Trump Administration Showers Palantir With Millions To Compile Data To Wield Against American Citizens
Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated.
That private contractor would be Palantir, which has never shied away from the role of villain since its inception. And it only makes sense this administration would choose Palantir, what with the company's founder being such a huge fan of Trump, fascism, and censorship.
Nearly a billion dollars are headed Palantir's way, even as DOGE continues to strip funding from nearly every government agency it has decided to meddle with. That's not a coincidence, as the New York Times reports.
Palantir's selection as a chief vendor for the project was driven by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, according to the government officials. At least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others had worked at companies funded byPeter Thiel, an investor and a founder of Palantir.
Just more insiders doing some (horse) trading. Palantir has already received more than $100 million from the Trump Administration since Trump took office in January. The Defense Department's outlay dwarfs the $113 million already allocated towards this project. The DoD has awarded a $795 million contract to Palantir, but has yet to actually start spending that money.
It obviously will end up spending it. But the main concern is the addition of Palantir software to a bunch of agencies not normally considered to be part of the federal government's domestic spyware programs.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
The administration and its surveillance partner are also seeking to infect the IRS and Social Security Administration with Palantir's tech, adding to the massive haystack the Trump administration can use for whatever purposes it wants.
Given how this administration has handled itself since returning to office, it's not that much of a stretch to believe this massive data collection will be used to help Trump and his compatriots find targets for arrest, deportation, or unconstitutional executive orders.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said.
That's obviously the point of this massive data pile, which removes silos that were put there for a reason. Stripping away these separations creates an extremely enticing target for malicious hackers, who always appreciate government contractors doing the dirty work of amassing personally identifiable information for them.
The only open question is whether Palantir's expanded data collection will be exploited by malicious hackers or malicious administration members first. Rest assured, it will be abused by someone, and any legal recourse after the fact isn't going to be able to undo whatever harms have been inflicted on Americans by this intermingling of data from multiple federal agencies.
Palantir, of course, couldn't care less. Its statement on this disturbing development merely says that it's proud to be a hammer but it can't control what the administration decides are nails.
We act as a data processor, not a data controller," it said. Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted."
This is obviously true. A contractor can't control what the government does with the tools it provides. However, it can decide whether or not to provide the tools. Palantir will never choose otherwise, no matter who's in office. And if it's willing to aid a president determined to do bad things with the data it provides, it's certainly willing to sell to other autocrats and human rights abusers elsewhere in the world. Ethics are a luxury this multi-billion dollar company apparently can't afford.