Donald Trump is helping build a bigger surveillance state, and naturally, he’s using taxpayer dollars to do it. Since beginning his second term, Donald Trump has joined forces with the CIA front company Palantir to build a massive new database on hundreds of millions of Americans. The database can be used in the future to track and search Americans’ tax returns, bank accounts, spending patterns, travel, and much more.
For months, keen observers of the American surveillance state like Whitney Webb have warned that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has provided Trump-linked technocrats with access to private information, with the potential of inputting all that data into a central database. Now, the Trump administration has pushed a new contract with the surveillance firm Palantir to do just that.
The Trump administration has long pretended to oppose the so-called “deep state,” but this latest move is simply the latest evidence that the administration has forged a close alliance with its “enemies.”
The New Republic reports:
The Trump administration is collecting data on all Americans, and they are enlisting the data analysis company Palantir to do it.
President Trump has enlisted [Palantir], founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to carry out his March executive order instructing government agencies to share data with each other. The order has increased fears that the government is putting together a database to wield surveillance powers over the American public.
Since then, the administration has been very quiet about these efforts, increasing suspicion. …
Palantir is speaking with various other agencies across the federal government, including the Social Security Administration and the IRS, about buying its technology, according to the Times. Palantir’s Foundry tool, which analyzes and organizes data, is already being used at the DHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and at least two other agencies, allowing the White House to compile data from different places.
The administration’s efforts to compile data began under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which sought Americans’ personal data from multiple agencies including the IRS, the SSA, Selective Service, Medicare, and many others.
This latest step toward securing new methods of tracking and compiling Americans’ data represents another augmentation of the American surveillance state that was greatly expanded to unprecedented levels under the George W. Bush administration and expanded during the Obama and Biden years. The Trump-DOGE-Palantir expansion of the American spy state is simply another tool that the federal government can use along side its already enormous data collection efforts under the NSA and similar agencies.
It is too early to know exactly how the federal government will use this data, but the potential is enormous for the future construction of a social credit system, for tracking gun owners, and for related purposes of creating an AI-fueled “pre-crime” database to identify future “criminals.” Who exactly is a criminal, of course, is to be determined at the discretion of future policymakers who will possess the data.
What Is Palantir?
The fact that the Trump administration has chosen to ally itself with Palantir on this matter is telling. Palantir is the poster child for the Pentagon-Big Tech alliance that has been forged by the so-called deep state. Palantir is part and parcel of the ecosystem of quasi-private-sector actors—such as Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others—who profit extensively from taxpayer-funded government contracts. The owners of these enterprises, perhaps most notably Palantir founder Peter Thiel, often pretend to be “entrepreneurs” while repeatedly expanding their alliances with the federal government and its tax-funded gravy train. These ersatz captains of industry are effectively parasites who profit from tax revenues while using their access to federal policymakers to further crush competition and the market economy.
Palantir and Peter Thiel—who has long cultivated the image of being some kind of libertarian—has an especially shady role. Webb, who has done extensive research on Thiel’s background describes Palantir this way:
Palantir is not just a military contractor, it was a company created to privatize and house the Bush-era, neocon-run surveillance program Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, housed previously at DARPA, and put it under increased CIA control (though the CIA was also intimately involved with TIA). TIA was shut down by Congress because it would have eradicted the constitutional right to privacy, but Palantir has accomplished that and gotten away with it because it is a private sector entity. Palantir’s earliest funder besides Peter Thiel - The CIA Palantir’s first client for its first several years as a company - The CIA Where did Palantir engineers every 2 weeks for years for guidance in developing their products? - CIA HQ Palantir’s originally intended clients per CEO Alex Karp - The CIA If there [ever] was a CIA front company it’s Palantir. (Though Peter Thiel has since quipped that the CIA is a front for Palantir)
Like Palantir’s “predictive policing” efforts, TIA was designed as a pre-crime program to stop both terror attacks and bioterror and even pandemics before they can happen. Palantir has developed the programs to accomplish all of this, the latter through their HHS and CDC partnerships, which will likely be used to pre-emptively declare the next pandemic before any outbreak emerges. Palantir played an outsized role in Op Warp Speed, distributing batches of experimental vaccines to minority communities first.
Palantir’s close alliance with the American spy state has reaped big rewards. As Forbes reports today, Palantir’s stock holders—of which Thiel is the largest individual owner—have profited solidly from the corporations access to taxpayer dollars. Specifically:
The company has witnessed more than $113 million in federal government expenditures since the new Trump administration took office, stemming from both existing contracts and new agreements with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. Palantir is reportedly also in discussions with the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service regarding the use of its technology. Additionally, the company secured a $795 million contract from the Department of Defense in late May.
Although Thiel no longer is personally at the helm of Palantir, he continues to be a major player in ensuring political support for his many Pentagon and CIA-connected endeavors. Thiel has been an enthusiastic advocate of American interventions in the Middle East, offering Palantir tech to help the State of Israel more “efficiently” bomb the residents of Gaza. Naturally, his support for the American foreign-policy “blob” will not go unrewarded.
Politically, Thiel has been careful to fund political candidates who might be useful to the expansion of Thiel’s deep-state empire. In this area, his most successful gambit has been his sponsorship of J.D. Vance. Vance essentially owes his entire political career to Thiel and we can be sure we will hear few protests from Vance on any aspect of Palantir’s alliance with the American state. Fortunately, other protégés of Thiel’s have been less successful. In spite of repeated runs for Congress, for example, Thiel-funded politician Blake Masters has not managed to win a seat in either house of Congress.
Will MAGA Oppose the Trump Deep State?
In numerous ways, the Trump administration is looking more and more like an extension of the George W. Bush years. This is true in its rubber stamping of enormous growth in federal spending, but the White House’s support for expansions of state power reminiscent of the Patriot Act force similar comparisons. Yet, it remains unclear if Trump’s core supporters will object. The political movement known as “MAGA,” after all, has long been notable for defending, more or less, every Trump policy through calls to “trust the plan” and give Trump the benefit of the doubt. There are signs that this attitude may be reaching its limits. Newsweek reports this week:
The reaction from Trump’s supporters reflected growing unease within conservative circles, indicating a rare rupture between the president and key segments of his constituency. …
Numerous pro-Trump voices expressed dismay and feelings of betrayal across social media platforms like X.
“People are so quick to suggest that I flipped on Trump...No, no, no...I didn’t flip on Trump. TRUMP FLIPPED ON US. I’m just not willing to continue living in a LIE, and I will tell you the unfortunate TRUTH about it,” The Patriot Voice wrote on X to his 158,000 followers. …
X user Jack Maxey wondered: “Was MAGA a giant psyop?”
X user @D10Cat wrote: “Is Trump the same man that he was in 2016? Or did I just not see it back then?”
These are hopeful signs, but even if MAGA were to completely abandon Trump on this issue, we’re unlikely to see any shift in policy from the White House. After all, building the surveillance state has been a central project of the US government since 1945, and Trump has shown no enthusiasm for opposing the trend. Moreover, Vance is clearly “Palantir’s man” and every call for “Vance 2024” is likely music to the ears of the deep state and its Big Tech allies.