After the current revelation that Donald Trump had chosen J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public consideration not solely turned towards Vance, but in addition to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been considered one of a number of outstanding Thiel protégés whose profile has risen lately, with different protégés of the PayPal co-founder together with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.
Latest studies have additionally famous that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle whereas Vance was nonetheless a pupil at Yale Legislation Faculty. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s funding agency Mithril Capital, the place he labored for 2 years earlier than becoming a member of Revolution Ventures. Vance performed a significant function in Revolution’s “Rise of the Relaxation” seed fund whose main traders included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton household of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton household. Vance later launched his personal enterprise capital agency Narya Capital in 2020, which was closely funded by Thiel in addition to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt, a significant Democrat donor, has been the guiding hand behind the Biden administration’s science and know-how coverage and has dominated the event of the AI insurance policies of the US navy and intelligence communities, largely by way of his management of the Nationwide Safety Fee on AI (NSCAI). As Limitless Hangout beforehand reported, the Schmidt-led NSCAI promoted insurance policies like the tip of personal automotive possession and in-person purchasing in america to advance Individuals’ adoption of AI as supposed nationwide safety crucial within the lead-up to the Covid-era lockdowns.Each Schmidt and Thiel are key members of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door and overtly globalist Bilderberg convention. Newsweek as soon as known as Schmidt and Thiel the 2 most influential figures at Bilderberg.
Thiel has donated closely to Vance’s political profession, giving $15 million to Vance’s profitable Senate bid within the 2022 election cycle in what was then the most important donation ever given to at least one Senate candidate. Thiel additionally joined Vance, a former “By no means Trumper,” on a go to to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago the place Vance efficiently gained the previous president’s blessing. Thiel additionally related Vance to different members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks who donated $1 million to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, together with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, have been allegedly a key think about Trump’s number of Vance as Vice President as they ran “a secret lobbying marketing campaign” for Vance that additionally included media presenter Tucker Carlson.
Thiel had been a significant donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential marketing campaign and served on Trump’s transition crew, with different Thiel-linked figures like Trae Stephens dramatically influencing Trump’s Pentagon appointments. Stephens’ affect on the Trump Pentagon additionally helped develop the navy’s relationship with the Thiel-funded firm Anduril, which was co-founded by Stephens and Thiel fellow Palmer Luckey. Earlier than Anduril, Luckey develop the Virual Actuality system Oculus Rift, which was later bought to Fb, the place Thiel then served on the board. Anduril is now constructing a “digital border wall” for the federal authorities and Trump, who lengthy campaigned on constructing a bodily barrier on the US-Mexico border, deserted that promise throughout his first time period and now helps the precise answer Anduril is promoting.
Anduril’s unmanned drones have additionally come to play a significant function in Ukrainian navy operations in the course of the Russia-Ukraine battle, as produce other controversial Thiel-funded firms like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used primarily photographs posted on Fb (one other Thiel-backed firm) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These firms’ shut ties to the Ukrainian navy could influence a second Trump administration’s insurance policies because it pertains to American help for Ukraine, notably if Thiel is slated to carry important affect. Past Ukraine, this community of Thiel-funded protection firms are remaking the face of warfare and slowly however absolutely changing human decision-making with AI.
Whereas these ties must be unsettling on their very own, the potential affect of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration ought to concern each American, no matter the place they fall on the political spectrum, resulting from Thiel’s efforts to rehabilitate and remake a few of the intelligence communities’ most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to focus on home dissent.
Thiel Data Consciousness
Whereas Peter Thiel has lengthy marketed himself as a libertarian, his monitor file from PayPal on has revealed him to as an alternative be an architect of the trendy surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had as soon as tried (however failed) to do the identical. Throughout PayPal’s earliest days, Thiel and his colleagues went round to varied authorities businesses, together with intelligence businesses, to see how they might greatest tailor their product to win authorities help (and contracts) for his or her services. After leaving PayPal, Thiel would observe an analogous path in creating one other firm, Palantir. Palantir is the engine on which the surveillance state runs and, quickly after Vance was introduced as Trump’s Vice President, it was reported that Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale in addition to Palantir itself have been backing a Trump-Vance tremendous PAC known as America PAC.
Limitless Hangout has reported extensively on Thiel and Palantir for a number of years. As famous in previous studies, the corporate was created to be the privatized model of a post-9/11 surveillance program that had been dreamt up by the Iran-Contra criminals answerable for the unconstitutional Primary Core database. In the course of the Reagan administration, the people on the coronary heart of the Iran-Contra scandal developed a database known as Primary Core, which firmly positioned the US national-security state on its present, tech-fuelled path for crushing dissent. A senior authorities official with a high-ranking safety clearance and repair in 5 presidential administrations informed Radar in 2008 that Primary Core was “a database of Individuals, who, usually for the slightest and most trivial motive, are thought-about unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic is likely to be incarcerated. The database can determine and find perceived ‘enemies of the state’ nearly instantaneously.”
Primary Core was expressly developed to be used in “continuity of presidency” (COG) protocols by the important thing Iran-Contra determine Oliver North and his allies that operated an “off the books” intelligence equipment with direct CIA involvement often known as “The Enterprise.” North and his associates used COG and Primary Core to compile an inventory of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be handled if the continuity of presidency protocol was ever invoked. Troublingly, these protocols might be invoked for quite a lot of causes, together with widespread public, non-violent opposition to a US navy intervention overseas, widespread inner dissent, or a vaguely outlined second of “nationwide disaster” or “time of panic.” North would later brush up in opposition to the Trump administration, becoming a member of former Blackwater founder Erik Prince in an effort to foyer the administration to create an “off the books,” personal CIA.
Primary Core utilized the PROMIS software program, which was stolen from its homeowners at Inslaw Inc. by prime Reagan and US intelligence officers in addition to Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Additionally intimately concerned within the PROMIS scandal was media baron and Israeli “tremendous spy” Robert Maxwell, the daddy of Ghislaine Maxwell and reportedly the person who introduced Jeffrey Epstein into the Israeli intelligence orbit. Like PROMIS, Primary Core concerned each US and Israeli intelligence and was a giant knowledge method to the surveillance of perceived home dissidents.
The Iran-Contra and PROMIS scandals have been uncovered, however have been subsequently lined up, largely by the then US legal professional basic William Barr, who would return to serve in that very same place in the course of the Trump administration. The usage of Primary Core by the federal authorities continued and continued to amass knowledge. That knowledge couldn’t be totally tapped into and utilized by the intelligence group till after the occasions of September 11, 2001, which provided a golden alternative for using such instruments in opposition to the home US inhabitants, all beneath the guise of combating “terrorism.” For instance, within the instant aftermath of 9/11 authorities officers reportedly noticed Primary Core being accessed by White Home computer systems.
September 11 was additionally used as an excuse to take away data “firewalls” throughout the national-security state, increasing “data sharing” amongst company databases and, by extension, additionally increasing the quantity of information that might be accessed and analyzed by Primary Core and its analogues. As Alan Wade, then serving because the CIA’s chief data officer, pointed out quickly after 9/11: “One of many post-September 11 themes is collaboration and knowledge sharing. We’re instruments that facilitate communication in ways in which we don’t have immediately.”
In an try to construct on these two post-9/11 aims concurrently, the US national-security state tried to create a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it simply months after its creation resulting from issues it might fully remove the proper to privateness within the US. Referred to as Complete Data Consciousness (TIA), this system sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance equipment managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. TIA’s supporters argued that invasive surveillance of your complete US inhabitants was needed to forestall terrorist assaults, bioterrorism occasions, and even naturally occurring illness outbreaks (comparable to pandemics) earlier than they might happen.
The architect of TIA, and the person who led it throughout its comparatively temporary existence, was John Poindexter, greatest identified for being Reagan’s Nationwide Safety Advisor throughout Iran-Contra and being convicted of 5 felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, in the course of the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his responsibility to withhold data from Congress.
In regard to TIA, considered one of Poindexter’s key allies was the chief data officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA quite a few occasions and managed the participation of not simply the CIA however all US intelligence businesses that had signed on so as to add their knowledge as “nodes” to TIA and, in change, gained entry to its instruments. Wade, whereas on the CIA, had beforehand partnered with Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Christine Maxwell, on nationwide safety software program known as Chiliad, which had similarities to TIA (in addition to Palantir) however fell wanting the proposed program’s scope and ambition. Christine had beforehand been concerned in her father’s efforts to market bugged PROMIS software program to US nationwide laboratories.
The TIA program, regardless of the perfect efforts of Poindexter and his allies comparable to Wade, was ultimately compelled to close down after appreciable criticism and public outrage. Although this system was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was by no means really shut down, with its varied packages having been covertly divided among the many internet of navy and intelligence businesses that make up the US nationwide safety state. Whereas a few of these TIA packages went underground, the core panopticon software program that TIA had hoped to wield started to be developed by the corporate now often known as Palantir, with appreciable assist from the CIA and Alan Wade, in addition to Poindexter.
On the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was instantly controversial, main it to alter its identify in Could 2003 to Terrorism Data Consciousness in an obvious try to sound much less like an all-encompassing home surveillance system and extra like a software particularly geared toward “terrorists.” The TIA program was shuttered by the tip of 2003.
The identical month because the TIA identify change Peter Thiel included Palantir. Thiel, nonetheless, had begun creating the software program behind Palantir months upfront, although he claims he can’t recall precisely when. Some studies state that Palantir started as an anti-fraud algorithm at Thiel’s PayPal. Thiel, Karp, and different Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the corporate had been based in 2004, regardless of the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel straight contradicting this declare.
Additionally, in 2003, apparently quickly after Thiel formally created Palantir, Iraq Warfare architect and Bush-era neoconservative Richard Perle known as Poindexter, saying that he wished to introduce the architect of TIA to 2 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Based on a report in New York Journal, Poindexter “was exactly the particular person” whom Thiel and Karp wished to fulfill, primarily as a result of “their new firm was comparable in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create on the Pentagon,” that’s, TIA. Throughout that assembly, Thiel and Karp sought “to choose the mind of the person now broadly considered because the godfather of recent surveillance,” shaping Palantir right into a TIA equal.
Quickly after Palantir’s incorporation, although the precise timing and particulars of the funding stay hidden from the general public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel turned the corporate’s first backer, other than Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir wouldn’t be publicly reported till mid-2006. As well as, Alex Karp not too long ago informed the New York Occasions that “the true worth of the In-Q-Tel funding was that it gave Palantir entry to the CIA analysts who have been its meant purchasers.” A key determine within the making of In-Q-Tel investments throughout this era, together with Palantir, was the CIA’s chief data officer on the time, Alan Wade.
After the In-Q-Tel funding, the CIA held the distinctive place of being Palantir’s solely shopper till 2008. Throughout that interval, Palantir’s two prime engineers—Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia each two weeks. Jain recollects making at the very least 200 journeys to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. Throughout these common visits, CIA analysts “would take a look at [Palantir’s software] out and provide suggestions, after which Cohen and Jain would fly again to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s determination to put money into Palantir, the CIA’s chief data officer on the time, Alan Wade, performed a key function in lots of of those conferences and subsequently within the “tweaking” of Palantir’s merchandise. It ought to come as no shock, then, that there’s an overlap between Palantir’s merchandise and the imaginative and prescient that Wade and Poindexter had held for the failed TIA program. The in depth overlap between the 2 is detailed in earlier Limitless Hangout investigations.
The advantages in repurposing the “public-private” TIA into a very personal entity after TIA was publicly dismantled are apparent. As an example, on condition that Palantir is a non-public firm versus a authorities program, the best way its software program is utilized by its authorities and company purchasers advantages from “believable deniability” and frees Palantir and its software program from constraints that might be current if it had remained a public venture.
A 2020 New York Occasions profile on Palantir famous:
The info, which is saved in varied cloud providers or on purchasers’ premises, is managed by the shopper, and Palantir says it doesn’t police using its merchandise. Nor are the privateness controls foolproof; it’s as much as the purchasers to determine who will get to see what and the way vigilant they want to be.
Not lengthy after Thiel helped resurrect TIA as Palantir, one other post-9/11 DARPA program was additionally searching for a non-public sector makeover. Developed by Douglas Gage, an in depth buddy of Poindexter’s and a DARPA program supervisor, LifeLog sought to “construct a database monitoring an individual’s complete existence” that included a person’s relationships and communications (telephone calls, mail, and so on.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and rather more so as to construct a digital file of “every thing a person says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured knowledge and arrange it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots whereas additionally “mapping out relationships, recollections, occasions and experiences.”
LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of this system, would create a everlasting and searchable digital diary of an individual’s complete life, which DARPA argued might be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and provide customers a “near-perfect digital reminiscence.” Gage insisted, even after this system was shut down, that people would have had “full management of their very own data-collection efforts” as they might “determine when to show the sensors on or off and determine who will share the information.” Within the years since then, analogous guarantees of person management have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, solely to be damaged repeatedly for revenue and to feed the federal government’s domestic-surveillance equipment.
The knowledge that LifeLog gleaned from a person’s each interplay with know-how was to be mixed with data obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the particular person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the particular person noticed and mentioned, in addition to biomedical displays that gauged the particular person’s well being. Like TIA, LifeLog was promoted by DARPA as probably supporting “medical analysis and the early detection of an rising epidemic.”
Critics in mainstream media retailers and elsewhere have been fast to level out that this system would inevitably be used to construct profiles on dissidents in addition to suspected terrorists. Mixed with TIA’s surveillance of people at a number of ranges, LifeLog went farther by “including bodily data (like how we really feel) and media knowledge (like what we learn) to this transactional knowledge.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Digital Frontier Basis, warned on the time that the packages that DARPA was pursuing, together with LifeLog, “have apparent, straightforward paths to Homeland Safety deployments.”
On the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA weren’t related, regardless of their apparent parallels, and that LifeLog wouldn’t be used for “clandestine surveillance.” Nevertheless, DARPA’s personal documentation on LifeLog famous that the venture “can be in a position . . . to deduce the person’s routines, habits and relationships with different individuals, organizations, locations and objects, and to take advantage of these patterns to ease its job,” which acknowledged its potential use as a software of mass surveillance.
Nevertheless, regardless of its proponents’ greatest efforts, LifeLog was shuttered similar to TIA. Given what had transpired with TIA, some suspected this system would proceed beneath a distinct identify. For instance, Lee Tien of the Digital Frontier Basis informed VICE on the time of LifeLog’s cancellation, that: “It might not shock me to be taught that the federal government continued to fund analysis that pushed this space ahead with out calling it LifeLog.” Together with its critics, one of many would-be researchers engaged on LifeLog, MIT’s David Karger, was additionally sure that the DARPA venture would proceed in a repackaged kind. He informed Wired that “I’m positive such analysis will proceed to be funded beneath another title . . . I can’t think about DARPA ‘dropping out’ of a such a key analysis space.” The reply to those speculations seems to lie with the corporate that launched the very same day that LifeLog was shuttered by the Pentagon: Fb.
Just a few months into Fb’s launch, in June 2004, Fb co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz introduced Sean Parker onto Fb’s govt crew. Parker, beforehand identified for co-founding Napster, later related Fb with its first exterior investor, Peter Thiel. As mentioned, Thiel, at the moment, in coordination with the CIA, was actively making an attempt to resurrect at the very least one controversial DARPA program that had been dismantled the earlier yr. Notably, Sean Parker, who turned Fb’s first president, additionally had a historical past with the CIA, which sought to recruit him on the age of sixteen quickly after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking company and navy databases. Because of Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 value of Fb shares and was added its board. Parker maintained shut ties to Fb in addition to to Thiel, with Parker being employed as a managing accomplice of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006. Thiel left the Fb board, which he had joined in 2005, in 2022 to deal with supporting “Trump-aligned candidates,” together with J.D. Vance.
Thiel and Fb co-founder Mosokvitz turned concerned exterior of the social community lengthy after Fb’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund turning into a important investor in Moskovitz’s firm Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Fb co-founders extends to his firm Palantir, as the information that Fb customers make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for US police departments, the navy, and the intelligence group. Fb knowledge additionally feeds one other Thiel-backed firm, Clearview AI.
Notably, even LifeLog’s architect, Douglas Gage, has publicly commented on Fb’s similarities to this system he had as soon as hoped to guide. In 2015, He informed VICE that “Fb is the true face of pseudo-LifeLog at this level.” He tellingly added, “We have now ended up offering the identical form of detailed private data to advertisers and knowledge brokers and with out arousing the form of opposition that LifeLog provoked,” exactly as a result of it’s now a non-public firm and never a venture housed on the Pentagon’s DARPA.
Palantir and the Surveillance Agenda beneath Trump
In the course of the Trump administration, Palantir loved an much more privileged standing than it had held beneath earlier administrations, with Palantir gaining many new profitable contracts, primarily with the navy and intelligence, throughout Trump’s first time period. This was possible influenced by Thiel’s presence on Trump’s transition groups and the function of shut Thiel associates in selecting key Pentagon appointees.
Not solely that, however the broader agenda behind Palantir – the decades-long effort to create a pre-crime, AI-powered surveillance system in america – additionally bought important boosts throughout Trump’s first time period. As an example, Trump’s Legal professional Normal William Barr quietly legalized pre-crime in america beneath the guise of detecting potential mass shooters earlier than they commit any crime. This system, known as DEEP, permits the DOJ and FBI to work with “personal sector companions” to surveil individuals of curiosity which have dedicated no crime, however are “mobilizing in the direction of violence.” At roughly the identical time this system was introduced, Barr was additionally pushing closely for a authorities backdoor into client apps and gadgets, notably people who make the most of encryption. He additionally signed an information entry settlement with then-UK Residence Secretary Priti Patel that allowed each nations to “demand digital knowledge on customers from tech firms primarily based within the different nation with out authorized restrictions.”
Additionally in the course of the Trump administration, an Israeli intelligence-linked firm known as Carbyne911 started to be put in all through america in emergency name facilities and has since unfold all through the nation. Carbyne911 was closely funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Trae Stephens sits on its advisory board alongside Michael Chertoff (head of DHS beneath George W. Bush) and Kirstjen Nielsen (head of DHS beneath Trump). Carbyne was additionally closely funded by Jeffrey Epstein and Leslie Wexner and, for a lot of its early historical past, was intently related to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, himself an intimate affiliate of Epstein.
Carbyne911 and comparable firms extract any and all knowledge from client smartphones for merely making emergency calls after which use it to “analyze the previous and current habits of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns,” with the final word objective of sensible gadgets – comparable to “sensible” road lamps – making emergency calls to the authorities, versus human beings.
Knowledge obtained from these software program merchandise, that are slated to be adopted nationwide as a part of a brand new nationwide “subsequent technology” 911 system, are shared with the identical legislation enforcement businesses now implementing the Barr-designed “nationwide disruption and early engagement program” to focus on people flagged as probably violent primarily based on imprecise standards. Mixed with the “home terror” framework launched in the course of the Biden administration, the definition of “home terrorists” now encompasses those that oppose US authorities overreach and those that oppose any type of capitalism, together with the World Financial Discussion board-favored “stakeholder capitalism,” and/or “company globalization.”
The Trump administration, throughout this similar interval, additionally mulled the creation of a brand new health-focused company modeled after DARPA. The proposed “HARPA”, which was promoted extensively to Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka in addition to Trump’s shut buddy and former NBCUniversal president Bob Wright. HARPA’s proposed flagship program – “SAFE HOME” (Stopping Aberrant Deadly Occasions by Serving to Overcome Psychological Extremes) – would use “breakthrough applied sciences with excessive specificity and sensitivity for early analysis of neuropsychiatric violence,” particularly “superior analytical instruments primarily based on synthetic intelligence and machine studying.” This system would have value an estimated $60 million over 4 years and would use knowledge from Individuals’ social media accounts in addition to “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Residence” and different client digital gadgets. This system would additionally acquire data supplied by health-care suppliers to determine who could also be a “risk.”
Although HARPA was not created beneath the Trump administration, Trump reportedly reacted “very positively” to the proposal and was “bought on the idea.” As well as, earlier than the proposal was identified publicly, Trump had known as on Large Tech, and particularly social media to collaborate with the DOJ to create software program that stops mass murders earlier than they occur by detecting potential mass shooters earlier than they’ll act. Nevertheless, Trump finally handed on creating HARPA, which was finally created in the course of the Biden administration as ARPA-H, underscoring the bipartisan nature of this agenda.
Are Peter Thiel-Backed Intelligence Contractors “MAGA”?
Regardless of many Thiel-backed or Thiel-founded firms describing themselves as “America First” and as defenders of “Western values,” a better examination of these firms suggests this isn’t the case. One lesser identified instance of that is Palantir’s early function in creating a means for the US authorities to focus on Julian Assange, leaks-based journalism within the public curiosity, and what it known as “The WikiLeaks Menace.” In different Thiel-linked corporations, it’s fairly clear that at the very least some are greater than keen to focus on Individuals on both facet of the political divide on behalf of their greatest shopper, the so-called “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile. Take, for instance, the Thiel-backed Clearview AI – which claims to now have the ability to determine each particular person on this planet utilizing its superior facial recognition system. As Limitless Hangout contributor Stavroula Pabst famous in a current report:
When requested in an NBC interview about Clearview AI’s potential damaging ramifications for society, the corporate’s CEO, Hoan Ton-That, mentioned ‘[a] lot of peoples’ minds on facial recognition know-how have been modified round Jan. sixth, when the rebellion occurred [at the United States Capitol Building]. It was very instrumental in having the ability to make identifications rapidly.’
As its personal CEO acknowledged, Clearview AI was used extensively on January sixth and later boasted of its “potential for figuring out rioters on the January 6 assault on the Capitol.” In a 2023 interview, New York Occasions reporter Kashmir Hill added that, not solely was Clearview AI used on the Capitol that day, but in addition within the days and weeks that adopted to determine alleged rioters:
The FBI had photographs of all these individuals as a result of lots of them have been filming themselves on social media and posting photographs on-line, they usually weren’t carrying masks. And so many police departments began working their photographs by way of Clearview AI to determine them.
After the occasions of January 6th, 2021, Clearview AI reported a 26 % uptake of its providers from legislation enforcement, having used its function in concentrating on Trump supporters as a gross sales pitch.
Clearview AI will not be the one Thiel-linked firm keen to focus on Trump’s base, as Palantir’s co-founder and present CEO Alex Karp is obsessed together with his long-time worry that the “far proper” goes to homicide him for his ethnic background. That worry, per Karp, “propels quite a lot of the choices” made at Palantir. “I nonetheless can’t consider I haven’t been shot and pushed out the window,” Karp informed New York Occasions reporter Michael Steinberger in 2020. Steinberger added that “if the far proper got here to energy, [Karp] mentioned, he would definitely be amongst its victims. ‘Who’s the primary particular person who’s going to get hung? You make an inventory, and I’ll present you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a field I don’t test.’”
Then, in 2023, Karp acknowledged throughout an interview on the World Financial Discussion board annual assembly that “We constructed PG [proprietary software], which single-handedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe.” Provided that the labels “far proper” in addition to “far left” are sometimes misused to explain these on both facet of the political spectrum that don’t subscribe to or help official narratives, it’s value asking if the “far proper” Karp claims to have stopped referred to individuals who really deserve the label, or right-leaning populism, given populism of any taste is a risk to Palantir’s benefactors within the company world and within the US Nationwide Safety group.
As well as, Trump supporters that didn’t subscribe to official narratives round Covid-19-era insurance policies ought to pay attention to Palantir’s function within the Trump administration’s Covid response and in addition within the Covid vaccination roll-out. Throughout Covid, Palantir developed Tiberius, which was utilized by HHS to “assist the federal authorities allocate the quantity of vaccine every state will obtain” and in addition to “determine the place each allotted dose will go – from native medical doctors’ places of work to massive medical facilities.” Tiberius, and by extension Palantir, collected all of the Covid-19 and healthcare knowledge from US authorities businesses, native and state governments, pharmaceutical corporations, vaccine producers and firms contracted to behave as vaccine distributers. Palantir was additionally supplied Individuals’ delicate well being data by the Trump-era HHS in addition to “a variety of demographic, employment and public well being knowledge units” so as to “assist determine high-priority populations” to obtain the vaccine first. Throughout Covid, Palantir was additionally a member of the Covid-19 Well being Coalition, whose different members included the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, which was Palantir’s first funder, in addition to Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Palantir additionally managed the HHS Defend database, a secretive database that hoarded (and nonetheless hoards) data associated to the unfold of Covid-19 gathered from “greater than 225 knowledge units, together with demographic statistics, community-based checks, and a variety of state-provided knowledge.” On the time, HHS Defend was criticized by a number of public well being consultants and epidemiologists, amongst others, due to the sudden determination by the Trump-era HHS to power US hospitals to supply all knowledge on COVID-19 instances and affected person data on to HHS Defend and, thus, to Palantir. Hospitals have been threatened with the lack of Medicare or Medicaid funding in the event that they declined to usually feed all of their COVID-19 affected person knowledge and take a look at outcomes into the HHS Defend database. Palantir declined to supply data on any safeguards it had in place to guard Individuals’ well being knowledge in any of its HHS-related packages, regardless of requests to take action from Senators and Congressmen. HHS Defend additionally later included HHS Imaginative and prescient, an synthetic intelligence–pushed “predictive” element, which “makes use of prewritten algorithms to simulate behaviors and forecast potential outcomes.” Facets of HHS Defend share exceptional similarities with the scrapped TIA sub-program often known as “Bio-surveillance.”
Not solely that, however a long-time advisor to Palantir, Avril Haines, was a key fixture on the controversial pandemic “simulation” in late 2019 that was tied to earlier, intelligence-linked biosecurity occasions like the 2001 anthrax assaults. Haines, a former CIA deputy director, labored very intently along with her superior, John Brennan, on the CIA, together with in the course of the time Brennan illegally surveilled Trump associates in the course of the 2016 election cycle and helped propagate and develop the “Russiagate” narrative, which Haines is now conveniently resurrecting. Haines, shortly after taking part in Occasion 201, joined the Biden administration and has been serving because the administration’s prime intelligence official – the Director of Nationwide Intelligence – since Biden took workplace in January 2021.
Palantir can be controversial among the many America left for its function in utilizing massive knowledge to facilitate ICE raids on migrants and its determination to pilot its “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, performance in low-income, minority communities. Finally, Palantir – like lots of the different navy/intelligence contractors with shut ties to Peter Thiel – is a software of the Nationwide Safety State, which has been ramping up its “Warfare on Home Terror” equipment that – per authorities documentation – will goal dissent on each left and proper and basically anybody who makes an attempt to face, and even converse, in opposition to authorities overreach and criminality.
With Thiel, Palantir and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale now pumping hundreds of thousands into the Trump-Vance marketing campaign after the current VP announcement, it appears nearly inevitable that Palantir and the opposite Thiel-linked navy contractors could have much more affect in a second Trump administration than it did throughout his first time period.
