Trump’s Plan To Surveil America

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Hi you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller, let’s get started. Today we’re going to talk about the disturbing report from the New York Times that confirms the US government is partnering with Peter Thiel firm Palantir to create one mega database of hundreds of data points on every American. First, we’ll discuss what Palantir even is. Then, we’ll look into the DOGE-led efforts to consolidate data on Americans across agencies with the help of Palantir, and the potential risks not only from a national security standpoint but also in the context of a growing police state. Let’s get into it.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy… when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority… unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That is the quote from Carl Sagan, beloved scientist to nerds the world over, that appeared at the top of the open letter signed by former Palantir employees in May, urging tech workers everywhere to resist complicity with the Trump regime and, quote, “speak out while we still can.” It accuses Palantir’s leadership of abandoning its founding ideals of protecting ethical data practices, privacy protections, accountability, transparency, and defense of democracy. Instead, the letter says, “Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of “revolution” led by oligarchs.” The letter warns, “Companies are placating Trump’s administration, suppressing dissent, and aligning with his xenophobic, sexist, and oligarchic agenda. Government databases are already erasing references to transgender people and gender-affirming care. These injustices could be facilitated by the very software infrastructure we help build.”

It is fitting that this letter would involve Palantir, the private company that is apparently at the center of the alleged scheme to centralize vast swaths of data on all Americans, potentially making that data vulnerable to hacking and exposure and facilitating a more robust and efficient police state, if put to nefarious uses. As Linda Xia, one of the signees of the open letter, told The New York Times, quote, “Data that is collected for one reason should not be repurposed for other uses. Combining all that data, even with the noblest of intentions, significantly increases the risk of misuse.” Given the track record of this administration, “noble intentions” are probably not what’s guiding this latest push.

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It has been interesting to watch the news of this mega database play out across the media landscape, with the right and the left reacting in different ways. This headline from USA Today caught my eye: “Trump administration's emerging surveillance state raises privacy concerns” It’s helpful to see in the Ground News browser extension that this publication leans left, so to get a fuller picture of the story I can click on Full Coverage. On the Ground News website I can see that 63 sources are covering this topic, with interpretations varying wildly depending on the bias of the publication.

For example, left leaning Democracy Now uses the headline “Palantir: Peter Thiel’s Data-Mining Firm Helps DOGE Build Master Database to Surveil, Track Immigrants” while far right Express US uses the headline “Trump's 'MAGA base' outraged as 'unnerving' citizen database is created” indicating no worries about vulnerable populations like immigrants and instead choosing to focus on a “citizen database.” Depending on where you get your news, you’re going to get very different takes on the same story. And if you only pay attention to one side or the other you might miss the full picture of the national conversation happening around the issue on all sides of spectrum.

This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture.

By using the Ground News Vantage Subscription, I can also see the blindspot feed where I can see stories disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum. For example, zero left-leaning sources are covering the story “DOD civilians can now aid DHS with ‘internal immigration enforcement,’ per memo'” Interesting. I feel better equipped to make sense of what’s happening in the world without being influenced by just one perspective. And listen I’m not the only one who loves Ground News, the Nobel Peace Center even called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview.”

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Palantir was founded in 2003 by Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel we’ve talked about before–he is a big believer in the teachings of blogger and pseudo philosopher Curtis Yarvin, see my episode about the ideology leading to the end of Democracy for more on him, but basically the idea is that democracy gets in the way of innovation because it requires things like civil rights and equality and if tech billionaire gods were allowed to run things like monarchs then humans would finally achieve technological greatness and everyone would be better off for it even if they don’t have stupid things like human rights or freedom of speech or access to clean drinking water or whatever.

Peter Thiel helped found paypal with Elon Musk and in 2008 invested 20 million dollars in Musk’s then failing SpaceX. And in 2011, Thiel met a young JD Vance at Yale law school where Thiel was giving a speech. After graduating from Yale in 2013, Vance spent about two years in the legal profession before accepting the first of what would become a long line of job opportunities handed to him by Peter Thiel. Thiel got Vance a job as the director of operations at Circuit Therapeutics, a biotech company whose CEO owed Thiel a favor. By 2016, Vance had moved on to venture capital with a job at a Thiel-founded firm called Mithril Capital— one of an annoying number of Peter Thiel-founded companies named after shit from the Lord of the Rings. And, that same year, Thiel penned a blurb for his protégé's new book — Hillbilly Elegy.

Thiel gave $10 million to a super PAC supporting Vance’s bid for Ohio Senator. He gave 1.5 million to pro Trump groups during the 2016 election cycle and backed him publicly, giving Trump greater credibility among the Silicon Valley set. Numerous people with Peter Thiel ties have joined the Trump administration this time around, including of course JD Vance and Elon Musk, but also David Sacks, the White house’s AI and crypto czar, Clark Minor, a former Palantir software engineer who is now CIO of the Department of Health and Human Services, which has significant government contracts with Palantir. Jim O’Neill, the former CEO of the Thiel Foundation who is now Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which also has Palantir contracts. And a number of DOGE employees also have connections to various Thiel enterprises.

And while Thiel has undertaken many entrepreneurial projects over the years, it is Palantir, the firm he founded back in 2003, that is getting the most attention lately. A palantir is an indestructible crystal ball from the Lord of the Rings and this is some nerd shit I don’t know much about but from what I’ve read it is telling that Thiel decided to use this as the company’s name. The crystal ball is used to communicate and see events in the present or in the past. However, even if the stones show real objects or events, it can selectively present information that will misguide its users, and those users with enough power could choose what to show and what to conceal. As the open letter from former Palantir employees states, “The myth of the powerful seeing stones warned of great dangers when wielded by those without wisdom or a moral compass, as they could be used to distort truth and present selective visions of reality.” The use of Palantir to name this tech company both shows Thiel's deep narcissism as well as his belief in the all encompassing power of tech and AI. But it is an apt metaphor for AI, as so many AI firms that have created the technology started out with strong moral codes of conduct that fell away as the commercial possibilities of AI corrupted the original intentions of the companies.

Okay but what does Palantir DO? This is some more nerd shit I don’t know a ton about, but Palantir has 4 main products. They all revolve around the use of AI to collect and analyze data. There’s AIP, which allows people and companies to access AI tech on private networks.. Then there’s Foundry, typically used by private businesses, to collect and analyze data. Gotham is primarily used by militaries and counter-terrorism analysts. And then there’s Apollo which allows for continuous integration and continuous delivery for software deployment. And even if you’re like me and you don’t fully have a grasp of what that all means, you can probably see the potential for governmental use and abuse in these technologies. The gist is that Palantir allows for accumulation of data and then has powerful AI capabilities to find patterns and analysis based on the data, which it can then turn into formats that make the data easy to communicate, like graphs and maps.

Palantir has had government contracts since before Trump took office, it helped the CDC manage vaccine distribution during the pandemic. But since Trump was elected in November, Palantir’s stock value has jumped 140 percent, clearly indicating investors know what a Trump White House means for future government contracts. Just since Trump took office this second time around, Palantir has received more than $113 million in federal government contracts, as well as a new contract with the Department of Defense for $795 MILLION. According to the New York Times they are also in talks with other federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education, and the IRS, about further government contracts. Foundry, the Palantir product typically used by private businesses, is now being used by DHS and HHS, you know the agencies where there are key Thiel-connected operatives now holding positions of power. And while some agencies and rights groups are pushing back, especially against DOGE-led efforts to access sensitive data, such as at the Social Security Administration where a judge recently blocked DOGE from accessing their databases, the fact that Trump has packed every level of the administrative state with acolytes means that many agencies are playing ball. For example, in April the New York Times reported that the IRS had agreed to work together with the Department of Homeland Security to consolidate taxpayer data and identify immigrants for deportation. Despite several lawsuits, a federal judge in May declined to block the arrangement from going forward. In fact, Palantir has a $30 million contract just with ICE, signed in April, to build a platform that, according to the New York Times, can track migrant movements in real time. Because of course, it’s not REALLY about collecting American’s data in one centralized place to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, as the government has suggested. It’s about targeting dissent and further speeding up illegal deportations. Indeed, a former senior IRS employee told CNN that the aggregated data combined with Palantir’s technology would absolutely be able to build a, quote, “deportation machine.”

Now while that last point is chilling given this current regime’s clear disdain for immigrants and interest in violating their civil rights, it is not abnormal for the government to contract out key needs to private entities. It is far cheaper for the government to go to a specialized data analytics company than to hire their own engineers to build out what they need. Tapping private enterprises for key skills is not necessarily insidious in itself. What becomes insidious is, of course, when those private enterprises are directly connected to government actors, and when billionaires can donate any quantity of money to any super PAC that will make or break election results, that means the potential for conflicts of interest is high. To say nothing of course of the direct conflicts that are obvious when someone like Elon Musk is given power over agencies with whom his businesses have direct contracts. But even though Peter Thiel isn’t holding a position of power like Musk is within the government, he is still in direct contact with Musk, he still has ample connections within the Trump administration, and he still is personally enriching himself off his influence over the functioning of the US government. And in a gloating call with investors back in February, Palantir CEO and Peter Thiel’s fellow co-founder Alex Karp, who apparently donates to Democrats and voted for Kamala, gleefully exclaimed “We’re doing it! … We are crushing it. We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.” He goes on to say “Palantir is here to disrupt … And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” According to Mother Jones, Palantir’s technology has been used, among other things, to assist the IDF or Israeli Defense Forces with generating kill lists. And in a separate letter to shareholders, Karp wrote “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.’” This is a quote from Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist and author of the book “The Hispanic Challenge” which laments that Hispanic people cannot assimilate to the United States and warns that the integrity of culture and politics in America is under threat from the Hispanic problem. Yikes.

Which is why it is doubly alarming that so much private data on Americans is being handed over to this private company that is allegedly going to then help the government put all of it in one mega database for the federal government. Trump has called for just that in a March executive order that lamented the siloed nature of government data across numerous agencies and claims that waste fraud and abuse would be better detected and dealt with if all that data could be consolidated into one place. This call for one big beautiful federal mega-database has security experts and various civil rights and liberties groups sounding the alarm.

As Representative Jamie Raskin has pointed out, the accumulation of data on private individuals in a centralized database is a tool used by authoritarian states like Russia and China to track their opponents and squash dissent. There is no case that the government has pointed to in which a huge centralized database is necessary for the detection of fraud, and the risk of abuse of this database is so high that whatever quote unquote waste fraud and abuse that may be detected through the database, if any, is GREATLY outweighed by the risk of that data either being breached by a foreign government or nefarious actors or used by OUR government for nefarious purposes.

The current decentralized nature of federal data means that any would-be hackers cannot access all of it at once. It creates more levels of security. It also means that data can be cross-checked across agencies. One centralized trove of data in the hands of the wrong regime means that data can be manipulated. As the open letter from former Palantir employees noted, we’re already seeing the erasure of data on transgender individuals. It would allow the government to have one central source of quote unquote “truth” with very little transparency as to what levers are being pulled behind the scenes. It would also allow for easy tracking and manipulation of certain vulnerable populations. Because yes perhaps the Department of Education knows about your student loan information and the IRS has your income and employment information and HHS might know about your COVID vaccination status and DHS might know about your social security number and your citizenship status, but combining that information, while making it more vulnerable, also gives the government outsized power to police and manipulate you. This is a violation of your privacy protections because you did not consent to the use of your data in that way by the federal government. It also has deeply troubling implications for surveillance and policing of individuals that the regime deems a threat. And that is important. Because it is true that we give private companies a shocking amount of data, often for free. Whether it’s through the TikTok algorithm or our credit card information or even our social security numbers or health information, companies know that the sheer wealth to be made through the collection of our data is truly endless. That is certainly cause for concern. But the sheer quantity of data that the government could potentially aggregate on each individual, combined with the power of a militarized state, is far more alarming. The New York Times reported that this potential mega database could house upwards of 300 individual data points on every single person in the United States. That is a shocking amount of centralized power that no government should possess, whether it’s being led by a Republican or a Democrat. The potential for abuse is too high. There is no level of waste, fraud, or abuse that could be supposedly rooted out through the use of this database that would be worth the level of risk.

And this is something even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters understand, which is why MAGA has started pushing back on this latest plan. The Hodgetwins, Trump supporters with over 3 million followers on twitter, wrote “Don’t know if this is true but I did not vote for this.” Far right Trumper Nick Fuentes, a devoted white nationalist, called the database “the ultimate betrayal of Trump’s own people” saying “Seriously, if Palantir isn’t the deep state, then what is?” He later posted a video saying “They are tracking everybody that criticized Israel, everybody that interacts with somebody that's criticizing Israel, and whether you're on a visa or not, whether you're a citizen or not, whether you're brown or not, Christian or Muslim, they're putting you in the Palantir database. They're putting you on the enemies list.” The underlying message is, of course, if it was just a database for immigrants, brown people, and Muslims, that would be fine. But Trump is betraying HIS OWN PEOPLE. User Ashton Nichols said on Twitter “I voted for Trump but this is just unacceptable” and user D10Cat wrote “Is Trump the same man that he was in 2016? Or did I just not see it back then?”

But of course Trump did promise to be a dictator on day one and consolidate his Article 2 powers while on the campaign trail. And so when you vote for a dictator they do tend to unfortunately do authoritarian things. Like aggregate data on everyone present in the country to better surveil, police, and control them, for example. Anyone who’s been watching has had something like this on their bingo card. To watch it unfold in real time is, of course, still horrifying, no matter how much of this we were able to predict and scream about ahead of the election. So the schadenfreude from seeing the horrified MAGA response online is dulled by the fact that we are all living under this, so what hurts them also, unfortunately, hurts all of us, and some of us more than others. And it is also highly unlikely that any of this will really cause Trump’s true supporters to turn against him. Cult leaders can do any level of despicable shit with very little consequence, that’s kinda the whole point.

Numerous privacy advocates, student unions, and labor rights organizations have sued to stop the aggregation of data collection between federal agencies. Lawfare media dot org keeps a running list of litigation currently pending against the Trump administration. DOGE has been temporarily barred, through judicial injunctions, from obtaining access to data from the Social Security Administration. There are additional ongoing lawsuits related to DOGE’s access to sensitive information held at the Department of Labor and the Office of Personnel Management, though a judge recently decided not to block DOGE from accessing treasury information while the lawsuit played out. So DOGE has managed to access our data in a sort of patchwork way so far, with some data being protected by the thin veil of whatever remaining injunction power the courts still hold. While those fights will continue to be held up in court likely for a long time to come, DOGE isn’t necessarily the only vehicle through which this information can be aggregated, as we’re seeing with the agreement between the IRS and DHS. Again, with Trump acolytes at every agency in the federal government, many of whom also have connections to billionaires who stand to gain a LOT of money and power through government contracts, there is ample opportunity for continued data aggregation, especially with the help of Palantir’s technology.

I don’t have a happy here’s what you can do message! I usually try to but, fuck yall, this one’s out of our hands. Congress holds the purse strings and could theoretically put more guardrails in place around whether federal dollars can be used to aggregate peoples’ data, but that would directly contradict Trump’s wishes. Any democrat-led reform would be dead on arrival, and Republicans are so distracted by this big beautiful bill, that is already so unwieldy at over 1000 pages long that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is only now discovering some of its provisions despite having voted for it over a week ago. Even if the MAGA base is, at least momentarily, startled by the very authoritarian takeover they voted for, there is unlikely to be any real pushback against this data aggregation scheme. So don’t forget to go outside and touch grass, at least it’s summertime so there’s free vitamin D to be had. Maybe don’t go out there for too long, though, the air quality here in the midwest is so bad I’ve had a headache and it’s smelled like a camp fire for days. Haha I love it here!

If you want to support my work, all my videos are completely ad free and uncensored over on Patreon, Patreon dot com slash leeja miller.

Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Marc, Sarah Shelby, Travis, Art, David, R_H, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from Monday about Project Esther, the latest blueprint brought to you by the creators of Project 2025.

Leeja Miller
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