Trump Is Expanding The Surveillance State With Palantir.

Trump's New Expansion Of The Surveillance State Will Make 1984 A Reality.

A new report in the New York Times shows that the Trump administration is massively ramping up the neo-con surveillance state that the Bush administration started.

The Times wrote, “In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power”.

The paper explained that “Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.”

The Times wrote that “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months,” with the company “receiving more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office”.

The Times also wrote that “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”.

It went on to write that“ A Palantir product called Foundry was put into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department,” meaning that “it paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies”.

This is a deeply disturbing development for civil liberties. Palantir-the controversial data-gathering tool created by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp-will be used by the Trump administration to go through various government agencies and collect a massive database on Americans.

Palantir has previously been used to expand the deep state’s surveillance technologies, go after whistleblowers, advance the Ukraine proxy war, and aid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

In this article, I will go over the bone-chilling capabilities and history of Palantir and explain why this is a chilling development.

Palantir’s Role In Creating The Neo-Con Surveillance State.

Pictured Above: Palantir founders Alex Karp (left) and Peter Thiel (Right)

The investigative journalist Whitney Webb has spent much of her journalistic time digging into Palantir and its nefarious history.

One of Webb’s important revelations has been that the Palantir technology was based on an idea from the former Ronald Regan official John Pointdexter, who served as Regans’s “National Security Advisor during the Iran-Contra affair” and was “convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal”.

Poindexter came up with an idea for a “‘precrime’ approach to combating terrorism known as Total Information Awareness( TIA),” after 9/11, designed to create “invasive surveillance of the entire US population”.

Describing the effect John Pointdexter’s TIA would have on civil liberties in 2002, the New York Times columnist William Safire wrote :

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized grand database.’

Safire went on to write:

this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -- passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the super snoop's dream: a 'Total Information Awareness’ about every U.S. citizen.

This Orwellian scenario, Safire pointed out “is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks”.

Witney Webb has noted that Pointdexter wanted to use these powers to compile a list of political dissidents in the U.S., writing, “A less well-known activity of Iran-Contra figures like Poindexter and Oliver North was their development of the Main Core database to be used in ‘continuity of government’ (COG) protocols.”

Webb wrote that “Main Core was used to compile a list of US dissidents and ‘potential troublemakers’ to be dealt with if the COG protocols were ever invoked,” noting that the COG protocols could be invoked for a number of reasons, including “widespread public opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of ‘national crisis’ or ‘time of panic’”,

She also noted that “a person could be added to the list for merely having attended a protest in the past, for failing to pay taxes, or for other, ‘often trivial,’ behaviors deemed ‘unfriendly’ by its architects in the Reagan administration”.

This Orwellian idea, to collect a mass database on every American citizen, ripe to be weaponized against political dissidents, is what the creation of Palantir was based on.

In 2020, New York Magazine reported that :

Back in 2003, John Poindexter got a call from Richard Perle, an old friend from their days serving together in the Reagan administration. Perle, one of the architects of the Iraq War, which started that year, wanted to introduce Poindexter to a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were starting a software company. The firm, Palantir Technologies, was hoping to pull together data collected by a wide range of spy agencies — everything from human intelligence and cell-phone calls to travel records and financial transactions — to help identify and stop terrorists planning attacks on the United States.

The two “Silicon Valley entrepreneurs “ who the war criminals Perle and Poindexter met with were “Peter Thiel and Alex Karp”. New York Magazine wrote that “Their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon (Total Information Awareness), and they wanted to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance”.

The Magazine noted that the “Total Information Awareness” idea thought up by Pointdexter and advanced by Palantir was “a precursor to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs that were exposed a decade later by Edward Snowden.”

Whitney Webb noted that soon after this meeting, Thiel “incorporated Palantir,” followed by “the CIA’s In-Q-Tel (The CIA’s investment arm) becoming the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million”.

Webb wrote that “Alex Karp told the New York Times in October 2020, ‘the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.’”

Webb also noted that “A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including the investment in Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer, Alan Wade, who had been the intelligence community’s point man for Total Information Awareness”.

Indeed, Palantir did help American intelligence agencies shape their “Total Information Awareness” surveillance state put into place after 9/11.

In 2011, Bloomberg Magazine called Palantir “the War on Terror's Secret Weapon”. The Magazine wrote that Palantir was used by intelligence agencies to gather mass data collection on people quickly, writing:

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner, is ‘make it really easy to mine these big data sets.’ The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

The outlet noted that “Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, and the police departments of New York and Los Angeles”.

Bloomberg noted that Palantir gave American intelligence agencies the exact access to people’s personal information that the “Total Information Awareness” concept proposed, writing: “Using Palantir technology, the FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers on U.S. citizens, tying together surveillance video outside a drugstore with credit-card transactions, cell-phone call records, e-mails, airplane travel records, and Web search information”.

The paper also noted that high-level Palantir figures had supported the Bush administration’s warrantless spying on American citizens, writing “Palantir’s senior legal adviser Bryan Cunningham, authored an amicus brief three years ago supporting the Bush Administration’s position in the infamous warrantless wiretapping case and defended its monitoring domestic communication without search warrants”.

Palantir’s Role In The War On Wikileaks and Whistleblowers.

Along with giving the security state unlimited spying power, Palantir has also played a large role in the deep state’s war on whistleblowers and WikiLeaks.

In 2011, activists hacked a document from Palantir, which uncovered a secret plot to take down WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

The document, created in partnership with the tech firms HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, outlined a long-term plan to take down what it called “The WikiLeaks Threat”.

The document proposed a plan to get mainstream journalists to stop supporting Wikileaks, writing that the“level of support needs to be disrupted”.

The document goes on to state: “These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them, if pushed, will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals.”

The plan attempted to get journalist Glenn Greenwald to stop supporting Wikileaks, writing “Without the support of people like Glenn (Greenwald), WikiLeaks would fold”.

Thankfully, Glenn continued to support Wikileaks and Assange's freedom throughout his career,but many other liberal journalists did eventually turn on Wikileaks due to the Russiagate and DNC hack hoax, suggesting that the plan to turn mainstream liberals away from Assange was continued.

The document also plotted to create a “fracture among the followers because of a belief that Julien is going astray from the cause and has selected his own mission of attacking the US,” which the document said was “great stress in the organization which can be capitalized on”.

One of the main points of the plan was to create division amongst WikiLeaks supporters and leak fake documents to WikiLeaks in an attempt to discredit them. The Document states, “Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.”

The document also plotted to do “Cyber attacks against the infrastructure (of Wikileaks)to get data on document submitters”

Along with this, the document called to run a “Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities” which it bragged would “create concern and doubt amongst moderates”.

Pictured Above: Palantir’s Plot To Destroy WikiLeaks.

The document finished by saying, “Together, Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies bring the expertise and approach needed to combat the WikiLeaks threat effectively”.

When this scandal broke, Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder, was forced to issue a public apology and claimed to “sever any and all contacts with HBGary”.

However, this was entirely performative, as Bloomberg reported “A Palantir engineer, exposed by the hacker collective Anonymous earlier this year (2011) for participating in a plot to break into the PCs of WikiLeaks supporters, was quietly rehired by the company after being placed on leave”.

One of the more disturbing elements of Palantir’s capabilities revealed in the hack was showcased in the section that stated, “Search for Leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees”.

The document later states that Palantir has worked with “the US national security and law enforcement communities”to“proactively identify and investigate internal threats”.

As Whitney Webb explained, this was referring to “the Orwellian concept of ‘pre-crime’” noting that Palantir “tracks people the government suspects may commit crimes, including suspected ‘subversives’”.

Webb noted that this was used by Palantir to identify government employees who could potentially be future whistleblowers, writing “Palantir not only enables the government to catch leakers; by recording if classified information was improperly handled and by whom; it also predicts which government employees are most likely to blow the whistle, before it even happens.”

She wrote that “Palantir has developed capabilities that allow it to thwart the leak of government information to organizations like WikiLeaks by tracking – and predicting – the actions of potentially disgruntled government employees, soldiers and contractors.”

Pictured Above: Palantir bragging about working with “US national security and law enforcement” to “proactively identify and investigate internal threats” (ie, whistleblowers).

Palantir As War Profiteers.

Along with its role in expanding a deep state surveillance state and war on whistleblowers and leaks, Palantir also functions as a war profiteer, raking in military contracts from every American war.

William Hartung, a researcher on the Military Industrial Complex for the Quincy Institute, exposed Palantir’s role in pushing for war and then profiting off of it.

Hartung noted that Palentir’s “goal is to shape the overarching U.S. national security policy that may determine what military technology the U.S. invests in for the next generation.”

He noted that Palentir’s CEO Alex Karp has pushed for a war with China in order to sell more Palantir intelligence technology, writing “Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said the United States will ‘likely’ go to war with China and that the best policy is to ‘scare the crap out of your enemy’ — no doubt in part by wielding systems built by Palantir.”

He noted that “Karp’s views about how to intimidate adversaries like China may be good for his company’s bottom line, but they are an extremely reckless guide to U.S. policy toward China.”

He also noted that Palantir has played a large role in the Ukraine proxy war and genocide in Gaza, writing:

Palantir’s products are also front and center in the two most prominent conflicts of the moment. The company’s Artificial Intelligence Platform, described by Bloomberg as ‘an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyze enemy targets and propose battle plans,’ is currently in use in Ukraine. And in January of this year (2024), Karp and Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, traveled to Israel where they forged an agreement with the Israeli government ‘to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.’ This reportedly includes using Palantir’s AI-based systems to select targets in Gaza.

Indeed, since its founding, Palantir has sold its information gathering intelligence technology to governments during every American war.

Bloomberg reported in 2011 that “In Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations Forces use Palantir to plan assaults.”

Palantir has also used the Ukraine proxy war as a testing ground for its AI technology.

Time Magazine reported that Palantir CEO Alex Karp was “the first leader of a major Western company to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky since Russia’s invasion”.

Time reported that “In the year and a half since Karp’s initial meeting with Zelensky, Palantir has embedded itself in the day-to-day work of a wartime foreign government in an unprecedented way”.

It noted that :

More than half a dozen Ukrainian agencies, including its Ministries of Defense, Economy, and Education, are using the company’s products. Palantir’s software, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, open-source data, drone footage, and reports from the ground to present commanders with military options, is ‘responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,’ according to Karp. Ukrainian officials said they are using the company’s data analytics for projects that go far beyond battlefield intelligence, including collecting evidence of war crimes, clearing land mines, resettling displaced refugees, and rooting out corruption.

As I reported recently, Ukrainian intelligence has spent much of its time going after its domestic critics-apparently with the help of Palantir.

Time noted that Palantir apparently offered its services to Ukraine for free as a way of using the bloody war as a testing ground, writing “Palantir was so keen to showcase its capabilities that it provided them to Ukraine free of charge.”

While not directly profiting in Ukraine, Palantir used the war and the needless lives lost to showcase their capabilities in order to secure more military contracts in the future.

This is evidenced by the fact that Paletir has aided Israel in its mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza since October 7th of 2023.

The outlet Ctech reported that “U.S. tech giant Palantir Technologies has announced that it has agreed a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense to ‘supply Palantir technology to help the country’s war effort.’”

The outlet reported that “Palantir said that the agreement followed a Thursday (in 2024) meeting between Israeli defense officials and Palantir co-founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp.”

The Israeli business network “Globes” reported that “Palantir expects revenue in the tens of millions of dollars from the agreement with Israel.”

Alex Karp, in a moment of honesty, admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” saying, “If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?”

Jacob Helberg, an advisor to Palentir, called the company “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century”.

Pictured above: Alex Karp and Peter Thiel meeting with Israeli defense officials in 2024.

Enhancing The Deep State

By now, it is impossible to claim that Trump is in any way “taking on the deep state”.

He is currently using the CIA-connected, war profiteering surveillance firm Palantir to collect even more data on regular Americans to fully fulfill the neocons' dream of creating a “Total Information Awareness” database on every American.

This Orwellian database will be used to spy on political dissidents, arrest whistleblowers, keep government secrecy, and all around continue the security state agenda that Trump campaigned on removing.

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