The war waged by the tech authoritarian oligarchy against the media has reached a new level:

#Palantir is suing us. Us, the Republik Magazin.

A small Swiss media company, funded by readers, founded in 2018 and free of advertising. I am not aware of any other media company globally that Palantir is currently targeting so aggressively.

What is this about? Together with my wonderful colleagues at the WAV research collective Jenny Steiner, Lorenz Naegeli, Marguerite Meyer, and Balz Oertli, we published a two-part series on Palantir's activities in Switzerland on December 8 and 9.

Using an extensive corpus of documents – which we obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – we were able to trace a sales campaign over a period of seven years. Palantir tried to get in with many federal authorities – and was rejected everywhere.

And we also found out that the Swiss Army Staff evaluated the products and came to the conclusion that the army should refrain from using Palantir products.

Among other risks, they feared that data would be passed on to the US authorities.

Palantir is not just any company. ICE uses its products to hunt down migrants in the US. The Israeli army IDF uses the software in its Gaza offensive. The British health authority NHS has made itself dependent on the products for data analysis during the pandemic. And CEO #AlexKarp displays inhuman and aggressive rhetoric towards Europe, while the company itself advertises the “optimization of the kill chain.”

These are all facts, repeatedly verified and published by renowned media outlets. Our research relating to Switzerland and Zurich is based on this.

In addition to analyzing documents, we also spoke to various sources – including Palantir executives here in Zurich. The quotes used were presented to them and approved. Of course, we always adhered to the high standards of journalistic work. We conducted a thorough fact check before publication.

But the company doesn't want us to write the truth.

After the US company owned by right-wing tech billionaire #PeterThiel dedicated an absurd blog post to us, claiming some misinformation (such as that they had not participated in official tenders with the federal administration, a point we never claimed. On the contrary: we spoke from the outset of attempts to establish contact, sales talks, informal meetings, business as usual), after the Global Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering and contact person for Swiss media Courtney Bowman launched personal attacks against us in LinkedIn comments between Christmas and New Year (“partisan fear-mongering”), Palantir's Swiss lawyers demanded a counterstatement on December 29.

We rejected this demand in its entirety.

In January, they demanded the same thing again. We rejected it again.

And now we see each other in court.

But why all this?

Our research on the Swiss army report caused a huge international media response. The Guardian and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on the Swiss army's rejection. Numerous financial portals and stock market magazines picked up our news (which could have consequences for the overvalued stock market company Palantir).

And Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz presented our research to a huge audience at the renowned IT conference Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg at the end of December.

All of this is making Palantir nervous.

We have now submitted a comprehensive defense brief. We can substantiate all of our findings with several documents and publicly available media reports.

We trust in the rule of law and freedom of the press in this country.

In keeping with yesterday's event “Zurich, little Big Tech City” at the Gessneralle, where we first announced this news exclusively to the audience on site:

World politics will soon be negotiated in Zurich: freedom of the press, the facts about ICE, Trump, Israel, Karp, tech authoritarianism.

The truth.

All this at the Zurich Commercial Court.

We will not be intimidated. And we will keep you informed.

Поколение Z оказалось глупее предыдущего – впервые с начала наблюдений

youtu.be/fexvw99zTvo

А я об этом давно говорю! Аниме и гаджеты отупляют молодёжь!

#IQ #поколениеZ #Якутенко #мозг #отупение #наука #молодёжь

#Russia member of state Duma admits neo-Nazi formations are fighting in Russian army:

Neo-Nazism and extremism are openly preached in Russia, Gennady Semigin, a State Duma deputy from the Fair Russia party, said on Wednesday. As an example, he cited some of the volunteer units participating in the invasion of Ukraine.

The quote above is from Agentstvo news agency, which also explains the context:

The neo-Nazi group DShRG “Rusich” is participating on Russia’s side in the war in Ukraine. The unit has been repeatedly accused of war crimes. In November, the group announced a reward for soldiers who send the unit photos of themselves posing with shot Ukrainian prisoners.

The far-right brigade ‘Espanola’ also participated in the hostilities. Initially, it was part of the Vostok battalion of the DPR, but in 2023 it declared itself a private military company, and from 2024 it operated as part of the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Volunteer Corps as the 88th Reconnaissance and Assault Brigade. Its fighters participated in the assault on Azovstal, Mariupol and Ugledar, defended Klescheevka, and captured Avdiivka and Chasov Yar.

Agentstvo also quoted another member of Duma Andrey Kartapolov who in 2023 excused these formations claiming that if they fight for Russia, that means they are no longer Nazis 😄

A whole collection of #Nazi apologetics from Russian nationalists can be found here:

video.echelon.pl/search?tagsOn…

It is fantastic to watch Russian bot farms change their tune almost in real time.

If you watched their narratives last year, the Russia’s goal was the ‘swift liberation of Donbas’ but today, with the Russian offensive stalled, that goal suddenly switched and it ‘has always’ been to ‘continue crushing the Ukrainian army’ and there was never any other goal. This narrative is, interestingly, a mirror reflection of the Ukraine’s ‘active defense’ goal declared by Zaluzhny already in 2023. And in case of Ukraine it makes slightly more sense simply because ‘continued crushing’ - or inflicting the enemy improportionally large losses compared to yours - is much easier done in defense than in offensive.

So much for the bots’ narrative, but in reality, the actual goals of the ‘SWO’ were never clearly defined by Putin, who since 2022 has used vague phrases such as ‘demilitarisation and denazification’ and then repeatedly changed the scope of the occupation (which is highly aspirational anyway).

I am posting this mainly because such ‘our goal has always been something’ statements, which change every six months, are an absolutely natural tactic for Russians, which can and should be pointed out and ridiculed. Samples are unfortunately only in Polish and Russian, because that’s the choice of bots I’m seeing on X but I’m sure you can find them in any language currently priorities by Russian bot companiies.