 On Sunday, I was sitting at a desk at my brother-in-law’s house in Sydney’s idyllic eastern suburbs, listening to an orchestra of Australian birds while I wrote up a pair of interviews conducted last week: One with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, the other with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf. It’s tricky writing about these companies because they develop the kind of lethal and spooky technologies that powered the origins of Silicon Valley in the 1950s, but have long been out of fashion with the software companies I usually cover. I was thinking about how to frame the interviews without cheerleading or emotional critiques. As I worked, my wife headed out with our two young children, niece, and nephew to a place she had known since childhood: Bondi Beach. On the way out the door, I asked her if she’d be able to keep all four kids safe in the water. They came home around 5:00 p.m. and we were driving together less than two hours later when we saw police cars and ambulances rushing to Bondi. Just feet from where our car had been parked, two men with several powerful rifles had opened fire on a group of Jews celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, killing 15 and wounding 42 others. That night, I read about the antisemitic incidents that had been on the rise in Sydney, and about the government’s attempt to monitor potential terrorists. It has become painfully clear that they should have stopped this: One of the Bondi shooters had been investigated for ties to the Islamic State. He had also reportedly obtained licenses for several guns, in a country in which there are 15 firearms per 100 people (compared to 120 in the US). About a month before the attack, the two shooters traveled to Mindanao, an island in the Philippines where IS is operating. Hindsight is notoriously clear. After every attack like this, needles in a haystack seem like obvious red flags. But if you want to understand Palantir’s work with intelligence agencies, which has made it successful and divisive, the simple version is: It builds customized software that enables those agencies to find the needles in advance. Governments and security services now face democratization of consumer technology and secure digital communications that make it easier to carry out destabilizing attacks at home and in theatres of war. And so, advanced countries and their contractors build even more powerful capabilities, from signals intelligence to low-cost autonomous weapons. And with those new technologies, the potential for abuse increases. Some civil libertarians argue that governments need to be kept from much of this technology. But political leaders, constantly briefed on threats, tend to want the best technology, and lean on democratic institutions to hold them accountable for using it. Here in Sydney right now, it’s hard not to agree with the case for surveillance. Indeed, Jillian Segal, Australia’s special envoy on antisemitism, had argued for increased data collection and coordination among law enforcement in recommendations submitted in July. But perhaps democracies don’t need to choose between stopping terrorist attacks and civil liberties. Technology can also increase transparency and oversight, identifying and discouraging abuse. But it would require that in democracies, systems of accountability adapt, too. | 
