Big Brother is Here: Palantir, Thiel & the End of Privacy

Thanks to Elon Musk and DOGE, Peter Thiel's Surveillance State Fever Dream is Finally Becoming a Reality

Back in February, I was just learning about Corporate Monarchy and Network States, the Dark Enlightenment of Curtis Yarvin, the techno-feudalism pipe-dreams of his PayPal Mafia acolytes, and the one name that kept coming up and tying them all together: Peter Thiel.

The Godfather of the PayPal Mafia.

A serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Thiel is the founder, co-founder or financial backer of «checks notes» AbCellera Biologics, Airbnb, Breakout LabsBrex, Clarium Capital, Deposit Solutions, Facebook, Founders Fund, Linkedin, Mercor, Meta, Mithril Capital, Neuralink, OpenAI, Paypal, SpaceX, Stripe, Thiel Capital, Valar Ventures—more or less a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley—and the one company to rule them all: Palantir Technologies.

Just like it’s founder, Palantir starts off creepy and only grows more off-putting and alarming the more you learn about it.

We’re about to get into some seriously dystopian, Orwellian stuff here, so strap in.

Palantir’s Origins

Following the sale of PayPal to Ebay in 2002, Thiel founded Palantir Technologies—a data analytics and software company—in 2003 along with Alex Karp, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, and Stephen Cohen. (For the purposes of this article, you only need to remember Thiel and Karp.)

Named after the palantír—the all-seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings that allowed users to see far-off places or events, even across vast distances—the initial vision for Palantir was to take PayPal’s anti-fraud techniques and apply it to counter-terrorism. Following the 9/11 attacks, Thiel began looking for ways to combine human intuition with computational analysis and apply it to matters of national security, aiming to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties."

While Thiel’s vision didn’t spark any interest from Silicon Valley investors, the premise alone sounded promising enough that Palantir’s earliest financial backer was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

Nothing nefarious ever happens if the CIA gets involved.

Core Products

Palantir currently offers four main products:

• Palantir Gotham – The original product launched in 2008, Gotham is a data analytics platform primarily used by government agencies for intelligence, defense, and law enforcement operations.

• Palantir Foundry – Launched in 2013, Foundry is a data integration and analysis platform designed for commercial and industrial organizations to centralize, analyze, and act on vast amounts of data. This makes it a favorite in private sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and finance.

• Palantir Apollo – A continuous delivery system that manages, deploys, and updates Palantir software across secure, hybrid environments—including classified networks and edge devices. It acts as the “nerve center” for software operations, ensuring Foundry and Gotham run smoothly in diverse and disconnected systems.

• Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) – Launched in 2023, AIP integrates large language models (LLMs) into enterprise and government workflows. AIP has become central to Palantir’s AI-driven government and defense contracts.

Yes, Palantir did eventually get around to creating a product line for commercial industry, but its raison d'être was intelligence, defense and law enforcement. And in that sector, they don’t have a close peer. Palantir’s Gotham client list includes:

• CIA

• FBI

• National Security Agency (NSA)

• Department of Homeland Security: Office of Intelligence and Analysis, U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CPB), and U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE)

• The entire U.S. military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, Department of Defense, U.S. Special Operations Command, and U.S. Northern Command

• CDC, FDA, and NIH

• UK’s Ministry of Defense

• The Ukrainian military

• NATO

• European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA)

• Israeli Ministry of Defense

• France’s intelligence agencies

• Australia Defense & Security agencies

• Canada’s Intelligence & National Security Operations

• Local police departments throughout the U.S.

Now, remember a few minutes ago when I said that Thiel insisted he was interested in providing counter-terrorism while “preserving civil liberties?” Well, it turns out that may be more of a PR spin than anything else.

Particularly when it comes to Palantir’s treatment of privacy.

PRISM, XKeyScore & the NSA Leaks

In 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden made international headlines by fleeing to Hong Kong and leaking tens of thousands of documents revealing numerous secret surveillance programs around the globe, many run by NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and U.S.)

Some lauded Snowden as a hero, others as a traitor. The U.S. DOJ charged him with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property before revoking his passport, forcing him to seek asylum in Russia (where he became naturalized in 2022).

Love him or hate him, the one thing you couldn’t do was deny the information Snowden leaked. Among the plethora of secret programs, two that stood out were:

• PRISM – The Prism program allowed the NSA to access emails, documents, photos, and data stored by tech companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, YouTube, Dropbox, and Apple through secret agreements.

• XKEYSCORE – Described as a “one-stop-shop” for surveillance, XKeyscore allowed the NSA to track and collect “nearly everything a user does on the internet” including emails, web traffic, and computer activity.

Both secret programs had something in common: they both relied on Palantir to help them sift through and analyze the massive amounts of data they were [illegally] collecting.

Immediately following the leak, Palantir came out and publicly denied any connection to NSA’s PRISM program, claiming it was merely a coincidence the name “Prism” happened to be the name of one of its own products.

But additional Snowden documents contradicted this, showing Palantir’s broader involvement in NSA surveillance, particularly through XKEYSCORE. XKeyscore helped make sense of the vast, incomprehensible amounts of data by visualizing connections, such as identifying IP addresses visiting specific websites at given times, sparking concerns about the ease of mass surveillance and potential privacy violations.

And just in case you had the silly notion that Snowden’s leaks were anomalies…

Secret Policing & the NOPD

From 2012-2018, Palantir was embedded into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department without any public disclosure, oversight, or formal city contracts. The partnership was facilitated through NOPJF (New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation), a private nonprofit that allowed Palantir to sidestep public procurement rules and city council approval.

Once the private company was inside the public system without any public awareness or consent, Palantir was granted access to arrest records, probation and parole data, 911 call logs, social relationships (e.g., gang affiliations, family ties), license plate reader data and surveillance footage.

Palantir then used this data to power a predictive analytics platform:

• It generated “social network maps” of suspected criminals, identifying and ranking individuals based on perceived risk.

• The system attempted to predict who might commit crimes or become involved in violence, even if they had no criminal record.

Yeah, Palantir started doing some Minority Report Precog “predictive policing” without anyone in the city—or even the city government and oversight boards—aware of what was happening. It only came to public light through an investigation by The Verge in 2018, at which point the project was immediately terminated.

“We predict that people aren’t gonna like this.”

Palantir used the data illegally collected in the New Orleans program to develop—and eventually patent—a “Crime-Risk Forcasting” software they then sold to foreign intelligence agencies to help them try to predict which people might commit terrorism.

“Lavender”

Hey, does anyone remember that little skirmish-y thingy going on in Gaza? Some sort of kerfuffle?

You know, the one that’s killed at least 57,000 Palestinians so far (a 40% undercount according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the UN Human Rights Office), 80% of whom are civilians, the majority of those women and children?

The one where 400+ aid workers have inexplicably been killed? The one where more than 200 journalists have also been killed—more than in any other armed conflict in world history?

The one some people are referring to as a “genocide”? (hint: because it’s a genocide)

It almost seems like there’s a bunch of unnecessary, mindless, senseless killings over there, doesn’t it?

Well, it seems that way because it is.

Lavender is an AI-powered database and targeting tool developed by—you guessed it!—Palantir, and deployed by the IDF to identify individuals in Gaza as potential Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives (heavy lifting on the “potential”).

Using surveillance cameras and drone footage data, military personnel relying on Lavender’s analysis reportedly spent only ~20 seconds per target—often as a mere “rubber stamp” of the AI’s recommendation—before obliterating whoever may or may not have been an enemy combatant.

Human Rights Watch noted that data analysts set a threshold score to decide which individuals were deemed “target-worthy,” and initial estimates suggest a bare minimum 10% error rate. Basically, people are getting un-alived by the thousands in Gaza because a piece of AI surveillance software hasn’t been around long enough to tell the difference between an aid worker and a terrorist, and nobody pulling the trigger cares enough to check the math. (In 2024, Norway’s Storebrand divested $24 million in Palantir stock over ethical concerns tied to its Israeli contracts.)

I can feel you growing skeptical of Palantir’s motives, Thiel’s assurances of privacy and “preserving civil liberties” notwithstanding. I don’t care how much lip service you pay and how many public declarations you make about “privacy” and ”civil liberties,” once you get caught lying about your involvement in secret surveillance programs and illegal data collection, and predictive murder software, I can’t find it in me to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Especially when I’ve heard the things you said when you didn’t think anyone was paying attention.

Peter Thiel’s Wackadoodle Ideologies

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir.

In Democracy is Dead: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy, I briefly touched on Thiel’s political ideologies, which he neatly summarized in a 2009 Cato essay, saying, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are incompatible.”

- Peter Thiel

If you read that and thought, That sounds bad, surely it can’t get any worse, it gets worse. The context of that quote was Thiel arguing that “welfare beneficiaries and women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Basically, Thiel’s argument was that allowing women and poor people the right to vote undermined his Libertarianist vision of “freedom.”

Thiel has also warned that any government efforts to regulate artificial intelligence could lead to a “global totalitarian character,” arguing that a government powerful enough to control AI would excessively curtail innovation and personal freedom. If the guy developing mass-surveillance AI programs railing against any AI regulatory oversight doesn’t send your Spidey senses into anaphylactic shock, find your nearest loved one and have them check you for a pulse. (We’ll come back to this point in a minute.)

It’s worth remembering here that Thiel is the one who groom- I mean mentored JD Vance on Curtis Yarvin’s dystopian ideologies, paid for Vance’s Senate seat, and convinced Donald Trump to put Vance on his ticket, now next in line for the MAGA throne.

But if you think Thiel is dangerous, wait until you hear what his CEO thinks about the world.

Alex Karp: The Most Dangerous Man in America

Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir.

Karp has been the CEO of Palantir since its founding, and his vision for the company (and society in general) is more dystopian than Thiel’s by orders of magnitude. Thiel is ambitious and classist and misogynistic and opposed to basic democratic values.

Karp is all of those plus he’s a sadist.

AI as a Weapon for Killing

In a world of emerging technologies, the AI debate usually centers on whether it’s a toy, a tool, or a replacement for humans. And also whether it may rise up and kill us all someday.

Karp skips over all the pleasantries and gets straight to the point: “AI is not a toy. It is a weapon. It will be used to kill people.”

And I guess he would know:

• Palantir’s AIP is currently active in Ukraine, processing real-time battlefield data, automating targeting decisions, managing logistics, and even documenting war crimes.

• Here in the U.S., Palantir is behind TITAN, the Army’s $480 million AI-powered battlefield vehicle that combines satellite data, drone feeds, and sensor input to suggests what to do next (or who to shoot). Here, I’ll let Palantir explain it:

TITAN offers a flexible and scalable ground station designed to modernize the Army with the latest deep sensing and sensor fusion capabilities. Our solution integrates sensors, networks, and automation to increase operational tempo and reduce time from sensor to shooter. Our modular and open software brings together data from multiple domains - enriched with AI and ML technology - to produce and deliver decision-quality targeting information to warfighters.

• Project Maven—launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2017—is an AI program designed to analyze and translate satellite footage into drone strikes and other efficient killshots. The initial contract for Project Maven was held by Google, who withdrew from the program in 2018 due to employee protests over the ethical concerns of using AI in warfare. Palantir stepped in and ran with it as soon as Google bowed out. (When you’re losing a surveillance ethics battle to Google, it may be time to rethink which side you’re on.)

Perpetual Surveillance & Total Awareness

Karp’s stated vision for Palantir involves creating an “architecture of total awareness,” where dissent is treated as a “glitch” and human inefficiencies are engineered out. In the past, he’s advocated for Palantir’s technology to be integrated into civilian institutions like schools, hospitals, and banks, effectively blurring the line between military and civilian surveillance. (As we’ll see momentarily, that dystopian future is a lot closer than you think.)

Western Superiority Through Organized Violence

Quoting Samuel Huntington, Karp once wrote in a letter to Palantir investors:

“The rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’”

Yeah, sounds like the kind of person you want running the world most advanced killing algorithms.

Humiliation and Impoverishment as Social Change

In an address to the Economic Club of Chicago back in May, Karp told a room full of listeners:

“The most effective way for social change is to humiliate your enemy and make them poorer.”

Exactly the kind of de-escalation rhetoric this political climate—where every ideological opponents is now regarded as “America’s #1 Enemy”—has been clamoring for!

In another 2025 statement, Karp said:

“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it’s necessary, to scare enemies, and on occasion kill them.”

Just a reminder that this isn’t a military commander discussing the importance of lethality training over, say, DEI—it’s the CEO of a freaking software company describing lethal force as a legitimate corporate business strategy.

One of the things Karp and Thiel both appear to have in common with the rest of their Billionaire Boys Club members is a penchant for petty, vindictive, overkill-style retribution directed at anyone who criticizes or crosses them.

• At a 92NY forum back in February, Karp told the audience he believed in having a “lower purpose” along with his higher purpose, and that his lower purpose involved using drones to spray “light fentanyl-laced urine” on financial analysts who said negative things about Palantir’s stock.

• In 2007, Gawker Magazine wrote a critical article of Palentir and a couple of Thiel’s other ventures, outing Thiel as gay in the process. Thiel was so furious on both counts for years that he funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker in 2013 for publishing a portion of a sex tape involving Hogan and the wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge (that’s a sentence I never envisioned typing). The case went to trial, a jury awarded Hulk Hogan $140 million in damages (later settling for $31 million), and Gawker was forced into bankruptcy.

The bottom line is that nothing coming out of Thiel or Karp sounds like anything you want to hear from anyone in possession of the kind of money and toys these cartoon villains have at their disposal.

Here’s Where It Gets Scary

“Wait, it hasn’t gotten scary yet? We’ve got a rogue software company contracting with the government to conduct illegal surveillance on American citizens, running predictive policing models—that don’t work—without anyone’s consent, and using glitchy algorithms to decide which brown people live or die?”

“HOW IS THAT NOT ALREADY THE SCARIEST THING EVER?”

Because I haven’t mentioned Donald Trump yet.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there is no such thing as a situation on earth—no matter how bad and unpleasant—that can’t be made exponentially worse with the addition of one Donald J. Trump to the mix.

On March 20, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14243: Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.

Bearing in mind that the nefariousness of a Congressional bill or Executive Order for the American public is inversely proportional to the patriotic wholesomeness of its title, you can probably take a stab at what “stopping waste, fraud, and abuse in information silos” is running cover for: eliminating privacy protections.

See, an “information silo” just means a place where data is stored that is only accessible by the institution who collected it in the first place, or for whom the information is relevant.

• Your tax filings and financials are in the IRS “information silo”

• Your loans, credit card balances, and credit worthiness are in the credit bureau “information silo”

• Your earning history and work credits are in the Social Security “information silo”

What Trump’s Executive Order seeks to do is “eliminate the waste” that results from all those pieces of private data being stored in separate places—FOR YOUR OWN PRIVACY—by combining them into a Single Giant Database that contains all your information: bank accounts, driving record, medical claims, immigration status, investment portfolio, student debt, Social Security, criminal history, disability status, union affiliations, religious affiliations, political affiliations—anything you can name—all under one roof.

You thought it was annoying to get pulled over for a busted taillight only to get hauled in on a bench warrant for 16 unpaid parking tickets? Try the same scenario, only the cop who got you for the taillight can also check your bank accounts, credit score, job history, disability status, medications you’re taking, political donations and contributions you’ve recently made, and the political ideologies of every connection you’ve got on social media.

That’s not conspiracy theory, that’s EXECUTIVE ORDER 14243!

Anyone care to take a guess who Trump awarded the contract to to create that database?

That’s right! Palantir.

The Palantir-DOGE Connection

If you happen to be one of the people who watched Elon Musk’s DOGE goon squad plowing through the Treasury Department, Social Security Administration, IRS, Department of Education, Department of Labor, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, FEMA, Office of Personnel Management and a dozen other agencies, demanding access to private data they didn’t appear—as college kids interning at SpaceX—to have any legal authority to access and thought, “It sure doesn’t look like they’re pursuing ‘waste, fraud and abuse;’ it looks like they’re just stealing all of our data!” that’s because….that’s exactly what DOGE was doing.

Okay, I understand why Palantir would want all our private data—they’re creating that Big Brother database monstrosity for Trump—but what does any of that have to do with DOGE?

This is where the hyper-entangled roots of the PayPal Mafia start coming to light.

According to reporting from Wired, assembling the initial DOGE team involved a recruitment campaign carried out by a few software engineers across Discord servers and online chat groups. At least three of the recruiters working for DOGE were confirmed current or former engineers for Palantir—Anthony Jansco, George Cooper, the third unnamed—though it’s suspected there were more.

Okay, but just because 3 kids who worked at Palantir also ended up working at DOGE, that doesn’t necessarily mean PayPal Mafia Dons Musk and Thiel are working together. Maybe those kids were just trying to pick up a second job on the side and Thiel wrote them a good referral letter to his old PayPal buddy?

That would be a totally reasonable suggestion…if Palantir hadn’t announced in February that they were partnering with Elon’s GrokAI and adding it to their AIP offering. Elon, Thiel, DOGE and Palantir couldn’t be more caught up in each other’s bulls**t if you super-glued their bare asses together.

Okay, so Palantir wanted everyone’s private information for a massive, AI-powered surveillance database, DOGE was the mechanism they used to acquire as much of it as they could get their hands on, Trump’s Executive Order put a “legal-adjacent” veneer on the whole operation…but STATES still have some say on what AI is or isn’t allowed to do in their state. So admit it—you’re just fear-mongering!

I hate to be the bearer of bad news (even though that’s pretty much all this article is), but perhaps you’ve heard of a little spending bill currently winding its way through the halls of Congress as we speak? Perhaps you recognize it better by its official name: The Big Beautiful Bill? You know, the one that’s all about Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for billionaires and is supposed to somehow “reduce the deficit” by adding $3-4 trillion to the National Debt over the next 10 years because the GOP thinks that since they can’t do math, nobody can?

THAT spending bill.

Well, tucked away in Section 43201 paragraph (c) on page 278 of that budget bill is a sneaky little clause that has absolutely nothing to do with budgets:

(1) In general. – Except as provided in paragraph (2), no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce.

Yep, hiding inside the “Big Beautiful” budget bill is a clause imposing a 10-year moratorium prohibiting states and localities from “limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating AI.”

Checkmate, libtards.

Stopping Waste, Fraud & Abuse

When the history books of 23rd century attempt to explain how America finally collapsed into fascistic authoritarianism, the chapter title for that lesson is gonna be called “Stopping Waste, Fraud & Abuse.” (SWFA from now on)

SWFA will go down in history as the official go-to slogan of the Trump Administration to justify anything and everything unethical, unAmerican, illegal, and unconstitutional they feel like doing. It’s actually quite brilliant if you think about it — Once you’ve framed an operations as a SWFA exercise, what is anybody going to say to oppose you?

“No, we’d really prefer to keep doing all the waste and fraud stuff… Because America!”

Head on over to the DOGE website. Spend an afternoon skimming through their Wall of Receipts. Do you see any “waste, fraud or abuse” items actually listed in there? No, you don’t.

Why not?

Because that was never the mission, it was merely the cover. The mission was always your private data.

I already mentioned all the government agencies currently using Palantir’s Gotham for intelligence, defense and policing purposes. Their Foundry offering is already embedded in HHS, Veterans Affairs, CDC, FDA, NIH, the Treasury, Office of Personnel Management, Department of Education, Labor Department, NOAA, FEMA, FAA, USAID, Social Security Administration, CFPB, and an early-stage pilot program is currently underway at the IRS.

This is it—the dystopian, all-seing Big Brother surveillance network Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four. We all wondered if something like that could ever happen for real. Where would it come from? What would it look like? Would we even recognize it if it reared it’s ugly head?

The time for wondering is through.

Big Brother has arrived.

Its name is Palantir.

Palantir is watching you.