#rp26 speaker Constanze Kurz & Franziska Görlitz: Always more Palantir laws

How the German police employs AI-based software – and why that’s so dangerous.
Foto von Constanze Kurz und Franziska Görlitz. Beide tragen glatte Haare. Franziska trägt eine Brille
Photo Credit
links: Heike Huslage-Koch, CC BY-SA 4.0, rechts: Bernhard Leitner

Following Hessen, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria, Berlin and Baden-Württemberg have now also authorized their police departments to conduct “automated data analysis.” For this AI-driven investigative work, police in several federal states are using the “Gotham” software developed by the U.S. company Palantir, which is backed by “boligarchs” such as CEO Alex Kar and Peter Thiel. But it doesn’t stop there. While police departments use the software to analyze massive amounts of data – some of which belongs to people who have no connection to criminal investigations – the software is also used by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. intelligence agencies, and the military in war zones.

What are the implications of using such software to analyze our personal data? And how do these “automated data analyses” actually work? Constanze Kurz, volunteer spokesperson for the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), and Franziska Görlitz, project coordinator at the Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V.), will discuss this at re:publica 2026. Their session will further address the role of the Federal Constitutional Court and fundamental rights in this context, as well as what we can do to combat the increasing analysis of our data. 

Franziska Görlitz is a lawyer and project coordinator at The Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V.). There, she focuses particularly on issues such as government surveillance and whistleblowing. She also tutors law students preparing for their exams.

Constanze Kurz holds a Ph.D. in computer science, is a non-fiction author, and has edited several books. She writes about issues related to IT security, technological surveillance, and ethics in computer science. Since February 2015, she has been part of the writing team for the blog netzpolitik.org. She is also a fellow of the German Informatics Society.