The DOJ used Palantir to build an app to help find criminals—and then shut it down

Recently uncovered documents show that the Department of Justice is no longer using a mobile app, built by Palantir, designed to help law enforcement officials search criminal records databases while operating in the field. 

Thousands of people, including agents at the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, appear to have ended up using the app, which was called “SHIELD”. But by February 2023, the agency had changed its approach and moved to shut it down, according to emails obtained by Fast Company. It’s a reminder that while the government is racing to implement all sorts of law enforcement tech and surveillance technology, these platforms are sometimes rolled back.

The beginnings of the app stretch back to at least 2018, when Karl Mathias, then-chief information officer of the U.S. Marshals Service, shared that the agency was in the “alpha” stage of developing a system that would allow officers to ping a crime database run by the FBI and help apprehend people. 

By the following year, the Marshals had brought on Palantir to help develop the platform. The app was designed to scan a picture of someone’s driver’s license and then run that image in various databases. The effort represented the U.S. Marshals’ new approach to “modernization,” according to comments Mathias made to the trade outlet GovCIO.

Since then, the agency said little about Shield, but it seems that the app was ultimately used throughout several law enforcement agencies. One Justice Department IT manager touts on LinkedIn that he helped “develop, deploy, and perform continuous improvement for SHIELD” and that the app enabled more than 2,000 people to perform “real-time biometric and identity verification in the field.” The app was successful enough that the agency requested additional funding to support the platform before fiscal year 2021 and then in fiscal year 2023. 

Still, emails show that between February and April 2023, technology leaders at DEA, ATF, and Marshals moved to decommission the app, warning the agencies to export and retain any remaining data and shutting down user access when the “end of contract” approached. 

“User access will be turned off at the end of the contract. Any service accounts we used to communicate with external systems should be identified and disabled,” a DOJ IT manager warned in February 2023. “All cleanup activities should be complete and contractor access and clearances may be closed out.”

The Justice Department declined to comment, and the U.S. Marshals Service, the DEA, and the ATF did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Still, one former Palantir employee said that it’s possible the contract itself may not have been particularly lucrative for the company, especially if it was sold to the government as a perpetual license, which would have allowed the Justice Department to use the service indefinitely. A person familiar with the matter says that Palantir has since moved away from the perpetual license model, which led to a transition off partnerships leveraging that model.