An All-American Surveillance System Is Coming

In Estonia, on the day you’re born, you’re issued a digital ID that will follow you for the rest of your days. It identifies you at the hospital, at the police station, on your taxes, in court, at the morgue.

On a recent episode of The Rip Current podcast, former Estonian president Toomas Ilves explained to me that this all-in-one system helped to root out what had been longstanding corruption under Soviet rule.

Not only is cash no longer the preferred form of money, transactions with the government are digital, so individuals like police officers and doctors have no way of greasing the wheels of their system for you, and thus bribing them doesn’t do anyone any good. “ All of that disappears,” he told me. “We've gotten to the point for at least 10 years where basically … there is nothing in your interaction with the state or the government that you cannot do online.”

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So when you hear that the Trump administration is paying the military contractor Palantir to stitch together a growing nationwide database that could soon connect the information held on you by a variety of federal agencies, from taxes to healthcare to student debt, you might think this will help, as a Trump executive order about collecting data has claimed, in “stopping waste, fraud, and abuse by eliminating information silos.”

But as President Ilves explained to me in the clip below, there’s a crucial ingredient that makes the difference between an efficient civil service like Estonia’s and a chilling nationwide surveillance network.

It is, in fact, the silos.

 ILVES: It’s a huge Christmas tree.

My health records are a little Christmas tree ball here. Your health records a Christmas tree ball over there….over here are my bank accounts, my traffic tickets.…that means that you cannot get a database where you get everything… 

So I can access my health records. I can access my bank records…[but] only my doctor is authorized to see my medical records. No one else can see my medical records unless they're authorized by me. So that  means that the police can't see it…that was the hard part. The technical stuff is easy… [the hard part is] actually figuring out…what are all the firewalls?

Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, writing in the New York Times, explained that after giving more than $113 million to Palantir to gather information from DHS and Pentagon databases, the Trump administration has bigger plans for the company.

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, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.

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.

And in case it’s not obvious to you, this is not Estonian transparency. It’s potentially something darker.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.

Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel (the Facebook angel investor, conservative libertarian, and patron to J.D. Vance) with CIA seed money in 2004, and made a name for itself helping the American intelligence and military community sift through an unthinkable amount of surveillance data from inside Iraq. Its software allowed an operator to find patterns—and people—in mountains of raw video. Since then, it’s contracts with the Defense Department have grown and grown. (A new DoD contract this year, separate from what the Trump administration has authorized so far, will pay it nearly $800 million.)

By the time the American military withdrew from Afghanistan, Palantir’s technologies had evolved to the point of facilitating a detailed biometrics database in that country, one that collected identifying information, but also made predictions about future behavior based on patterns of life. In her 2021 book First Platoon, Annie Jacobsen recounts a conversation with a military operator who had used Palantir in Afghanistan.

“The fact that there’s other moves afoot to actually use Palantir in the United States, I think that’s very, very bad, because of the type of 360 [degree] metrics that are collected,” Kevin warns. “I’m not kind of saying, ‘Hey, I’m scared of Big Brother.’ That’s not my view. But that is exactly what Palantir is capable of.”

The company has, like many technology companies, sought to distance itself from any controversy around how its products are used by essentially blaming its customers. On its blog, to which it refers reporters seeking comment, it writes

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.

But a group of former Palantir employees have written to protest that how the technology is used is a deepening problem, and should be the company’s responsibility, at least in part. They warn against “the increasingly violent rhetoric which the company is employing today and the actions to which it might become complicit in the future.”

The company wrote in its IPO filings that it wants to be the “default operating system for data across the U.S. government,” and once a government agency becomes dependent on the company’s Foundry system, the subscription model can serve to lock that agency into a relationship that’s far easier to continue than to end. And its leader, CEO Alex Karp, publicly evangelizes a need to empower a new military-industrial complex to strengthen the West, and actively celebrates the power of his products. He boasted on an earnings call this year that “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.”

“Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs,” the Palantir ex-employees wrote. “We must resist this trend.”

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