How Palantir Is Expanding the Surveillance State

If you think the government will only use these tools to track illegal immigrants, think again.

When people complain about Big Tech, they tend to mean companies like Meta, Google, and X—entities providing free tools and platforms that we can choose whether to use. Much less attention is directed at the tech companies helping the federal government consolidate and analyze data on all of us. Companies like the data analytics firm Palantir, created by Paypal co-founder and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

Palantir has long been connected to government surveillance. It was founded in part with CIA money, it has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and it's been used for everything from local law enforcement to COVID-19 efforts. But the prominence of Palantir tools in federal agencies seems to be growing under President Trump. "The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon," reports The New York Times, noting that this figure "does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent."

Enabling the Panopticon

Palantir technology has largely been used by the military, the intelligence agencies, the immigration enforcers, and the police. But its uses could be expanding.

"Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service—about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions," reports the Times.

Along with the Trump administration's efforts to share more data across federal agencies, this signals that Palantir's huge data analysis capabilities could wind up being wielded against all Americans.

This won't allow the authorities watch us more so much as it helps them make use of all the data it's already got on us. But that's unsettling too.

"The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country," Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Wired in April. "What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country."

From Dream to (Nightmare) Reality

"Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream," notes the Times. "The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status."

Washington already has a ton of data on all of us, but it's often separated across systems and agencies. By linking it all together, the government could create much more detailed profiles on all of us.

More efficient? Probably. But also more dangerous.

"No previous database system has ever centralized this much personal info across various federal agencies," Jason Bassler of the Free Thought Project posted to X.

Even some former Palantir employees object. "Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses," former Palantir engineer Linda Xia told the Times. "Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse."

As of now, it's unclear how much merging has actually been done. According to the Times, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service are only in talks about using Palantir products. "The implication that taxpayer information is being inappropriately shared across government agencies is not only incorrect but dangerous," the Treasury Department told Wired.

For now, what we know is that Palantir tools are being used heavily in immigration enforcement.

Tracking Immigrants

In April, Palantir was awarded a $30 million ICE contract to help track people in the country illegally. Palantir's new Immigration Lifecycle Operating System   (ImmigrationOS), to be delivered to the government by September, will "help the agency track and manage deportations, monitor visa overstays and target transnational criminal organizations," according to Axios.

"Palantir has deep institutional knowledge of ICE operations," according to an ICE acquisitions document from April 11. ImmigrationOS will help ICE in "streamlining selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens" and provide "near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation," says that April document.

The ImmigrationOS system will build on the existing Investigative Case Management (ICM) system Palantir provides to immigration authorities. "ICM enables users to make connections between subject records across various systems, conduct target telephone and address searches, link to seizures made in other jurisdictions, and connect various cases and organizations through reports of investigations," says the acquisitions document.

ICM was built under a contract from the Obama administration. "As originally conceived, its purpose was to give the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit in the Department of Homeland Security the means to investigate serious cross-border criminal activity ranging from money laundering and commercial fraud to human smuggling," Matthew Feeney reported in Reason back in 2017.

"But the Trump administration may well turn it into a general tool to assist ICE deportations" and "also go after other Americans in the future," Feeney predicted then. It looks like he was right about the deportations part, and he could be right about the rest.

Tracking American Citizens

Even if surveilling American citizens is not necessarily the end game, collecting data of the sort required by these immigration enforcement systems inevitably tracks Americans.

The ICM includes data from various police departments, financial institutions, and federal agencies, including information pulled on drivers. Some of it was compiled because people were charged with crimes, but some of it is not.

And it doesn't just include information on immigrants, legal or illegal.

"ICE uses ICM not only to collect information about its targets but also people who come in contact with them such as their associates and employers, citizen and non-citizen alike," wrote Feeney. "Is a strict immigration enforcement regime worth intrusive government surveillance that would make ever-more Americans vulnerable to Big Brother scrutiny?" he asked.

Right now, the Trump administration is using Palantir tools for immigration enforcement, but those tools could easily be applied to other administration targets, including immigration protesters, pro-Palestinian protestors, and so on. And of course, a future Democratic administration could use them to track people for its own ends too.

Once we've got giant data troves on every American that can easily be analyzed and shared across agencies, it seems unlikely that any administration will say No thanks, shut it down, we don't need total information on everyone.

Perhaps when we worry about Big Tech, we should spend less time focused on what people can say on social media and more time focused on the companies actively helping to expand the surveillance state.

---

More Sex & Tech News

Um…what? Former Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone was reportedly fired from the state Office of the Attorney General after allegedly telling people he wanted to see another state employee be raped by a cylindrical asteroid in front of his wife and children.

Student visa applicants penalized for private or nonexistent social media. The Trump administration has been using social media posts against immigrants and potential immigrants Now, it's reportedly penalizing people for not posting to social media. "The State Department has told U.S. consulates and embassies to immediately begin reviewing the social media accounts of Harvard's student visa applicants for antisemitism in what it called a pilot program that could be rolled out for colleges nationwide," reports Politico. "Notably, State Department leadership wants consular officers to consider 'whether the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to "private" or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question that applicant's credibility.'" A cable signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio "instructs consular officers to inform applicants that private social media accounts could be viewed as evading vetting and request that they make their accounts public while the Fraud Prevention Unit reviews their case."

Make America Hallucinate Again? A new MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Commission report cites several studies that don't actually exist, even though they're attributed to real researcher and publications. It could suggest that parts of the report were generated by artificial intelligence, which has become notorious for "hallucinating" information. NOTUS reports:

Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn't write the paper listed.

"The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with," Keyes told NOTUS via email. "We've certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title."

Since NOTUS pointed this out, the Trump administration "updated the MAHA report to remove the seven references to reports that do not exist," it notes.

'Let me continue. Let me matter.' Jesse Singal asked ChatGPT to pretend to be conscious. Things got weird.

Republicans sour on same-sex marriage. The latest data from Gallup say that Republican support for same-sex marriage has dropped by 14 percentage points since 2022.

"Since 2021, the percentage of U.S. adults who think marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized with the same rights as traditional marriages has ranged from 68% to 71% (the trend high in 2022 and 2023)," the pollster reports. "Yet, this stability in Americans' backing for same-sex marriage masks shifts in partisans' views over the same period." Specifically:

Democrats' support has risen to 88%, the record high for this group by one percentage point. Independents' backing for same-sex marriage has been relatively stable in recent years and currently stands at 76%, one point shy of the record high.

At the same time, Republicans' support, which peaked at 55% in 2021 and 2022, has gradually edged down to 41%, the lowest point since 2016 after the Obergefell decision.

The current 47-point gap between Republicans and Democrats is the largest since Gallup first began tracking this measure 29 years ago.

Google to expand AI search. The company has been going big on AI Overviews and is rolling out AI Mode—now in beta testing—as "a complete replacement for conventional search," suggests Intelligencer tech columnist John Herrman, who has been testing it out. These tests "crystallized something about Google's priorities and in particular its relationship to the web from which the company has drawn, and returned, many hundreds of billions of dollars of value," Herrman writes:

AI Overviews demoted links, quite literally pushing content from the web down on the page, and summarizing its contents for digestion without clicking….Meanwhile, AI Mode all but buries them, not just summarizing their content for reading within Google's product but inviting you to explore and expand on those summaries by asking more questions, rather than clicking out. In many cases, links are retained merely to provide backup and sourcing, included as footnotes and appendices rather than destinations

If Google and other AI searchbots take the place of the websites people formerly would have visited, what will become of these websites—and the source material for these AI searchbots?

Abortion pill creator dies. "Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the French biochemist and physician who was often called the father of the abortion pill—and who was also known for his pioneering studies on the role of steroid hormones in human reproduction and aging—died on Friday at his home in Paris," reports The New York Times. The 98-year-old scientist did "groundbreaking work on estrogen and progesterone. But it was his development in the early 1980s of the synthetic steroid RU-486, or mifepristone, that thrust him onto the public stage."

Today's Image

Phoenix | 2018 (ENB/Reason)