Hesse Runs Its Palantir Dragnet 15,000 Times a Year. Bavaria Ran It Illegally First. Neither Has Stopped.

Hesse's police run Palantir's data-mining platform, rebranded "Hessendata," up to 15,000 times a year. That is not a number reserved for terror plots or hostage situations. It is a number that describes a machine running constantly, in the background, across a state's entire population, because 2,000 officers now have a button that cross-references databases the way a search engine cross-references web pages — except the subjects didn't consent to be indexed and most have never been suspected of anything.

Bavaria's version, called VeRA, tells the same story with better documentation. Reporting by NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained the actual usage log: of roughly a hundred queries between September 2024 and May 2025, more than twenty had nothing to do with terrorism or mass-casualty threats. They were property crime. Bike theft rings. ATM bombings. The tool sold to legislatures as a shield against the next Christmas market attack is, in practice, a convenience feature for garden-variety casework — because once the capability exists, "why not use it" always beats "should we." Bavaria ran it for over a year with no legal basis at all, until its own data protection commissioner forced the state to legislate one after the fact.

This isn't a rogue vendor story. It's a structural one. In 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe drew hard limits on automated police data analysis, specifically because Hesse and Hamburg had built systems that hoovered up people with zero connection to any crime — witnesses, victims, someone who happened to file a report, someone who was just nearby. The court said: not like this. Hesse's answer was to keep the software running and blackbox certain records from individual officers, a technical patch dressed as compliance. Bavaria's answer, per the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte's constitutional complaint filed this July alongside the Chaos Computer Club, is that the state legislature wrote a law authorizing exactly the kind of dragnet Karlsruhe had just ruled out — Article 61a of the Bavarian Police Tasks Act, letting officers link previously separate datasets and flag people who gave no cause for suspicion at all.

None of this is abstract for anyone who has been near a demonstration, an antifascist info-stall, a squatted building, or a solidarity network with people the state has decided to watch. Palantir's software doesn't invent new evidence against you; it makes the state's existing paperwork about you queryable in seconds, forever, across agencies that were never supposed to share. A vehicle registry entry, a foreigners' registry entry, an old witness statement — all become raw material the moment an analyst decides you're worth a look. And the company on the other end of this contract is run by a man, Peter Thiel, who has said openly that he doesn't think democracy and freedom are compatible, and whose flagship platform in the US now helps ICE hunt down migrants. Germany's states didn't quietly adopt a neutral database tool. They bought into a surveillance architecture built by people with an explicit political project, and they did it because building a German or European alternative would have cost a few hundred million euros the federal government decided it didn't have.

The pattern across Bayern, Hesse, and now NRW and Baden-Württemberg is always the same: introduce the tool under emergency framing, get caught using it far beyond that framing, get slapped by a court or a data protection office, then legislate the overreach into permanence instead of undoing it. There is no version of "proportionate use" that survives contact with a standing capability and an under-resourced oversight apparatus. The only fix that has ever worked against this pattern is refusing the premise — no data-mining platform, no matter whose logo is on it, gets access to a state's population on the promise that it'll only be used for the worst case. Karlsruhe said so in 2023. Three states are still finding workarounds.

Sources

Tagesschau: Wird die Palantir-Software unangemessen genutzt? (NDR/WDR/SZ investigation)
Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte: Blackbox Palantir - Verfassungsbeschwerde gegen Art. 61a BayPAG