of Auckland study found that Tarrant had likely publicly posted on the notoriously far-right Politics (/pol/) section of 4chan since at least 2015 about his support for and intent to carry out far-right attacks, a community known to have hosted previous mass shooters.
In March 2018, a year before the massacre, a user very likely to be Tarrant joined a thread about the South Pacific.
When discussion conversation turned to Muslims in New Zealand, the user joined in on expressing hatred, identifying himself as a Dunedin resident at the same time Tarrant was living there. His country, New Zealand, was visible through a flag next to the post ID. After someone egged him on to do something about it, the user posted “[D]on’t worry lad, I have a plan to stop it. Just hold on.”
In another August 2018 thread, a user likely to be Tarrant joined discussions about the locations of mosques in New Zealand.
“Tarrant wrote angrily about mosques and refugees in the South Island, including ‘here in Dunedin.’ He wrote: ‘F***** dunedin and christchurch both have mosques, christchurch has two of them for fucks sake.’ And again: ‘Want to hear some crazy shit? Ashburton now has a mosque, they converted a church.’ Four of the posters, including Tarrant, called for violence against the mosques. One commented that a particular mosque would be easy to firebomb. When another posted an image of a matchbox, Tarrant replied with only “Soon.” Seven months later, Tarrant attacked two mosques in Christchurch”.
The study’s findings raise “serious questions, not only about why this posting was not detected, but also why it has not been discovered in the five years since the attacks”, the study’s authors wrote in a 2025 article for The Conversation.
A sleepwalking inquiry
Tarrant publicly stating his intention to attack significantly contradicts the royal commission’s remark that it would be “unlikely that the individual [Brenton Tarrant] would have wished to do anything that might attract the attention of international intelligence and security agencies.”
The royal commission’s belief that Tarrant desired to act covertly was used to justify not investigating whether Brenton Tarrant met with Martin Sellner – a far-right Austrian activist known for his advocacy for remigration (a euphemism for mass deportations) – after Tarrant donated approximately $2,300 Australian dollars to him January 2018 and discussed the possibility of meeting up in Austria over email.
Shortly after the massacre in March 2019, Austrian police raided Sellner’s residence over his ties to Tarrant. Sellner destroyed copies of his communications with Tarrant 40 minutes prior to the raid, suggesting that he had foreknowledge of an investigation into him. The only correspondence Austria’s authorities were able to recover came from screenshots that Sellner himself intentionally chose to preserve.
In late 2018 – just months before the massacre, Tarrant spent 9 days in Austria.
According to the Lone Actor podcast, an Austrian intelligence report has it that a rental car Tarrant used during his trip travelled about 2,000km during the trip.
The royal commission’s final report dismissed all this evidence, and made no mention of Tarrant’s extraordinary usage of a rental car during his Austrian excursion. Instead, the inquiry took him at his word.
Tarrant told the royal commission “that he did not meet Martin Sellner” and “had not tried to do so” during the late 2018 visit, according to the report.
“We [the inquiry’s commissioners] are inclined to accept this denial. There is no evidence to suggest they [Tarrant and Sellner] did meet”, the inquiry said, seeming all too eager dismiss the claims, which risked undermining the inquiry’s finding that Tarrant was a “lone actor”.
Since the massacre, Sellner has gained prominence and influence among Europe’s right-wing, and has popularised remigration.
In November 2023, he hosted a secret countryside conference with top brass of Germany’s right-wing CDU and AfD parties – some of whom were sitting members of parliament at the time – to plan how mass deportations could be implemented in Germany. Following the conference, AfD’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, publicly committed to implementing remigration.
Hardly the first time
The Police’s brief flirtations with Palantir does not mark the first time that New Zealand’s public sector has jumped into bed with the firm.
In fact, the government’s relationship with Palantir began when the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) started a pilot programme in 2012, including acquiring licenses for Palantir technology and the training of 100 NZDF personnel, around the same time Palantir opened a dedicated Wellington office.
The programme soon expanded to an “ongoing contractual relationship”, including the “acquisition of additional hardware and annual Palantir licences”, the NZDF said in response to an OIA request from Exit From Affco. The NZDF also released the manual for Palantir’s Gotham software to Exit From Affco.
By 2018, the NZDF was spending over $1.8 million NZD a year on its contracts with Palantir, and had spent $7.2 million NZD between 2012 and 2018, according to a report in the New Zealand Herald.
The SIS and GCSB are also known also use Palantir software, in a relationship which the New Zealand Herald says also dates back to 2012.
In March 2020, Palantir approached and met with the Ministry of Health and Privacy Commissioner, offering to “rapidly set up COVID-19 data-crunching capabilities” as it had done in Italy and the UK at free or little cost. The Ministry of Health then sat on the offer for a month, before announcing it had no plans to retain Palantir’s services.
Private sector health firms in New Zealand have also begun to make use of Palantir’s offerings, a source has claimed to Exit From Affco.
An OIA request from academic Marco de Jong revealed that then-defence and intelligence minister Judith Collins met with the head of Palantir’s international operations during her February 2026 visit to the Munich Security Conference.
The briefing was mostly redacted, but it saw her “acknowledge the importance of an ongoing effective partnership” and ask whether there were any “opportunities of interest for New Zealand in new technologies and emerging capabilities in this sector”.
Chris Penk, Collins’ replacement as Minister of Defence and intelligence, told RNZ that “the NZDF has no existing plans to use Palantir in the emerging technologies space”, “the NZDF uses Palantir as an analytics platform to aid with planning”, and that “the Government’s ongoing partnership with Palantir is led by the GCSB.”
The NZDF over recent years has been helping test and develop the US military’s new Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) system, a network to link together all sensors and data from the US military and its allies to enable more battlefield data collection, analysis, and interoperability. Palantir helped develop the Maven Smart System platform alongside the US military as their interface for this command and control network.
In May 2024, as revealed by documents found in a Salvation Army op-shop and given to Nicky Hager, NZDF staff attended a secret “Five Eyes community Combined Digital Leaders Forum” in the United Kingdom to discuss the new “Five Eyes C5 Campaign Plan” and how the five member countries would integrate their military command and control systems. This would include sending data, intelligence and information to other partners and be analysed in a “federated [Five Eyes] data fabric”, which Hager describes as “a worldwide system where all intelligence and information from the five partners is shared and woven together to support the dominant partner”.
New Zealand naval officers had meetings with other Five Eyes partners in September last year ahead of RIMPAC 2026, the US Navy’s biennial naval exercise in Hawai’i. These meetings were to discuss Project Overmatch, the US Navy’s initiative for integrating the CJADC2 system, and testing it during exercises at this year’s RIMPAC. The NZDF announced earlier this month it would be sending 50 personnel to the Project Convergence Capstone 6 event later this year in Arizona, where the US Army is testing the CJADC2 system by putting soldiers alongside aerial and ground drones.
Strange bedfellows
New Zealand’s relationship with Palantir started shortly after one of its co-founders, Peter Thiel, was naturalised in 2011, while meeting none of the statutory requirements, and having only spent 12 days in the country, through an unusual and informal understanding with the John Key government: that Thiel would invest heavily in New Zealand’s technology sector.
Thiel didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Valar Ventures, the venture capital firm Thiel set up in 2010 specifically for his New Zealand ambitions, ceased making investments in New Zealand shortly after Thiel had received his citizenship. By 2017, Valar had almost completely divested from New Zealand.
Thiel was able to keep his citizenship secret for almost five and a half years, until The New Zealand Herald revealed it in January 2017.
Valar Ventures was recently revealed to have received $40 million in investment from late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Sir Rod Drury, founder of fintech firm Xero, became one of Thiel’s surrogates in New Zealand after the billionaire made an investment into both Xero and Pacific Fibre – a venture Sir Drury co-founded to build an undersea fibre optic cable between the United States and New Zealand – which had no less than $5.5 million in investment from Thiel’s Valar Ventures.
Sir Drury, who was described by the New Zealand Herald as “the biggest winner of Thiel’s brush with New Zealand”, was one of Thiel’s character references, and wrote to New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs in support of Thiel’s citizenship application.
In 2013, whilst Thiel’s citizenship was still a secret, then-Green Party co-leader Russel Norman issued a press release questioning whether the Key government was working with Palantir to spy on New Zealanders after it was revealed Key had met with Thiel multiple times, the company had opened a Wellington office, and had posted a job listing for an analyst to be embedded inside the New Zealand government.
After Norman posted a tweet writing “When crony govt meets surveillance state - John Key appoints Peter Thiel’s Palantir to spy on NZers”, Drury quoted the post and wrote “Don’t be wankers”. Sir Drury and Norman then got into a heated Twitter dispute, with Sir Drury writing that the Greens were “ruining relationships and/by insinuating cronyism is vandalism”. In later comments to Stuff, Sir Drury said Thiel was “an incredible friend of New Zealand” and was annoyed at the collateral damage Norman’s comments had caused.
In 2021, Sir Drury applied for a resource consent to build ‘Te Wharehaunui’, a bunker-like compound on his 29ha section of Queenstown to host meetings for “government leaders and global technology innovation company executives”.
The application said the meeting house would bring “very influential people” to Queenstown who would hopefully invest in the region. The region has become a popular location for property among the international elite, including Peter Thiel, who has been attempting to build a luxury lodge overlooking Lake Wānaka despite legal challenges.
Sir Drury has allowed his Queenstown property to be used for diplomatic meetings, including Australian PM Albanese’s visit last year. A source in New Zealand’s public service claimed to Exit From Affco that Sir Drury’s Queenstown property has also been used to host meetings for the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. In September 2022, top officials from all Five Eyes partners flew into Queenstown for a secret meeting, with attendees suspected to have been hosted at the Millbrook Resort near Arrowtown, just a 10-minute drive from Drury’s property.
The source alleges that to accommodate these meetings, a sensitive compartmented information facility was built on the property, making it suitable to discuss and handle secret or classified information.
New Zealand’s outgoing defence and intelligence minister Judith Collins denied the claims in response to both a request for comment and OIA request from Exit From Affco.
“Minister Collins rejects both assertions”, Collins’ press secretary said.
Drury’s relationship alleged relationship with the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and with Thiel – who is closely tied to the alliance himself – may warrant taking another look at their Pacific Fibre venture, which sought to build an undersea fibre optic cable with funding from Thiel.
Sam Morgan, then a director of Xero as well as a co-founder of Pacific Fibre, also wrote to the Department of Internal Affairs in 2011 in support of Thiel’s citizenship application.
The Pacific Fibre effort occurred while the GCSB – in partnership with America’s National Security Agency (NSA) – were starting up the Speargun mass surveillance program. Revealed by leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the program saw covert surveillance of New Zealand’s Internet traffic and metadata, collected by bugging the Southern Cross Cable Network in the North Island, which at the time was the only undersea fibre optic cable connecting New Zealand to North America, as well as handling the vast majority of traffic routed through Australia, thus seeing most of the country’s international internet traffic.
On Wednesday – just a month after he received the New Zealander of the Year Award – Sir Drury was publicly accused of inappropriate behaviour during his time as CEO of Xero by a former employee, which resulted in an internal misconduct investigation being launched in December 2017.
Drury abruptly stepped down as from his CEO role four months later.
On Wednesday, Xero said that it began an internal review of its handling of the allegations.
The very American solution
The Central Intelligence Agency’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel, bootstrapped Palantir’s founding in 2003 with a $2 million investment, and the US government has subsequently become their biggest customer. Palantir has contracts with the US intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, law enforcement agencies, and police departments across the United States.
The Maven Smart System platform for the US military’s CJADC2 system, co-developed by Palantir and the Pentagon, is currently being used for data analysis and target selection in the US-Israeli war on Iran according to an early February report in the Washington Post. Some US lawmakers believe Maven may have chosen to target a girl’s primary school in the country’s invasion of Iran at the beginning of February, which killed at least 175 civilians, most of whom were young schoolgirls.
Palantir’s contracts with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have long been controversial since they began in 2014, but their collaboration increased heavily under the first and second Trump administration. To assist with Trump’s mass deportation program, Palantir was contracted in 2025 to develop ImmigrationOS, a platform which uses data collection and AI analysis to find, track and help ICE deport suspected noncitizens.
Palantir software has been used extensively by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in the Gaza genocide and their wars throughout the region, with CEO Alex Karp saying in February 2024 he was “exceedingly proud that after Oct. 7, within weeks, we are on the ground and we are involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel.” Palantir has been repeatedly accused of complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity due to the IDF’s actions in Gaza. When confronted with these accusations at a Cambridge Union event, Peter Thiel responded that his “bias is to defer to Israel”.
Palantir is eager to onboard governments and institutions to their services, often offering free or discounted rates and being proactive in approaching potential clients.
Palantir has often been criticised for enabling aggressive data collection and surveillance by providing these services to clients and allowing them to connect vast sources of data much more easily. There have also been concerns raised about data sovereignty, where data is processed or stored, and whether any data is shared elsewhere by Palantir. In 2024, the Swiss government decided to abandon their plans to work with Palantir after officials couldn’t guarantee there was data sovereignty, writing in a report that “there is a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services.”
Palantir has also recently begun rapidly expanding its relationship with the United Kingdom. Palantir’s London based European branch, chaired by Louis Mosley – the grandson of Nazi collaborator and British Union of Fascists Leader Sir Oswald Mosley, has signed numerous contracts over the past decade with England’s National Health Service (NHS), the Britain’s Ministry of Defence, and the Met Police.
Tarrant himself was a fan of Sir Mosley, having posted links to his works prior to the massacre, and even gifted one of Sir Mosley’s books – Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered – to his sister’s mixed race girlfriend.
Ironically, the Police sought solutions made in part by Sir Mosley’s grandchild in the wake of the massacre.
Do you have any information about Palantir’s use in the government or in the Christchurch shooting?
· Securely contact Smith K. Stead through email at smithkstead@protonmail.com
· Securely contact William Evans through email at williammaxwellevans@protonmail.com or through Signal at the username william.69
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