Part seven — the companion goes global. The UK Operational Twin asked where Palantir fits beside Splink at home. This asks the same of every country that runs Splink. Eight jurisdictions profiled, adversarially fact-checked; every connection tiered by how direct it actually is.
↗ Read the full per-country master analysis (GitHub)
The honest thesis
Splink and Palantir are not the same tool, and there is no evidence anywhere on Earth that Palantir uses, supplies, or touches Splink. What is real is a structural coincidence with teeth: the same wealthy, capacity-rich governments that run benign statistical linkage (Splink) also run Palantir’s proprietary, US-owned operational platforms — and they run Palantir most heavily where the stakes are highest: policing, immigration, defence, intelligence. The civil-liberties weight sits almost entirely on the Palantir side.
Only the UK has a single body running both (NHS England — covered in the companion). In the US, Palantir is dominant and operational while Splink was tried and rejected (the Census Bureau chose its own BigMatch). Everywhere else the tie is thematic — same country, different body, different tool. And in three Splink countries — Chile, the Gambia, Laos — Palantir has no documented government presence at all. Stated plainly, because the clean negatives keep the rest honest.
The standout: a court actually ruled — in Germany
The single most important finding sits on the Palantir side, in Germany. On 16 February 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, 1 BvR 1547/19; 1 BvR 2634/20) struck down the automated police data-analysis powers in Hesse and Hamburg as unconstitutional — a violation of the right to informational self-determination, because they permitted dragnet “analysis by association” sweeping in unsuspected people. Hamburg’s provision was declared void; Hesse’s was time-limited. The judgment names Palantir and its Gotham system (run in Hesse as “hessenDATA”) explicitly. It is the only binding court ruling against a Palantir-enabled deployment anywhere in the world — the mirror image of the UK’s “ruled unlawful next door,” but heavier, and on the operational layer.
Honest framing: the court struck down the enabling statutes for inadequate thresholds — not Palantir’s software in itself. Yet German states keep adopting Gotham (Baden-Württemberg signed in March 2025), and a fresh constitutional complaint against Bavaria’s system was filed in July 2025. The litigation is live.
The other flags
• United States — off a March 2025 executive order to eliminate inter-agency data silos, Palantir is reported to be building an IRS-centred “mega-database” unifying tax, immigration and Social Security records, alongside ICE’s deportation tooling (ImmigrationOS). The loudest version of this whole series’ anxiety — but reporting- and congressional-letter-sourced, disputed by Palantir, no contract value public, no court ruling. Flagged as allegation, not fact.
• Canada — the federal Ethics Commissioner found in September 2020 that Palantir Canada’s president breached the Conflict of Interest Act; the military holds a CAD 46.8M contract kept secret for five years.
• EU — Palantir Gotham ran at Europol until 2021; the European Data Protection Supervisor issued a 2022 erase-order over Europol’s bulk data (not established to be Gotham-specific).
• UN / humanitarian — Palantir Foundry sits at the World Food Programme (a 2019 deal reported at ~$45M that drew an open letter from 65 organisations); by 2026 Privacy International calls Palantir the “cornerstone of the WFP data ecosystem.” The aggregation of vulnerable-population data inside a US national-security-linked firm.
The pattern, and the part that should worry you
A US-headquartered, In-Q-Tel-seeded, Thiel-associated firm holds operational contracts over other nations’ citizen, police, defence and humanitarian data — frequently via sole-source, limited-tender or outright secret procurement (Germany’s urgency award; Canada’s five-years-secret contract; Europol releasing 2 of 69 documents; Baden-Württemberg’s reported no-exit clause). This dependency and data-sovereignty risk is specific to Palantir’s proprietary model and has no analogue on the open-source Splink side — Splink is free, inspectable, self-hosted. The combined picture is not “Splink leads to Palantir.” It is that the same well-resourced states pursuing the low-risk end of data-linkage are, through other arms, also buying the high-risk, foreign-owned, operational end — with markedly less transparency.
What I will not claim
No Splink↔Palantir link of any kind, anywhere — not one shared agency, dataset or task. The German court did not rule Palantir’s software unlawful in itself, only the enabling statutes. The US “mega-database” is reporting and allegation, disputed and unadjudicated. Claims that Palantir powers IDF “kill lists” (Lavender/Gospel) are journalism/NGO allegations, not court-confirmed, and those are IDF-attributed systems, not proven Palantir products. UNHCR’s public record-linkage uses fastLink, and “Building Blocks” is not a Palantir product. Each was searched and excluded. The undismissable finding stands without them.
Method: 8 country/institution vectors researched and put through an adversarial verification pass (briefed to argue like a Palantir lawyer); tiers downgraded where overstated (Germany and Canada were pulled back from same-country to thematic; the US down to same-country). Full per-country analysis, contract values, the German judgment detail, citations and the do-not-overstate list: master analysis on GitHub.