At a Medact briefing on Palantir’s NHS contract, Amnesty International, the Good Law Project and Corporate Watch joined forces to expose the vendor’s surveillance toolkit. Within weeks, several MPs demanded the deal be terminated, citing the firm’s involvement in wartime data operations, including the Minab massacre that claimed nearly 200 children. The event sparked an urgent public call to rename the technology after Tolkien’s prophetic stones.

Former Palantir engineer turned commentator argues the problem lies in language that masks the platform’s architecture. He urges workers, policymakers and lawyers to abandon marketing jargon and treat the system as a generic “Palantir stone” – a cloud‑level SaaS that aggregates inputs and outputs predictive decisions. Such reclamation, he says, makes the invisible data stack visible to public scrutiny.

By framing these tools as extensions of a mythic “seeing stone,” activists hope to cut through hype and force contracts like the NHS deal into transparent debate. The briefing’s visual essay, illustrated by Clarote and AI4Media, circulates under a CC‑4.0 license, inviting remix and wider distribution. The push demonstrates that non‑engineers can shape the discourse around AI surveillance.